Intro to Puroresu

If you’re here, I assume you’ve heard about this Japanese pro wrestling thing and want to start learning more about it. Welcome!

This page is meant to tell you about the different major promotions in Japan and where to watch them, as well as a little detail on what’s going on in each one. As you might imagine, this page gets out of date pretty quickly, so I’ve kept it fairly light for now.

Marking your calendar

One thing you might pick up on: these companies do not run weekly TV shows on regular dates like we’re used to in American wrestling. Most of these companies don’t have TV deals at all, in fact, and the ones that do are usually putting on shows that are like packaged highlights aired at 2 in the morning. Instead, their schedules just vary based on the best times to run live shows - you’ll see plenty of companies run only weekends, or run like 4 shows on a holiday weekend and then nothing the rest of the month, or stuff like that.

Additionally, these schedules tend to vary wildly in terms of how big the shows are. Usually most promotions will run one or two “big” shows a month, and a lot of smaller shows at touring venues. The production and overall match card quality on these differ pretty drastically.

So my recommendation is: figure out the promotion’s big shows, make sure to watch those, and then look at the other cards just to see if there’s anything you’re interested in. For example, as a big mark for DDT’s younger guys, I’ve made their “D Generations Cup” mini-tournament appointment viewing this week, but that’s just some matches on a few small no-commentary shows. The magic of watching wrestling on VOD is that we can pick and choose whatever we want to watch!

Big (and small) venues to know

The Tokyo Dome might be the most famous venue for the casual wrestling fan in terms of name, as it’s where New Japan has held Wrestle Kingdom (and other shows before that) for many years. It has a long history (check out Chris Charlton’s Eggshells if you want a comprehensive look), but today it really just is where Wrestle Kingdom is once a year. NOAH did hold a huge Kenji Mutoh retirement show there a couple years ago, so it’s not entirely impossible for other special events to use it, but I wouldn’t count on it without another retirement of that stature.

In the literal shadow of the Tokyo Dome is the second-most well-known venue, and the one you’ve probably seen the most in Japanese wrestling GIFs, Korakuen Hall. With a flexible capacity up to around 1,700 people, but with many shows getting more like 800-900 people, it’s an intimate venue purpose-built for punchsports, dating all the way back to 1962. Every company shows out when they run Korakuen. Even NJPW, who include Korakuen Hall on tournament and “Road to” tours, tend to make sure their cards are just a bit more special when they run here. For everyone else, Korakuen shows tend to represent some of the biggest shows of the year.

East of the Tokyo Dome is Ryogoku Sumo Hall, which, yes, is primarily a Sumo arena. The thing is, Sumo tournaments only happen in Tokyo three times a year, which leaves you with a lot of calendar space to book, and thus, you get a lot of puro shows there. Ryogoku is a large venue with around an 11,000 capcity, but some promotions run it with as few as 3,000 people and seem to do okay. As a sumo hall, it has traditional sumo box seating on the lower floor, though often you don’t see it since it’s hidden behind a few rows of people in folding chairs. Most of the major promotions - NJPW, NOAH, DDT, TJPW, Stardom - run a big Ryogoku show during the year.

I’ll quickly mention the Nippon Budokan here as well, since it is a famous name, but it hasn’t been run much at all in recent years. NOAH had big shows there in 2023, 2024, and 2025, but that’s it. Not sure what the story is there other than that I bet the capacity is too large to be worth it compared to Ryogoku. Don’t mix it up with the much smaller Yokohama Budokan which promotions have run a lot in the past few years.

A few train stops to the west of Tokyo Dome City is Shinjuku FACE. Originally a music venue, it was flipped into a punchsport venue in 2005 and has a long history of hosting smaller shows ever since. With a 600-person capacity, it’s commonly used by promotions like NOAH, DDT, TJPW, and Stardom for their smaller shows. Drawing well at Shinjuku FACE can also be seen as a good sign for indie promotions that wouldn’t really be able to fill Korakuen.

The last Tokyo venue you should know is Shin-Kiba 1st Ring, down on the Tokyo Waterfront. With only a 290-person capacity, this is where the smallest shows by mid-tier promotions and mid-size shows by tiny indies are run.

