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

Newsletter: June 4, 2025

Going with a new strategy for this week’s newsletter(s). There’s a weird number of midweek shows - 6/3’s NOAH Korakuen show, the 6/4 and 6/5 Korakuens from Dragon Gate - plus some stuff I still need to catch up on like Stardom’s Saori/Natsupoi PPV. So my instead I’m gonna publish this recap-and-news newsletter, and then I’ll be back in a few days with notes on those shows and the usual what-to-watch preview. That might end up coming late (or, at worst, I’ll fail to send it and just see you next week), but there’s not that much coming up this weekend so I’m not too worried about it.

Match Recommendations

Osaka Pro 4th Light Heavyweight Tournament Night 1 (5/24, FREE Youtube, Cagematch)

Osaka Pro 4th Light Heavyweight Tournament Night 2 (5/25, FREE Youtube, Cagematch)

NOAH Monday Magic Prime Time Season Ep1 (5/26, Wrestle Universe, Cagematch)

NOAH Monday Magic Prime Time Season Ep2 (6/2, Wrestle Universe, Cagematch)

NJPW Best Of The Super Junior 32 Night 13 (6/1, NJPW World, Cagematch)

TJPW Spring Tour 2025 in Nagoya (6/1, Wrestle Universe, Cagematch)

NJPW: A delightful and surprising BOSJ finals

I’m writing this section last, because it’s the easiest to write: the BOSJ finals, YOH vs Kosei Fujita, kicked so much ass. You need to see this match.

This is the match of YOH’s career - this 36-year old dude who never managed to recover from the breakup of his tag team RPG 3K, way back in 2021. He’s never impressed in singles, he even have any particularly well-regarded matches in this tournament, and while he is a junior tag champion with Master Wato, and… well, he feels like the lesser in that team. He has been in a bad place.

But much like Wato did in 2023, YOH managed to have a killer BOSJ finals match. Maybe it was only because Fujita was able to bring it out of him - if he did, that’s an incredible accomplishment for a 22-year old relative newcomer. But really, I think YOH is a good wrestler who’s been in a lot of bad spots, and I think he doesn’t necessarily have great instincts on how to elevate a match when left on his own. But when you give him a match as important as this, and the match is treated as important by the crowd, he is able to shine.

The crowd was electric as this one went on, seemingly almost evenly split. Fujita is the obvious future of this division, and maybe this company. He is great in the ring, has a great look, and might be the only guy under 30 that has avoided any pitfalls while in this company. Even being paired with the usually-lame team of TMDK has actually helped him, having him be Zack Sabre Jr’s understudy (while not actually trying to make him wrestle like ZSJ).

Fujita won, which surprised me. It feels like the winner of this match is destined to lose to Junior Heavyweight champion El Desperado, who’s been waiting for a rematch with DOUKI after Despy won the title only due to a rough injury to DOUKI. Fujita had a solid match with El Desperado back in February and I can see why they’d run it back, but I feel a little bad that he’s going to go 0-2 and YOH isn’t gonna get the moment.

The other surprise of this story is that the title match won’t happen on Dominion as it usually does. The storyline here is that El Desperado is facing Jun Kasai on 6/24 at a special NJPW-produced show, and Fujita doesn’t want to face a “distracted” El Desperado before then. This means that Fujita, who is the youngest ever BOSJ winner, will be giving up his chance to be the youngest ever Junior Heavyweight champion in New Japan, which is another sign he’s probably not winning. Regardless, this does mean that Despy vs Kasai is now a Junior Heavyweight title match - I’d love for them to belt up Jun Kasai for no reason, but not sure I see it happening. Fujita vs Jun Kasai actually sounds amazing and hasn’t happened in the last few months, though… hm, maybe it’s not so impossible.

The match will probably happen on one of the two touring New Japan Soul shows between that and the start of the G1 Climax - 7/4 at Tokyo Budokan (not the Nippon Budokan; a much smaller but still relatively large venue) or the 7/6 Korakuen.

I’m going to save a Dominion writeup until next week, but it makes sense to move this match off of it: it’s a beefy card both literally and figuratively: you’ve got Shingo vs Goto, Tsuji vs Gabe, and Oleg vs Takeshita; there’s not much reason to stick this match on there and have it get drowned out by the heavyweights doing their thing.

Fujita is popping up in DDT on a 7/13 Korakuen, teaming with Takeshi Masada against To-y and Koroku. On one hand, those are three of DDT’s greatest young wrestlers; on the other hand, they all feel kind of beneath Fujita?

