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

Newsletter: June 17, 2025

Gonna split this week into another pair of newsletters, since there is a lot to talk about coming out of NJPW’s big Dominion 6.15 show.

Match Recommendations

NJPW Dominion 6.15 In Osaka-Jo Hall (6/15, NJPW World, Cagematch)

TJPW (6/7, Wrestle Universe, Cagematch)

NJPW’s Dominion debacle

I think it needs to be stated up front that NJPW Dominion had some really good matches on it, including a great main event, and a number of smart title changes and good booking decisions. This has to be emphasized because, if you were only reading the fan reactions to this show, you would think it was one of the worst major company shows of all time.

In the wake of a few recent AEW PPVs, I remember seeing a lot of discourse around the idea that “a bad main event completely spoils an otherwise good show.” I didn’t really buy this idea, because it didn’t seem like the people making this argument were really having their nights truly ruined by, like, Mox vs Cope or whatever. They seemed to be arguing more about some abstract concept of show quality than, like, whether they enjoyed the show or not.

And here, I think, is a counterpoint that maybe proves my point: this show had a great main event, one of the best matches NJPW had this year, and one that I think overdelivered expectations - I think there are some people who are a bit tired of Shingo Takagi, and with his character sort of out in the weeds right now after the breakup of LIJ, this felt like it’d be lacking some heat. But this was hot as hell by the end, is sitting at a well-earned 8.85 on Cagematch, and I like to think sent the crowd home happy.

I’m also not sure that it mattered in the slightest, because this show also featured three awful matches and one of the most widely-rejected booking decisions I have seen New Japan make in years, and coming out of this show I don’t know of any New Japan fans feeling particularly good about the show or the state of the company. I don’t know, maybe a bad main event really can kill a good show, but it seems clear that a great main event can’t save a bad show. Let’s dig in.

Match-by-match

The show opened with a House of Torture vs War Dogs 4v4 with a mysterious X on HoT’s side. That turned out to be Bad Luck Fale, now referred to as Don Fale (see, he left Bullet Club, so he’s no longer the Underboss…). Boring, no one cares, Fale is just here to lose a G1 qualifier match and maybe hang around for bad undercard tags on the G1 tour.

But then, shock of shocks, Chase Owens turned on the War Dogs and joined House of Torture mid-match. Again: Owens is here to lose a G1 qualifier and bad undercard tags, no one cares. He did debut a new cowboy character which uh… I’ll let you be the judge of it, because I don’t think I can make it through all three minutes of that video.

So that was a bad way to kick off a show but is pretty meaningless. There are other guys who would be more interesting to lose G1 qualifiers, but I get reintroducing them in HoT since where else are you going to put them? i don’t actually want to see either guy pushed, HoT jail seems fine.

Then you had a perfectly fine El Phantasmo & Shota Umino vs ZSJ & Oiwa match, and a Tanahashi vs Yuya Uemura match that I thought was fine and ended on Tana getting a surprise rollup on Uemura. This made some people mad but Uemura and Tana are in the same G1 block and Yuya will almost certainly get his win back; seemed like a smart surprise win to set up drama in the tournament. I bet we’ll get one of the last ever instances of heel-ish Tanahashi in that G1 match (unless NJPW fans are way more down on Uemura than I’m aware of).

But then, probably the most disastrous booking decision of the night. Master Wato & YOH defending their junior heavyweight titles against SHO & Kanemaru did not seem like it was ever going to be a good match - yeah, SHO/YOH heat has potential, but Kanemaru does not. Unfortunately, we didn’t get that match.

Instead, DOUKI - one of the most beloved underdog faces in modern NJPW history, who rose from a last minute freelancer replacement for an injured El Desperado in BOSJ to being junior heavyweight champion, only to lose his title due to an injury in his big match against Despy at Wrestle Kingdom - returned as a heel for House of Torture, subbing for an “injured” Kanemaru. The crowd audibly shrieked and groaned at Douki’s reveal here. They did not react much better to Wato & YOH dropping their junior belts on their first defense.

Thankfully, this was followed by two good title matches with sensible title changes that got the crowd back. Ishii & Taichi defeated Great-O-Khan & Callum Newman for the heavyweight tag belts in a perfectly fine match. I did love the finishing stretch where Ishii hit one of the grossest brainbusters I’ve ever seen on Newman, which normally should end a match, but Taichi still hit his own finisher on Newman for emphasis before getting the pin. Taichi & Ishii are a surprisingly fun team, and while the IWGP Tag Team Championships haven’t mattered all that much in recent years, having them hold through World Tag League and defend at the Dome sounds like a great plan to me.