Outside of Tokyo, there’s a wide mix of convention centers and weird gymnasiums on display, usually identified by their complete lack of interesting lighting. Midsize venues in Japan are as tricky to figure out as they are in America - some promotions, like Dragon Gate, have recently lost major venues and found themselves having to run double shots at smaller ones to make up for lower gates - so you gotta grade on a curve a bit, even if it is a bummer to see companies like AJPW use pretty ugly venues on major shows.

NJPW

New Japan Pro Wrestling is the largest promotion in Japan. Drawing regular Korakuen sellouts several times a month, large show crowds in the mid-thousands, and Tokyo Dome crowds ranging from 15,000 to 40,000 over the last few years, they’re firmly the biggest regular draw in wrestling in the country. If you’re brand new to puroresu, start here. It is by far the most approachable Japanese promotion for western audiences.

The home of some of the most legendary wrestlers in the prime of their careers for the better part of the 2010s, New Japan has struggled a bit to find its footing after the one-two punch of AEW and COVID-19. Having lost Omega to the founding of AEW, and main eventers like Okada, Ospreay, Ibushi, and Jay White leaving in the years since, there is still a sense of depletion at the top of NJPW’s card.

That said, there’s only so much you can do to fill the spaces once kept by some of the greatest wrestlers in the world, and to their credit NJPW have been trying some interesting stuff. Sometimes this is interesting (pejorative), such as the infamous EVIL title run - I’m sorry, I don’t care how good of business it drew and how many Tokyo Sports awards House of Torture won, they will never be fun to watch - and sometimes this is interesting (complimentary), like Zack Sabre Jr’s surprising IWGP title reign.

Now feels like a great time to get into NJPW if you’re looking for fresh faces in wrestling: they’re setting up their new generation of wrestlers to take the reigns over the next few years. Some of their guys have faltered (sorry, Shota Umino and Master Wato), but others are either on the cusp of breaking out or, in the case of Gabe Kidd, well past it. This is no longer Okada, Omega, Naito, or Tanahashi’s promotion, but this is a promotion with a stacked midcard that’s soon to take over their upper card.

How to watch: NJPW events are streamed live on NJPW World for $9.99/mo. Over the past few years they’ve experimented with having NJPW’s American shows be separate PPVs (in Japan, they’d be broadcast on Abema, which is like Japanese Tubi). It seems like that’s no longer the case, with Battle in the Valley being offered as part of the standard NJPW World subscription. Almost all NJPW shows have English commentary.

What to watch: NJPW runs big shows at big venues, both in Tokyo and on tour. Most of these shows get unique names and are easy to pick out on the English-language schedule (linked below).

Conveniently, NJPW actually marks their “house show tours” with the “Road to” prefix (with the suffix being the name of their next actually big show). This makes it pretty easy to stick to just watching the biggest shows. Their roster has gotten stuffed enough that they have started running some big matches to headline some of the “Road to” shows, so keep an eye on the cards for big matches you might otherwise miss.

There’s some additional tours to be aware of: FantasticaMania is their yearly February CMLL crossover tour that usually has a couple big Korakuen dates; the New Japan Cup is a yearly single-elimination tournament in March; the Best of the Super Juniors round-robin tournament will happen sometime in May or June; the world-famous G1 Climax round-robin tournament happens every year in summer; and the year ends with the 1-2 combo of the Super Jr Tag League and World Tag League. That’s a lot of tournaments, obviously, and you are under no obligation to watch all of them, but I do think it’s worth trying to watch a full G1 live-or-as-close-to-it at least once in your wrestling fandom. You’ll know you’re doing it right if you start keeping track of the league standings in your brain as the shows roll on.

Schedule: https://www.njpw1972.com/schedule

DDT

If you know DDT (Dramatic Dream Team, though no one ever actually calls it that), you probably know it as “the comedy promotion.” You might know Yoshihiko, the blowup doll. Maybe you know it was the place where Kenny Omega and Ibushi worked a much goofier version of the Golden Lovers before heading to NJPW. But maybe you know it’s the origin of one Konosuke Takeshita, who is arguably the best representation of modern DDT.