I watched EVIL vs Gedo, the only other singles match on the otherwise all-house-show-tags BOSJ finals card, and it wasn’t as bad as I expected. EVIL won with a bunch of shtick and announced that HoT will get a new member at Dominion. I’ve seen some speculation this could be Hiromu, given he’s not on the Dominion card and HoT could use a junior, but that seems like a terrible idea on a million different levels.

Hiroshi Tanahashi’s last UK match will be at AEW Forbidden Door on 8/24. This implies there might not be an NJPW Royal Quest this year, but I figure there’ll be some kind of cobranded RevPro show with some NJPW wrestlers on it as a minimum.

NOAH: Monday Magic kicks off, 6/3 Korakuen notes

NOAH kicked off another of their Monday Magic “seasons” (miniseries?) last week, and now have two of the four episodes (not counting the PPV) in the books. It’s been really fun so far. These shows are in kayfabe booked by NOSAWA, who is also, if not the booker of NOAH in reality, certainly one of them.

They’re easy shows to watch, broadcast in front of a rowdy Shinjuku FACE crowd on a Monday night with high production values and a two hour runtime. They’re generally built around mystery cards, kind of like how most American TV wrestling doesn’t reveal the full card before the show - night one was a total mystery, while night two only had two announced matches, and night three in a couple weeks looks like it’s back to being an unannounced shows. That said, they’re running some continuous storylines and angles on these shows to set up a PPV at the end of this month, Wrestle Magic on 6/30, so it’s not a total mystery.

The shows feature crossovers with Marvelous and Marigold, plus some random freelancers and fly-ins. There’s also two extra championships that basically only exist in the Monday Magicverse: the GHC Hardcore Openweight Championship and the GHC Women’s Championship. So it ends up sitting in this strange place where, yeah, the core talent base is NOAH, but it feels very different from just throwing on a random Star Navigation or Sunny Voyage show.

GHC Women’s Championship storyline

I’ll run down the storylines thus far, starting with the championships. On episode one, Mayu Iwatani made her “NOAH debut” teaming with GHC Women’s Champion Kouki Amarei against Marvelous’s “Great Sakuya” (Riko Kawahata doing a silly gimmick) and Sadie Gibbs. This was an interesting mix: Mayu, of course, just debuted in Marigold. Amarei is the first ever GHC Women’s Champion, having won a battle royal in November. Unfortunately, she was injured during her first defense on January 3 and has been on the shelf since then. This was only her second match back, her first being on Marigold’s PPV a couple days ago - good timing given the new Monday Magic season and that PPV, I guess, though the kind of good timing that makes me worry she might have rushed back from injury too soon.

Sadie Gibbs is an English freelancer with not many matches under her belt. She had very brief 2019 runs in Stardom and AEW, and had some controversy in each that I had completely forgotten about: there were various rumors of her walking out on her Stardom tour early (including one Will Ospreay randomly posting about it, before he learned how to shut the hell up online), and her AEW run lead to a couple bad matches on Dark and a rumored backstage fight with Bea Priestly. She was cut by AEW in 2020 and more or less retired before returning to wrestling with a Marvelous run in 2024, and has worked a few shows and tours since then.

She looked pretty good in this match, though she did have a sick botched springboard moonsault to the outside where she faceplanted on some chairs and had a bloody face by the end of the match. So if you were trying to judge whether she’s botchy or reliable maybe this is not the greatest performance, but hey, I thought that was cool as hell. She also worked a couple Marvelous shows the following weekend so presumably she didn’t get any lasting damage from it.

Anyways, Team Marigold won this match, leading to Marvelous’s Takumi Iroha coming out from backstage to challenge Amarei. She ended up winning a pretty good match on episode 2. There wasn’t any immediate follow-up to this, but the assumption seems to be that Mayu will challenge (and probably win) at Wrestle Magic as part of her quest to get a bunch of Marigold and adjacent championships. That sounds good to me!

GHC Hardcore Openweight Championship

Meanwhile, Shuji Ishikawa is, apparently, your GHC Hardcore Openweight Champion. This belt technically existed for a few years in the mid-2000s - last held in that time by one Kenta Kobashi - and was reactivated for Monday Magic’s first season in 2023. It has a very silly recent history: Masato Tanaka won it on the second episode, Ninja Mack won it off him on the fourth episode, then Shuji Ishikawa won it off Mack on last year’s Wrestle Magic PPV (following the second season) and defended against Tanaka on an episode of the third season.

