プロレス Primer
A weekly guide to Japanese pro wrestling.

Newsletter: May 7, 2025

Golden Week is all wrapped up, along with NJPW Wrestling Dontaku, NOAH’s Memorial Voyage in Ryogoku, Dragon Gate Dead Or Alive 2025, and some more Champion Carnival in AJPW. I managed to watch all of these! Even so, I’m somehow still backlogged on Golden Week shows - DDT, TJPW, and Marigold will have to wait until next week - but I’ve got more than enough to talk about even so.

Match Recommendations

NOAH Memorial Voyage 2025 In Ryogoku (5/3, Wrestle Universe, Cagematch)

NJPW Wrestling Dontaku Night 1 (5/3, NJPW World, Cagematch)

NJPW Wrestling Dontaku Night 2 (5/4, NJPW World, Cagematch)

Dragon Gate Dead or Alive 2025 (5/5, DG Network, Cagematch)

AJPW Champion Carnival Night 9 (4/28, AJPW TV, Cagematch)

AJPW Champion Carnival Night 11 (5/6, AJPW TV, Cagematch)

NOAH: Ryogoku recap

NOAH’s Ryogoku show was an easy to watch show, bookended by two great matches. They drew 4,521 to Ryogoku this year, which is a big improvement on last year’s 3,512. Things continue to trend upward for NOAH as Team 2000X continue their run.

OZAWA defended the GHC Heavyweight Championship against KENTA, by far the biggest threat to OZAWA’s run since he claimed the title in January. This really felt like it could go either way: taking the title off OZAWA this early might seem a bit deflating, but it wouldn’t be too hard for him to keep his heat on the road to revenge, especially given his odd position as a heel who’s as over as a babyface. That said, I’m glad he kept the championship here. Unsurprisingly, Team 2000X did all kind of heel shtick to keep OZAWA in the fight (including Yoshitatsu pulling the ref after KENTA hit a Go 2 Sleep, which got KENTA a visual pin). KENTA looked great as a mean old man - OZAWA’s gimmick of hating his elders is so good in a place with so many older wrestlers like NOAH - and the crowd was split in a very interesting way, with KENTA getting a bit of boos early before firmly getting the crowd behind him by the end (especially after the Team 2000X interference).

The crowd was much less split for the challenge made after OZAWA’s defense: Kaito KItomiya, coming off of a victory in a mediocre match against Marufuji, came out to a chorus of boos to make the challenge. That’ll be at 5/18 at Korakuen, and Kaito is going to lose the hell out of this match. I would love to see a heel turn here for Kaito, otherwise unless he’s getting written off for an excursion or something I have no idea why they’d do this. To be clear, NOAH is not just ignoring these boos - they’ve actually done a better job integrating them into the story than even NJPW has with Shota Umino - so I don’t think they’re just going to make this a normal main event babyface vs heel match. Kaito got that singles match against Marufuji after getting embarrassed being pinned by Saxon Huxley in a tag match, with Marufuji challenging Kaito to try to help him get him his mojo back. If Kaito gets embarrassed at Korakuen again, they clearly have to be doing something with him.

The junior championship changed hands with YO-HEY defeating Eita, which started off scary after YO-HEY seemed to suffer a concussion on the outside. For better or worse, they managed to stall long enough for YO-HEY to recover enough to wrestle a pretty good match. Can’t say I thought the match was good enough for him to risk his health like that, but it was still a pretty good match and the juniors division continues to trend up in NOAH. YO-HEY will defend his championship against Tadasuke in the only other announced match for the 5/18 Korakuen - a rematch of their #1 contender match from 4/14. Tadasuke more or less earned that match by defeating HAYATA in a singles match with Manabu Soya (HAYATA’s stablemate in Passionate RATEL’s) refereeing; this ended up being a really fun match and I appreciated Soya begrudgingly counting three for Tadasuke.

My favorite match on the show was the opening junior tag championship match, in which Alpha Wolf & Dragon Bane surprisingly defeated the champions AMAKUSA & Junta Miyawaki. I assume this will be a short run for Wolf & Bane to give the former champions an obstance to overcome to continue their reign, but the match was great and I’d love to see them run it back if that’s the plan. Alpha Wolf & Dragon Bane are definitely sticking around through at least the 5/18 Korakuen, but it remains to be seen whether they’ll be around beyond that. Also check out this absurd dive Alpha Wolf did.