This not a company built around comedy as much as character. Sometimes, that character is Antonio Honda, who’s gimmick is that every match he says his knee is injured and that he’s going to retire, but then miraculously recovers and pokes everyone in the eyes. Sometimes, that character is Chris Brookes, who likes to fire a staple gun into his opponent’s chest and nipples. Sometimes, that character is Kazuki Hirata, who powers up by doing a dance routine while wearing light-up glasses and often gets advantage in matches by forcing his opponents to do the same. Sometimes, that character is Yuni, a shoot high schooler who can do the best hurricanranas in the business what the fuck??

Also sometimes that character is Danshoku Dieno, and, well, listen, you’re always allowed to skip a Dieno match.

DDT is my own personal favorite promotion at the moment due to its mix of drama, comedy, and in the upper card, workrate. It is not as wacky as you might think it is, but it’s always a good time. It is some of the best vibes in wrestling, up there with TJPW.

How to watch: Wrestle Universe for 1300 yen/month (currently $8.53). Most DDT shows go up live or on a pretty fast archive upload. A lot of them are single-camera no-commentary shows (a running theme for basically all companies that aren’t NJPW). The biggest shows will have English commentary, usually helmed by ChocoPro wrestler Baliyan Akki and a few people who’s names I can never remember. They do passable live translations on it but you generally don’t need it.

What to watch: DDT tends to have one or two big matches on their smaller shows, so it’s worth keeping up with the cards. Korakuens are always a big deal, as they are in any non-NJPW promotion. They run a few big, obvious named big shows a year that you should definitely make sure to check out.

Schedule: Streaming schedule / Dramatic DDT schedule

Other resources: Dramatic DDT is an excellent blog covering DDT (as well as TJPW, GanPro, and Basara). Super handy if you do find yourself mystified by a bit on a past show, since there’s often at least some basic explanation of what happened in it.

NOAH

Man, NOAH is weird. The history of NOAH, if you’re not familiar, is that it was split off from AJPW in 2000 after Giant Baba died and Misawa lead an exodus to start a new company because he hated the new owner (Baba’s widow). Things only got rockier from there.

I remember when I started watching wrestling in the mid-2010s that NOAH was a real afterthought in any online discussions - not really accessible, not really star-studded, somewhat rudderless. Wikipedia goes into further details on this but basically they had lots of wrestlers, bookers, and owners come and go over the last decade.

Nowadays, they’re owned by Cyberfight, the same extremely-money-burning parent group that owns DDT and TJPW. With their shows now accessible on Wrestle Universe, there’s now a little more interest in NOAH in the west than there has been in the past ten years. Crossover shows with NJPW during the pandemic also helped a bit with exposure. And, well, they seem to have some low-key working agreement with WWE: in addition to WWE sending Nakamura and Styles over for matches on some of NOAH’s big shows over the past year, they also sent a couple NXT guys over for NOAH’s N1 tournament (yes, their equivalent of NJPW’s G1). And Omos had a weird stint for like two weeks last month.

So where does that leave NOAH? Well, they finally seem to have a hot main event angle: the world’s single most put-upon wrestler, Kaito Kitomiya, got clowned on by the re-debuting OZAWA in the main event of NOAH’s big New Year’s show. OZAWA’s return was very much in the vein of Okada’s Rainmaker Shock, and he’s also started a new heel crew called Team 2000X who, unlike the newer heel factions in some other puroresu companies who’s abbreviations also start with N, are actually fun to watch. Yes, even though they’re managed by Yoshitatsu, of all people.

As for the rest of their roster, I honestly don’t know! They have a juniors division that I’ve never been able to make heads or tails of. They do reliably bring in interesting foreign wrestlers, though once again this is two different definitions of “interesting:” sometimes you get Ninja Mack (cool!), sometimes you get Anthony Greene (oh no!). And there is the ever-present threat that WWE might start sending more of the worst guys they have over for excursions, or start stealing guys for NXT Evolve or whatever. I don’t know if right now is a great time to get into NOAH as a whole, but I do think the Team 2000X angle is worth taking a look at.

I should also mention Go Shizoaki is running a weird subbrand called “Limit Break,” currently booked around his reign with the ZERO1 Championship, of all things. The cards are a weird mix of mostly guys under 30 or over 40, pulling from ZERO1, DDT, and freelancers instead of the usual NOAH roster.