In this fourth season, he was challenged by Manabu Soya in the first episode and defeated him in a super silly plunder match on the second episode. This was worth a watch, not so much for spectacle as much as sheer comedy. There are a few gross bumps (sentons onto chairs on the outside, a horrific powerbomb table spot), but also just a ton of very silly plunder comedy like chairs being hit off each other in nonsensical ways and Shuji kicking a ladder into Soya’s crotch repeatedly. A good time, maybe my favorite Soya match since I started watching NOAH this year.

I’d enjoy seeing another defense of this belt on Wrestle Magic 2025, though I don’t know if we’ll get it.

Other storylines & guests

The main event of night one was a decent tag match that featured Kaito Kitomiya and Titus Alexander facing off against Minoru Suzuki and Ryan Clancy. I’ll get to the other guys in a second, but the important thing is Kaito did call out MiSu for a match in his postmatch promo. I think this was just him working his own angle, since they didn’t follow up on night two, but man that would be an awesome match for Wrestle Magic.

There’s an ongoing story where they keep putting GHC Junior Tag Team Champions and real life brothers Alpha Wolf and Dragon Bane on opposite sides of matches - on night 1 in a singles contest that went to a time limit draw, and on opposite sides of a 6-man on night 2. They seem to be more annoyed with the booking than each other, so not really sure if this is going anywhere, but I don’t mind since their night 1 match was actually really fun. A better brother vs brother match than the one I’m gonna get to when we talk about All Japan.

NOZAWA came out on night two to announce that the main event of Wrestle Magic would feature wrestlers from New Japan, DDT, Dragon Gate, and NOAH. Hard to say what he’s building there, no one from New Japan has shown up yet.

There’s a lot of weird fly-ins on this show, a quick rundown:

AJPW: A mid show in Sendai

So the big Sendai show was kind of a bust for match quality, which I guess wasn’t that surprising given the card going in. There’s really nothing I’d say you need to check out here. The highlights were the midcard championship matches, with Dan Tamura failing to capture the AJPW Junior Heavyweight Championship from Seiki Yoshioka and Kento & Yuma Aoyagi defending their tag belts against Shotaro Ashino & Xyon. Xyon looked much better in that match than I expected, he could do well as a big guy in a tag. He and Shotaro Ashino seemed like a totally random pairing but came out in matching shirts and gear with a logo saying HAVOC on it, so I guess they’re a new permanent team? That could be fun. They had a few tag moves, like one that was like a Shatter Machine assist but with Xyon giving Shotaro their opponent for a suplex.

The main event was a dud, and I’m not reallly shocked. The first sign that Rei vs Jun Saito would be a bad match was when Rei came out with a shaved face again. If there’s one thing his linear improvement during the Champion Carnival proved, it’s that his wrestling acumen is stored in his beard. He came into the Carnival with it shaved and stunk, and turned it around both in storyline and match quality as it regrew. He came into this match with it shaved and had a bad match and lost.

I don’t really have anything else to say about the match other than that it was long and boring and had less heat than you’d expect given how good ticket sales were and how popular the Saitos are. I’m hoping that now that we’ve gotten through this match, we can finally get the belt off Jun Saito - I’d be fine with the Saitos regaining the tag belts, but maybe they can stay out of the Triple Crown scene for a bit.

The rest of AJPW’s June

I’m not sure Jun’s next challenger will be the guy to dethrone him, though. After winning an awful match versus Takashi (the former Cyber Kong), Hideki Suzuki came out to challenge Jun Saito. Mind you, this was a guy who got utterly squashed by Rei Saito in the Champion Carnival semi finals, and is now challenging the guy who just beat Rei Saito. I know Suzuki defeated Jun in the tournament, but still don’t feel like he has a great claim to this challenge considering how said tournament wrapped up for him.

I do think Suzuki can be fun when he feels like going, but he also doesn’t seem like much of a draw. He could be a fun transitional champion, maybe.

A 7-foot-tall guy from Oklahoma named Talos debuted as the surprise in a midcard match in Sendai, seeming to join Hokutogun. He seemed… better than I expected a guy who’s mostly notable for his time in Billy Corgan’s NWA to be. He’ll be getting a singles match against Seigo Tachibana on 6/24 at Shinkiba 1st Ring, and be on the challenger side of a Hokutogun vs Hokutogun match for the trios titles on 6/14.