Kenoh & Ulka Sasaki won the heavyweight tag titles off of Team 2000X, which I think is really weird. The Team 2000X tag championship saga was kind of a big story in NOAH for the last few months, and I really thought Daga & Jack Morris would be getting a longer run here. When this happened, I actually really thought it meant KENTA would be winning the main event - after all, if he had the heavyweight championship, he wouldn’t need to keep the KenKen tag with Kenoh going. Now, this puts KenKen in an odd place, even if Kenoh, KENTA &, Sasaki are intended to be a sort of trio (in a company with no trios belt, mind you). The KenKen T-shirt could wind up being a Y2AJ level collector’s item here in a few weeks, depending on how KENTA feels about Kenoh holding gold without him.

Other story developments: Galeno defended the National Title successfully against Saxon Huxley in a very-nothing 5 minute match, kind of surprising after they made a big deal of Huxley pinning Kaito in a Korakuen tag. And in the Jun Akiyama & Takashi Sugiura vs Tetsuya Endo & Owadasan match, Endo refused some (but not all) cheating help from his Team 2000X stablemates. Wonder if we’re going to get more internal dissension storylines from Team 2000X here.

I missed a story a couple weeks ago, which I’ve seen discussed more this week coming off of this NOAH show: Fightful Select reported that NOAH has an interest in bringing in Naito. This could be an interesting challenger for OZAWA in a number of ways. I would personally not love Naito going over OZAWA for a variety of reasons, but it does feel like it’d be a very NOAH-esque booking decision. For all we know, the NOAH crowd might reject the idea of Naito coming in to challenge OZAWA, though, considering they were ready to boo NOAH stalwart KENTA over him; who knows how they’d react to a NJPW lifer coming in?

NJPW: Dontaku & Resurgence

Dontaku recap

Wrestling Dontaku was, as usual, one show’s worth of good to great matches spread across two nights.

The cage match was real dumb in a way that should be seen. It’s a bad match compared to basically any other modern cage match (let alone the comparatively excellent Dragon Gate cage match the same weekend), but it’s so incredibly stupid that I hope they keep trying it. If you don’t want to drop money on NJPW World, the thing to know is that the “cage” is actually just an extra high ringside barrier - which isn’t even that high! it’s like ten or twelve feet maybe! - with no top. I’ve never seen a cage match where they don’t even try to have a pretense around competitors wanting to “escape” in some way (whether to win like a WWE cage match or Dragon Gate’s escape rules, or just to run away as heels normally try in cage matches), so it’s kind of refreshing in that sense? The important thing is, Gedo does an elbow drop from “the top of the cage.” It’s an impossibly stupid match.

The War Dogs won, so House of Torture has now “left Bullet Club,” as if this somehow matters. I guess they’ll have to make some new shirts? They’re following this up with David Finlay challenging EVIL to a dog collar match, I think that’ll be at Dominion next month.

ELP vs Takeshita was a solid match even if the time limit draw was obvious from the moment the title vs title stipulation was announced; they’ll run this back at Resurgence without the TV title on the line.

ZSJ vs Tanahashi was one of the better matches on Tana’s retirement tour, though maybe without the emotional punch of some of the others. You know what match didn’t lack in emotional punches? Shingo Takagi vs Shota Umino, in which Takagi hit Umino with emotional punches, forearms, and lariats until that kid was dead in the ring. I’ve given up guessing at what they’re trying to do with Umino. We’ll hopefully find out in the G1.

On night two, the final Naito/BUSHI match wound up being a pretty standard LIJ multi-man tag. Gotta give them credit for going out how they came in. Naito, it turns out, is getting yet another eye surgery this week, so it’ll be a while before he makes his debut elsewhere.

Tsuji vs Uemera for the IWGP Global Heavyweight title was fine, though I was a little underwhelmed after a few people called this a show-stealer. They’re very good at wrestling, and the crowd was very into this, and I think at least one of these guys should win their G1 block; time to start pushing these guys in the biggest events. Tsuji won and retained, leading to a last LIJ group pose.

Tsuji challenged Gabe Kidd after who immediately came out to accept for Dominion. I’d love to see Kidd win and walk into the G1 with gold. These two are 1-1-1 (not counting their many singles matches as Young Lions), with their most recent match at New Beginning in Osaka in February ending in a double KO.

Goto vs Newman was also a perfectly fine match. I really did hate that return match Callum had against Naito, but since then I’ve been happy to watch him. He did a pretty solid English language pretape for this match and did a good job as the underdog everyone knew was going to lose.

After the match we got two challengers for Goto: ZSJ challenged for Resurgence, and Shingo Takagi challenged for… some time after that, but presumably Dominion.

So LIJ broke up, maybe?

NJPW are so loathe to change up their units that I am honestly surprised that the story seems to be LIJ are actually breaking up. I wouldn’t believe it if it weren’t for the Tokyo Sports report indicating as such. There’s still a chance they keep going, but it’s clear that Yota Tsuji, at the very least, is splitting off in his own direction. Takagi also claimed he had no unit in his post-show promo challenging Goto.