How to watch: Wrestle Universe for 1300 yen/month (currently $8.53). Most NOAH shows go up live or on a pretty fast archive upload. Big shows have English commentary by Mark Pickering & Stewart Fulton, who for my money are basically unlistenable, but at least can help you get a grips on some of the storylines.

What to watch: Anything with english commentary is obviously a big show, and will usually be marked on Wrestle Universe in advance to make it easy to pick out.

NOAH’s basic house shows are all branded “Sunny Voyage,” while their Korakuen shows are branded “Star Navigation”. Some of them are branded “Star Navigation Premium” as well, which I assume just means “even bigger card than a normal Korakuen.” And then the biggest shows all have special brands like “The New Year,” “Great Voyage in Yokohama,” or “Destination.”

Schedule: Streaming schedule / Official schedule

Other resources: The Emerald FlowShow podcast covers NOAH and AJPW (plus bits on GLEAT, DDT, and occasional others).

Stardom

Stardom is Japan’s most popular running joshi promotion. Owned by NJPW/Bushiroad since 2019, it has had a lot of crossover visibility in both NJPW and AEW. Last year, long-time head of the company Rossy Ogawa left and formed a new company, Marigold.

Stardom is a bit of a blind spot for me, so I won’t have too much to add here. That said, an easy way to get invested in Stardom: pick a faction and root for ’em. I’ve personally picked Neo Genesis, a bunch of young wrestlers with basically no aesthetic consistency compared to any other team, and with one of the worst logos I’ve ever seen.

How to watch: Stardom’s streaming platform is Stardom World. For 920 yen/month, you get smaller shows as a mix of live streams and VOD uploads, and PPV matches uploaded on about a week delay.

As for those PPVs: there’s a lot of them and they’re kind of expensive. Some of them do have English commentary.

Stardom also has a rookie-focused subbrand, New Blood, that streams free on Youtube.

What to watch: Great question! Wikipedia has a major events page, but otherwise I think the obvious thing is to just watch anything that is major enough to be a PPV.

Schedule: Official schedule / Stardom World schedule / Wikipedia (major events)

TJPW

Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling is the most guaranteed good time you can have watching wrestling on the internet. It’s a joshi promotion built around fun idols and idol-inspired wrestlers, and also sometimes Max The Impaler is there. It is character-heavy and relatively workrate-light, though these women certainly enjoy killing the shit out of each other when it’s big main event time.

TJPW is a lot of slow burn booking, with a pretty rigid hierarchy that rarely gets skipped. It does sometimes make the booking a bit dull, especially if you’re trying to watch every show, but I highly recommend keeping up with the big shows, which are some of the safest bets in wrestling. You’ll get some real fun stupid comedy on the undercard, a mix of fun tags and special singles matches in the midcard, and then, most of the time, a surprisingly brutal main event.

It’s also the most accessible, “what you see is what you get” booking anywhere in puro. There’s long-term storytelling, sure, but most of it is easy enough to understand in the moment. The main story the undercard always trying to get up to the upper card, and the upper card defending their spot. Sometimes when you’re on top you just gotta jump off the top rope and stomp a girl dressed up like a taxi cab to stay there.

How to watch: Wrestle Universe for 1300 yen/month (currently $8.53). Most TJPW shows go up live or on a pretty fast archive upload. Big shows have English commentary by the same crew who do DDT. Every now and then the wonderful Mr Haku shows up to take the lead role. I wish I could give WU more money for a tier where they give Haku money for more commentary, he’s great.

What to watch: “Anything with a special name or English commentary or at Korakuen” is once again a good rule of thumb here. They have a few small tournaments each year that are fun to keep up with, usually just single eliminations with goofy unbalanced brackets.

Schedule: Streaming schedule / Dramatic DDT schedule

Other resources: Dramatic DDT covers TJPW as well as DDT.

AJPW

So, kind of as a bit, I decided to try watching the All Japan Pro Wrestling Champion Carnival last year. I was trying to branch out and watch other stuff and figured a big tournament would be a fun way to introduce myself to the promotion.

Given the promotion’s history, I was expecting, I dunno… a bunch of large guys in black trunks doing big power spots and slow brawling. Instead, I got a surprisingly exciting and diverse roster. Sure, this is a company that appreciates a slower pace and bigger guys - after all, they put their championship on Davey Boy Smith Jr for part of last year. But they also have a really exciting crop of younger guys doing very fast paced heavyweight and junior heavyweight wrestling.