Oleg Botlin vs Takeshita rocked, and Botlin won to take the NEVER Openweight Championship. I guess I should have expected Oleg to win this, given Takeshita beat him only a few months ago at New Beginning in Osaka, but I was still somewhat surprised by this, maybe because of how all over the place the booking had been thus far.

Then the other major problem of the night: David Finlay taking on HoT leader EVIL 1 on 1 in a dog collar match. EVIL beat Finlay in a terrible, lengthy match that killed the crowd, including a long and stupid extended stretcher spot. They had just announced Finlay for the G1; if this is like a write-off for Finlay and the G1 announcement was a swerve I guess I would give it some credit, but on the other hand a long-ass stretcher spot is stupid for a guy who’s going to be back in barely a month to wrestle in the G1. The match itself is astonishing for being yet another case of New Japan completely missing the point of a stipulation match: the dog collar and chain are supposed to keep the two wrestlers locked in combat; the chain they had here seemed to span the length of the ring and allowed things like Finlay throwing EVIL over the top rope with plenty of slack to spare. At least the awful Dog Pound Cage Matches had spectacle.

The dead crowd did not help Gabe Kidd vs Yota Tsuji, which was a disappointment compared to their banger time limit draw back at New Beginning. Gabe botched a senton at one point and maybe gave himself a concussion, so I guess that could have been part of the problem. The crowd did pop big for Gabe winning the IWGP Global Heavyweight Championship and his postmatch promo. Normally I’d be spending time talking about Gabe’s continued weird booking in AEW vs NJPW (and even NJPW vs NJPW US); here it feels like a footnote to be saved for later analysis.

And as I said at the top: Shingo vs Goto was great. I did think it was a bit too long - one of the good things about Goto’s reign has been shorter IWGP Heavyweight Championship matches; this was his longest defense thus far at 28 minutes and really felt like it had to stall a lot through the first half. That said, Goto’s finishers being so buried over the past 15 years means he can get away with hitting like four different GTRs or Ushigoroshis or whatever in a match and any of them feel like they could be the finish.

Looking at NJPW’s summer shows

Before I do too much analysis of upcoming NJPW shows, I want to just quickly lay out the next couple of months for them, plus the G1, because there’s a lot going on.

The G1 starts on 7/19 and goes through 8/17. As I alluded to earlier, NJPW announced the G1 blocks during this show. I’ll start there, since it’s useful context for everything else going on over the next month:

There are two play-in spots in each block as well. The 6/23 New Japan Soul show at Korakuen will have Ishii vs Drilla Moloney for a spot in the B Block and Taichi vs Callum Newman for a spot in the A Block. The 7/4 New Japan Soul at Tokyo Budokan will have Ryohei Oiwa vs Don Fale for the A Block and YOSHI-HASHI vs Chase Owens for the B Block.

Finally, useful thing to know in this G1: the playoffs this year will involve the top three in each block. It’s kind of like quarterfinals/semifinals/finals, with a bye: 8/14 will have 2nd place in A Block vs 3rd place in B Block and 2nd place in B Block vs 3rd place in A Block; 8/16 will have 1st place in A Block vs the winner of the first match and 1st place in B Block versus the winner of the second match; and the 8/17 finals will have the winners of those two matches face off.

In addition to those play-in matches, we have:

Ok, with that out of the way…

Let’s talk about the House of Torture

It has to be asked: what is the point of House of Torture?

It’s a western fan myth that New Japan, or puroresu in general, has ever put more value into “clean” wrestling than American pro wrestling does. The hottest acts in Japan right now, the ones that are actively improving the business of their respective companies, are cheating heel units: Team 2000X in NOAH, HATE in Stardom, Z-Brats in Dragon Gate. And these are not just midcard acts, these factions are what the main events in these companies are built around. You can’t just say that House of Torture is a bad unit because they cheat.

But there’s some distinct differences here. House of Torture have been around for essentially five years, starting from EVIL’s initial defection to Bullet Club in 2020. They were initially recognized to be a way to kill time during COVID restrictions in Japan, starting with EVIL’s weird little IWGP Heavyweight Championship reign. They lost access to the foreign wrestlers and had to scramble to get a local guy set up as a heel for an indefinite amount of time.

This worked: they got their heels. And then they have just spun their wheels for half a decade.

SANADA (37) isn’t getting any more over with House of Torture than he did as IWGP Champion. EVIL (38) isn’t a guy who should be getting more meaningful wins at this point, and he’s not over enough that anyone beating him feels meaningful. SHO (35) somehow feels even more buried than YOH, junior tag team gold or not. DOUKI (33) seems like he’s about to have the rest of his NJPW career derailed by this run. Ren Narita (27) might be able to escape in time to salvage his.