I guess I’ll take this time to point out what a disaster the NJPW units are right now. Just 4 Guys are now just teaming with the rest of the faces, so they don’t seem long for this world. United Empire lost TJP and Cobb and Henare is still out for the rest of the year, and I don’t think a team of Callum Newman, Great O Khan, Francesco Akira, and Templario feels particularly coherent. And LIJ is dead. War Dogs and House of Torture seem fine, but everyone else really seems like they need to figure something out.

I have always thought NJPW had a weak faction game compared to some other promotions, but right now it really sticks out like a sore thumb. Every time I see one of the undercard tags I keep thinking “why do any of these guys hang out with each other?” TMDK eventually started to feel coherent just because they actually do seem like guys who hang out with each other (ZSJ taking a quasi-mentor role of Fujita helped a lot with this); maybe United Empire can get there but I’m doubtful.

I’d love to see stuff get shaken up - it feels like there’s a lot of room for new units to give the younger members of the roster a chance to forge a new legacy.

Resurgence is, in fact, still happening

So, like I mentioned last issue, NJPW Resurgence on Friday near LA is selling pretty poorly and is a $20 PPV on NJPW World. I feel really silly skipping live prime-time NJPW, but man, I think the vibes on this one are bad enough that I am gonna find another way to spend my Friday.

NJPW’s full preview here goes into more detail than I feel like. There’s a few good matches that could be okay, even if they’re basically in an empty arena. Goto will defend the IWGP Heavyweight Championship against ZSJ in the main event, Takeshita vs ELP will be good, Drilla Moloney and Ishii will have the requisite beef match. Mercedes Mone will probably drop the Strong Women’s Championship to either AZM or Mina Shirakawa by way of one of those two pinning the other, keeping Mone protected.

Dragon Gate: Dead or Alive cage match result

I caught the big Dragon Gate Dead Or Alive 2025 show and really enjoyed it, though I don’t have a ton of thoughts on it. The surprise of the night was an excellent match between U-T and the very rookie Homare - probably the best match you will ever see someone with eight months of experience in wrestling have.

I will say if you go out and pirate this (though I’d argue it’s a show and production quality worth giving DG money for), do make sure you find English commentary; Jae Church is great as ever at explaining some of the most complicated, long-running stories in pro wrestling and Ho Ho Lun is one of the funnier color commentators around.

The main event was, as usual at Dead or Alive, a steel cage survival match, where the last person left in the cage loses either their mask or their hair. This year’s involved three members of D’Courage and three members of Z-Brats, all feuding with each other for various reasons. Case Lowe at Voices of Wrestling absolutely nailed his prediction from his preview last week: Madoka Kikuta turned on his D’Courage stablemate Yuki Yoshioka to join Z-Brats and escaped along with Shun Skywalker, leading to Yoshioka’s head being shaved.

The other big thing in this match was an arm injury to Dragon Dia, which was odd. Dia laid on the cage for a while being attended to by a ref, a few wrestlers, and the GM, though I didn’t really see any doctors. He ended up getting boosted up by his stable mates to allow him to escape the cage early in the match. He also was present for the postmatch angle. He worked a match the next day so I guess he either just got scared of an injury that wasn’t actually that bad (happens, especially in cages!) or this was a really odd work to get him out of the cage early.

Besides the stories, the cage match was just really fun; they did one of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen in a cage match where the members of Z-Brats outside the cage would just poke the D’Courage members climbing the cage with spare ring boards and poles. It was a hilariously effective visual of just watching these poor guys get poked back down as they tried to climb up and get the escape flags. And speaking of effective visuals, you also had some nasty Kikuta hip attacks where he whipped some heads into the cage; if I’m those members of Z-Brats I’m probably asking Kikuta later “hey, did you really have to do that just to hide that you were joining us?”

If you want a more in-depth review and storyline coverage, Case has a full review here that’s worth a read. I had a lot of fun watching this show and will try to keep up a bit more with Dragon Gate, but damn if they don’t make it hard with their schedule. Their next big show seems to be Kobe World in July, so I’ll check in there at the latest.

AJPW: Champion Carnival block finals coming up, junior tournament announced

Since we were just speaking about Madoka Kikuta: the day after Dead or Alive, he fought Rei Saito in a Champion Carnival match at Korakuen that kicked ass and was the best match Rei’s had all tournament. Plus it delivered what I wanted to see after Dead or Alive, which was Kikuta getting his shit absolutely rocked.

Anyway, I’m now all caught up on the Carnival, which after a pretty brutal lull period had a very good Korakuen. I do have to mention in that lull period that a match I didn’t put in my recommendations, but that you should maybe see, is Hideki Suzuki vs Xyon from night 10. It’s one of the worst matches I’ve seen this year because it’s basically not a match; they spend eight minutes stalling and it ends up in a rollup. It’s hilarious. Xyon does a postmatch promo where he talks about Suzuki being a master of the craft that Xyon has much to learn from and I almost fell over laughing. I have no idea why these guys didn’t have an actual match.