The roster here is a bit thin compared to some of the other promotions on this list, so I can’t say I feel obliged to watch every single show, but it does make it really easy to understand the characters when you’re watching the same guys every on every card. Personally, I absolutely love the Saito Brothers, two big bruisers who currently hold the tag belts and one of whom holds the heavyweight belt - they’re just big guys who wear leather jackets and sunglasses, but can also be surprisingly compelling bases in the ring. Kento is a delightfully over face, one of the only guys I’ve ever seen have an encore built into his entrance. And Yuma Anzai might be one of the best talents under 30 in all of Japan, clearly a guy being set up to be the ace of this company.

They also play up a surprising amount of comedy on these shows - not quite DDT where they’re actively doing bits, but just silly stuff like Hideki Suzuki getting pissed at his young tag partner Dan Tamura and walking away from a match engaged in a slapfight.

How to watch: ajpw.tv gets you all shows for 999 yen/month.

What to watch: I’m still figuring this out myself! AJPW tours a lot more than some of these other promotions, so you can’t just use the “mostly Korakuens or special names” rule. Sometimes they’ll just have like “AJPW Summer Action Wars Night 4” and you’ll have to look up the card to see that it has a huge championship main event. That said, they don’t run quite as many shows as some of these other companies, so it can be a bit easier to keep up with the actual schedules.

AJPW also runs the Champion Carnival every year in April-May, maybe the second-most-well-known round-robin tournament after the G1. It’s not quite as much of a production as the G1, but it was certainly fun to watch last year.

Schedule: ajpw.tv schedule / All events

Other resources: The Emerald FlowShow podcast covers NOAH and AJPW (plus bits on GLEAT, DDT, and occasional others).

Dragon Gate

This is another promotion that’s a bit of a blind spot for me. I want to get into it this year, I promise!

What I can tell you: Dragon Gate is sneaky big. It has at times been the #2 or #3 promotion in Japan. They’re based in Kobe, but run Tokyo a lot, with Korakuens being big shows as they are for most companies.

If you’re familiar with Dragon Gate, you probably know them from their tours of America that became famous for popularizing the lucharesu style among American indies (ROH in the 2000s, and DGUSA/EVOLVE in the 2010s). You might also know them as where CIMA, PAC, Akira Tozawa, Uhaa Nation, Shingo Takagi, or T-Hawk are from, but uh, none of those guys are still there!

Instead, you have a lot of guys who don’t really get a lot of exposure outside of DG. Dragon Gate is extremely faction-heavy, usually with one big heel unit (currently Z-Brats) at the top. Right now the big up-and-coming star to watch for is Shun Skywalker, who’s heeling it up in Z-Brats. Dragon Gate are also making a big showing in Vegas for Mania weekend; it’ll be interesting to see if that leads to further American excursions to get their roster in front of more eyeballs.

How to watch: So, the good news is dragongate.live exists and gets you (I think?) all the major shows, live. Most of the streamed shows have English commentary with the very good Jae Church, which is awesome for explaining the faction drama, and also Ho Ho Lun is there and look he’s not very good at commentary but I just think he’s neat.

The bad news is the shows that don’t air live may not make tape at all. There’s been some recent drama around this and it may change a bit, but basically, Dragon Gate are running like 20 shows in March and 3 of them are gonna actually air. Not a great number for a service that costs 1500 yen ($10) a month!

What to watch: Honestly, the upside of DG not streaming everything is this might just be as easy as “anything that airs live.” DG does run big Korakuen and Osaka Edion shows, as well as a few specially-branded shows a year.

Schedule: dragongate.live schedule / Full show list

Other resources: Open the Voice Gate is a podcast covering Dragon Gate that’s been around forever, with two guys who have been watching Dragon Gate forever.

Indies

Big Japan Pro Wrestling is, on paper, the most genius idea in wrestling: it’s got a big guys title, a deathmatch title, and a tag team title that kinda veers between the two. You get to go to a show and see Daisuke Sekimoto chopping the shit out of dudes and then some dudes hit each other with light tubes, sounds good, right? Well, the problem is their roster is a mess. The average age seems to be like a thousand. A 55-year old Mad Man Pondo has one half of the tag belts. The vibes are very off.