I put those ages there for a reason: unlike those other three units I mentioned, this is a unit of mostly older guys. And they’re not old guys who are reinventing themselves: SANADA made an entirely lateral move from Bullet Club to House of Torture. EVIL has been this guy for half a decade. SHO has been this guy for half a decade. Fale (43), Owens (35), Kanemaru (48), and Yujiro (44) have all been in heel units for a decade. There is no novelty to House of Torture in 2025. Even DOUKI came in as a heel initially; there’s nothing new there either.

No one is clamoring for any of these guys (other than, for now, DOUKI) to turn on House of Torture and return as beloved babyfaces. This unit does not have a Saya Kamitani, it does not have a Shun Skywalker, it doesn’t have an OZAWA - hell, this unit doesn’t even have an Owadasan. There is no one who is primed to come out of this unit more over than they came in. There is no one in this unit who will ever draw more business thanks to their inclusion in it, other than maybe the initial EVIL run. The unit itself may have had some juice in terms of merch sales early on, because it was novel early on, but did anyone see Chase Owens and Fale join and think “clearly, now is the time to buy a House of Torture towel?”

House of Torture has no movement. No one in House of Torture is on the way up or on the way down. They just exist. And they’re not fun to watch wrestle.

They could pull some interesting tricks with them in the G1. Maybe Tana could beat SANADA and EVIL to qualify for the quarterfinals, only to have his hopes dashed by Ren Narita. That would be movement: Narita getting a huge win on an old ace. Maybe he could go from there to a run with the IWGP Global Title (have Kidd challenge him as revenge for Tana, something like that). That would be movement! I have no faith in them doing this.

You know what I think we will get? Finlay will beat EVIL, but SANADA will beat Finlay, and this stupid War Dogs vs HoT feud continues. SANADA vs Finlay at the Dome. Maybe EVIL gets ejected from the unit by SANADA on the way there.

At the end of the day, you have to have entertaining matches. You can do run-ins and ref-pulls and beat-downs all you want, if you have good matches. I don’t think House of Torture are capable of good matches. They’re a unit made up of the blandest (EVIL, SANADA, SHO) and worst (Chase, Fale, Yujiro, Togo, Kanemaru) wrestlers in the company, and look like they’re going to drag Narita and now DOUKI down with them.

I’d loved to be swerved here. Maybe after the G1, DOUKI and Narita overthrow EVIL and SANADA and form a new antihero unit. Heck, bring along SHO and… I don’t know, rope a heavyweight in there. Shingo needs some new friends. EVIL and SANADA can continue to pal around with Dick Togo and the worst wrestlers in the company on the undercard if they want. I feel like New Japan has many options for good stories, honestly. I just don’t think they’ll take any of them as long as Gedo has the book.

Other News

Corrections section: the show last weekend that I’d been just kind of assuming was TJPW ring announcer Sayuri Namba’s retirement show was actually just a produce show. Her actual last show is this weekend on 6/22.

I caught up on a little bit of TJPW. I was pleasantly surprised by HIMAWARI vs Mifu Ashida. Ashida makes me wish TJPW actually had heels; the cheerleader poses would work well for that (I guess that’s not far off from Kamyu’s shtick). Shoko Nakajima vs Kaya Toribami was both a perfectly average main event and also probably one of the best MLW-adjacent matches of all time. MLW seems to be shedding everyone young on their roster, including both recent women’s champions (Janai Kai and Delmi Exo), so I have no idea who the hell Shoko will face next time she pops up on an MLW show. There was an interesting spot in this match where Shoko went for a 619 but, having had her arm worked over, failed to hang on to the rope as she went for the kick - she didn’t go out of the ring but just kinda stopped on the apron. Not sure I’ve seen that sell before, for as many times as I’ve seen a 619. Toribami’s limb work could be a great way to separate her out from the other rookies who are on the verge of becoming consistent midcarders; she did some really cool grappling in this that I’d love to see more of.

In addition to their match in DDT on 6/29, MxM Collection will also be making appearance in GLEAT teaming with Baliyan Akki & Mei Suruga on 7/1. That show also has Alberto Del Rio on it. GLEAT continues to be a weird company.

That’s all for this issue; later this week I’ll be back with notes on this week’s big midweek shows (NOAH Monday Magic episode 3! AJPW’s Korakuen! Charismania II…?) and a watch guide for the weekend.