I thought I’d be coming in here giving my big predictions for both blocks of the tournament but, uh, I completely missed that this Korakuen is the last night of Block A matches. So, great news, I don’t have to make any predictions there.

The top two from each block advance to the finals, so Block A came down to DBS Jr vs Hideki Suzuki and Kento vs Jun Saito, all sitting at 10 points going into this show, with the winners of each match advancing. Hideki Suzuki defeated DBS Jr in a real nothing of a match, while Kento defeated Jun Saito in a significantly hotter match than their championship match a couple months ago.

Weirdly, the best match of the last night for Block A? Shotaro Ashino and Kuma Arashi having an absolute banger of a singles match for nothing but bragging rights. That said, Ashino did hit like six rolling German suplexes on Kuma and still failed to get the pin; I think it’s time he takes MASTER OF SUPLEX off his tights.

Block B is still up in the air. I’ve got my predictions: I think with the run Ryuki Honda has been on, he’s absolutely set to advance. The other spot is more up in the air - I am really hoping Rei Saito comes back from behind to steal it, because a Rei vs Jun Saito Triple Crown match could be awesome.

Apparently, AJPW decided the Champion Carnival and Real World Tag League aren’t enough: they’re also adding a junior heavyweight tournament, running from July through August. This could be really fun depending on who they bring in - AJPW only has like five guys who could be juniors; they’ll need more to fill up the five nights of league matches announced. I expect some folks from Dragon Gate at a minimum.

Other news

Like I said at the top, I’m a bit backlogged on wrestling, so I have yet to catch Mayu’s debut in Marigold. I’ve heard good things about the match, though!

I’m also behind on DDT, and haven’t caught up on Night 1 of the King of DDT tournament. I’ll be watching that this week along with Night 2. In other DDT news, Masahiro Takanashi has begun physical rehab after his spinal injury, currently working on wiggling his toes. That’s a far bit worse than I’d hoped he’d be after surgery, but still a lot better than it could be.

What to watch

Night 2 of the King of DDT tournament airs on 5/10. I’m very excited to catch up on this tournament - it’s nice to have a simple single elimination one as opposed to all these big round robins.

Speaking of which, AJPW is wrapping up the Champion Carnival blocks with shows from Hokkaido on 5/10 and 5/11, airing on AJPW TV.

And also speaking of which, NJPW’s Best of the Super Juniors kicks off with shows on 5/10 and 5/11, plus a Korakuen double shot on 5/14 and 5/15. I will not be watching this tournament in full, but I’ll definitely be rooting for my favorites and will try to pass along any good matches I do catch in the recommendations.

Before that, NJPW has the previously-previewed Resurgence, which… yeah, maybe not worth $20. There’s worse ways to spend your Friday night, though.

I want to call out two big VOD uploads for TJPW: their Golden Week shows happened on 5/3 and 5/5, but were only uploaded to Wrestle Universe on 4/6 and 4/7. These shows actually have some pretty big matches on them: the 5/3 show has Suzume defending the International Princess Championship against HIMAWARI and Yuki Kamifuku defending the VPW Women’s Championship against Viva Van, while the 5/5 show has Shoko Nakajima & Hyper Misao defending the Princess Tag Team Championships against Matcha (of Thailand’s SETUP) & Alexis Lee (of Singapore Pro Wrestling), Raku defending the SETUP Women’s Championship against Malaysia’s Nor Phoenix Diana, a TJPW RUSH! 5v5 knockout match, and… Yuki Kamifuku vs Yuki Aino vs Yuki Arai. Now that I’ve written that all out, these kind of feel like can’t miss TJPW shows, especially during this lull period before Summer Sun Princess.

That’s not all in the world of joshi wrestling, with Stardom having a Korakuen show this weekend live on Stardom World on 5/11. Saya Kamitani defends the World of Stardom Championship against rookie Sayaka Kuraka in the main event. There’s also various small shows from Marigold and Sendai Girls going up on Wrestle Universe over the week.

That’s plenty to watch, but still feels like a nice breather coming off of Golden Week. There’s various smaller shows around (NOAH house shows, Dragon Gate’s Korakuen on 5/9, and heck if you’ve got WU there’s even Ganpro and Michinoku Pro shows getting uploaded this week).

That’s all from me this week. I’m feeling good about puroresu right now, that’s a lotta good matches in that list up there at the top! I’m also glad to have a break from the big shows. Feel like I finally have room in my life to watch some TJPW house shows again.