They have their own streaming service, BJW Core, but they also have a Youtube membership you can subscribe to for $10/mo.

FREEDOMS is, I guess, the big deathmatch company in town now? They do deathmatches and nothing but deathmatches. I really don’t know much about them but they reliably deliver the couple times a year I’m like “I wanna see some gross shit.” Jun Kasai works there and he’s extremely cool.

FREEDOMS’s biggest shows are aired as taped specials on Samurai TV. Tube sites can help you there. They also upload individual matches from smaller shows to their Youtube channel.

Ganbare Pro (GanPro) is a small indie that’s on Wrestle Universe. I know very little about it but I think it’s neat that they get their shows on there. They have a subbrand for joshi called GanJo, as well.

GLEAT is… oh man, I don’t even know how to explain GLEAT. It doesn’t seem like I’ll have to for much longer, given they draw incredibly poor crowds for what qualify as “star-studded” cards by indie standards (so, expensive, not necessarily good). GLEAT was started in 2020 and is owned by Lidet, a company that briefly tried to invest in NOAH in 2019 before selling them to Cyberfight. They started with a NOAH partnership which they then dropped pretty quickly, and now are mostly associated with CIMA, T-Hawk, and El Lindaman, a trio of wrestlers you may know from either Dragon Gate or their early AEW appearances as #StrongHearts.

GLEAT has some shoot-style stuff that seems like a weird legacy of the original promotion’s concept, a bunch of more standard puro, and a women’s division that I think has like two full-time active members. They have a Youtube channel you can pay to watch stuff on, but I probably wouldn’t. This is a promotion that is colder than ice; I genuinely don’t know of anyone covering or watching GLEAT regularly in English-language wrestling media or fandom. They have like one show a year that actually gets enough cagematch.net ratings to show an average rating, and it is generally not a good one. What I’m saying is you don’t need to worry about GLEAT.

Marigold is Rossy Ogawa’s new joshi promotion after leaving Stardom. It’s also on Wrestle Universe, except for the biggest shows, which are PPVs. Not really too much else to say; it’s not the most exciting promotion to me as someone who wasn’t big on Stardom to begin with, but they’ve had some really good upper card matches with people like Sareee and Utami Hayashishita, though it remains to be seen if their newest class will really work out. I also personally love Bozilla more than most other wrestlers. She’s like 6 feet tall and 205 pounds and just kills everyone and it rules. Sometimes when I’m feeling down I just go down to the Marigold section on WU and click the most recent show and see who Bozilla’s murdering in the ring today.

Sendai Girls is a cool indie joshi promotion based in Sendai, though their biggest shows are often in Tokyo. It’s booked by Meiko Satomura, who is arguably their biggest star, though she’s about to retire. They’re on Wrestle Universe now, which rules! I’m really excited by a lot of their up-and-coming wrestlers, and they have a ton of crossover with other joshi promotions.

Sareee-ism is joshi wrestler Sareee’s surprisingly good promotion. I say surprising because while Sareee is a fantastic wrestler, I’d expect a vanity promotion to have a pretty whatever undercard, and instead she seems to be booking really solid shows. She’s only run a few shows, but they seem to draw quite well. I believe they’re all PPVs and can be bought at https://sareeelive.com/, but they definitely make the tube sites as well.

There’s a bunch of other small indie joshi promotions. SEAdLINNNG and Marvelous seem like the biggest ones. I’m kinda grouping these all together just because I have no idea how you’d watch them legally, and I look them up on tube sites whenever they have a big match I hear good things about. Beyond that there’s Ice Ribbon, ActWres girl’Z, Oz Academy, Pro Wrestling Wave, and Diana, but I couldn’t tell you the last time I saw anyone recommend a match from one of these companies.

There’s also a million other indie puro promotions. Maybe you can be come a true puro hipster and be the biggest Osaka Pro fan in the world, or try to get everyone to check out Basara or whatever. Evolution seems to be an interesting indie right now having recently rebranded from being joshi-focused to having mixed-gender cards that seem to draw on a lot of people working in other promotions, even full-timers.