There’s only a couple other matches announced for the rest of June: Rising HAYATO & Yuma Anzai will defend the All Asia Tag Titles against the Aoyagi brothers on 6/15; Yuko Miyamoto will defend the GAORA TV championship against (UGH) Takashi on the same show. The 6/18 Korakuen will have Naruki Doi challenge for Seiki’s Junior Heavyweight title, Kento & Yuma Aoyagi defending against Dragon Gate’s Madoka Kikuta & KAI (both of Z-Brats), and the Jun vs Hideki match. The KAI return here is interesting - he started his career in 2008 in All Japan he worked there (and for Wrestle-1) until 2018 when he left for Dragon Gate; this will be his first appearance in All Japan since 2020. Nice to see AJPW and DG continuing to work together.

A pretty sleepy month, though I’ll probably keep my AJPW TV subscription active to check out the tag title matches if nothing else.

Checking in on Osaka Pro’s Light Heavyweight tournament

Osaka Pro had another nice little tournament that aired free on Youtube. Like their tag tournament this year I highly recommend watching the tournament matches in full (feel free to skip the midcard tags and battle royals) - it’s maybe 90 minutes total of wrestling.

Once again this was another hot crowd and a very well shot show considering the free release. The tournament didn’t quite hit the heights of the tag tournament, only because the crowd was on fire for that tournament because, well, putting basic hot tag psychology in front of this crowd is basically cheating. But these matches were super fun and I had a blast watching this as a lower-stakes alternative to BOSJ.

The participants were:

A fascinating cross section of the 25-30 year olds on top of the microindies and some veterans you’ve probably never heard of.

I won’t do a full breakdown of the bracket but this tournament was super fun and I would say the main events of both matches are absolutely worth watching, especially for free. I won’t even spoil it here! Mainly because I don’t even know if their big show in a couple weeks is going to make tape and whether it’d be worth trying to preview it! If it does I’ll make sure to link it though.

Other news

Walker Stewart was announced as the new head of English communications for Stardom, a long time coming. I hope he gets paid a little extra for that, and hope he continues to call big shows and just make Stardom more generally accessible. He already started strong by posting an English-language Stardom World schedule to Twitter for June, now if we can just get an actual English-language website we’ll really be in business. Then again, considering the debacle NJPW had with their English-language site earlier this year, I probably shouldn’t expect much.

Yuki Arai won the right to challenge for the Princess of Princess Championship at Summer Sun Princess in an elimination match. This match had a funny little set of rules: it was a 4v4 tag with pins and over the top rope eliminations, and the idea was that if one of the teams won and had more than one wrestler left, they have a match with the remaining wrestlers (whether a singles, three-way, or four-way depending). Yuki Arai ended up defeating teammate Arisu Endo in the final singles match. Very fun!

Here’s a wild stat: of all the full-time roster members in TJPW who have gotten to challenge for the PoP title, Yuki Arai is the only one who debuted after 2019. This basically sums up why I find TJPW so stale these days. There could be worse things for TJPW creatively than if, say, Miyu Yamashita or Shoko Nakajima left to go elsewhere and free up space at the top of the card (business-wise this might not be ideal, but on the other hand, how do you ever build new draws without having them, y’know, win things?).

It was also a little weird to have Arai win the right on a single-cam no-commentary house show and not have that as some kind of Korakuen main event or something. Summer Sun Princess is a month and a half away, after all. With that said, TJPW hasn’t booked any Korakuens yet this spring/summer (their next will be after Summer Sun Princess for the Tokyo Princess Cup Finals), so I guess this show was as good as any.

AEW/ROH’s MxM Collection will be debuting in DDT on the 6/29 Korakuen show. Not a huge fan of their shtick but I’d be happy to see them get over here, it’s a good fit for them.

Pro Wrestling Evolution announced Suwama vs Shinya Aoki for their 7/5 show, that should kick ass.

Daisuke Sekimoto was injured last week at a Big Japan show with a very scary neck/spine hit; thankfully he “only” suffered a “traumatic cervical spine injury” and is not paralyzed as first feared. Wishing him all the best and also to escape Big Japan; unfortunately the photo that went around of his injury also showed that he was working in front of what looked like only 400 or so fans at Korakuen. Go to All Japan or something man; they’re drawing well but are in desperate need of beef!

Like I said up top, the usual roundup of upcoming shows should be coming later this week (probably Friday, maybe a special Saturday edition?). Doesn’t look like there’s too much to cover, though: Stardom and DDT Korakuens on Sunday and Monday are the only shows that stick out to me on the Puwota calendar.