I’m about 10 pages into chapter 8, about the JPW era of AJPW, but as a lead-in to that post I thought that I should go into greater detail than the bio itself does about the story of JPW’s formation. My posts have tended to be more about the non-New Japan side of puro history, since my personal project pertains to All Japan specifically, but this post should help make up for that a bit.

What would eventually become Japan Pro Wrestling was a result of the extended fallout from the unsuccessful coup attempt in August 1983, when Inoki’s financial abuse of his position was revealed. I don’t know how well-known the actual affair is in English-language circles, so I’m going to go into it.

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In 1980, Inoki founded Anton Heisel (I don’t know the meaning of the Heisel part, but I do know that Anton is derived from Antonio), a biotech startup with the cooperation of the Brazilian government focused on the production of ethanol from sugarcane bagasse. This had really taken off in Brazil in the aftermath of the 1973 oil crisis, when its government financed a program to phase out fossil fuels in automobiles. This manifested in the ethanol-gasoline blends now sold in the country. There were, as there continue to be, great concerns about the pollutant effects of bagasse conversion to ethanol (specifically the aldehydes produced in alcohol oxidization), but Inoki was convinced that they were manageable. Sure, livestock which are fed recycled bagasse are prone to diarrhea, but Inoki logic saw that as a good thing because that meant more fertilizer. Inoki could solve the food crisis!

He couldn’t. Japanese climates couldn’t facilitate the fermentation process of such organic fertilizer effectively. This enterprise ended up hitting Inoki’s wallet even harder due to Brazilian inflation.

To recoup the billions he had lost, Inoki got TV Asahi to pledge 1.2 billion yen in broadcasting rights as collateral, but it wasn’t enough. (The debt would eventually be transferred to Kiyoshi Sagawa, founder and then-chairman of delivery company Sagawa Express, in exchange for stock certificates.) What seems to have led to the coup attempt was NJPW’s June 1983 shareholders’ report, which reported a profit margin of a mere 26 million yen on nearly 2 billion yen in sales, with a carryover profit of 7.2 million and no shareholder dividends.

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Back to the story. In December 1983, NJPW sales manager and coup conspirator Naoki Otsuka resigned from his post to form New Japan Pro-Wrestling Entertainment. The name was transferred to him by Inoki, which he did to “keep the New Japan name” even if the promotion itself was taken over by TV Asahi. Investors included Haruka Eigen and eventual JPW chairman Katsushi Takeda. Choshu would quickly become closer to Otsuka than New Japan proper, as his private production company, RIki Production, was entrusted to New Japan Pro-Wrestling Entertainment to operate.

Cracks soon formed in the relationship between the ostensible sister companies. Inoki was not present at NJPW Entertainment’s founding party, which led to distrust from Otsuka. NJPW Entertainment, rather than NJPW itself, organized a Fujinami/Choshu match on February 3, 1984. I can’t tell you exactly how they did this, but it clearly didn’t help their relationship, as Inoki began to suspect that Otsuka planned to take over event booking and monopolize profits.

Choshu’s own relationship with the company would deteriorate. The source I’m taking this from kayfabes it as manifesting in his interference in the June 14 Inoki/Hogan match, where he hit Hogan with a lariat. To put it mildly, the fans did not like that. However, I think it’s reasonable to suspect that this was true in a different way: namely, that Choshu did not like this angle or at least its result. Hogan got to go back to the WWF without any real damage, and Inoki’s kayfabe supremacy prevailed.

After this tour, NJPW Entertainment arranged an event at the Denen Coliseum on August 26, but New Japan cancelled. This is where Giant Baba enters the picture. Either Otsuka, who thought NJPW was harassing him, or Baba, who respected Otsuka’s acumen as a salesman, sought contact with the other through the go-between of Gong magazine’s Kosuke Takeuchi. Now, it must be made clear that this was not Otsuka jumping sides; as he ran an entertainment company, either he believed or Baba convinced him that he could play with both sides. But when the Denen event was revived as an AJPW event, NJPW obviously saw it as betrayal.

As NJPW’s Summer Fight Series began, Yoshiaki Fujiwara and Nobuhiko Takada jumped ship to the UWF. Choshu would also be offered a UWF contract, but Otsuka reported this to New Japan, who then moved to offer an exclusive contract with TV Asahi, in an attempt to both curb Shinma’s attempt and to separate Choshu from Otsuka.

Two months later on August 24, just after the company had returned from Pakistan, Otsuka was handed his notice by Inoki himself. After the scheduled events through Septemer, the two companies’ dealings would cease. Two days after the AJPW Denen show, Otsuka notified New Japan that he was leaving, and that he was going to pull everybody except Inoki and Sakaguchi with him. In fact, the day after receiving his notice, Kuniaki Kobayashi had asked Otsuka if he was quitting. After this, Otsuka received a call from Choshu to meet him at his apartment, and when he did so he found Kobayashi, Yoshiaki Yatsu, Animal Hamaguchi, and Isamu Teranishi were also present. It was here when Otsuka made his offer to Choshu to come along with him and “break new ground”.

Ishingun would proceed to participate in the Bloody Fight Series, but Choshu approached Sakaguchi to request that he and Yatsu take an expedition to the WWF to refresh themselves. At this point the cracks in the promotions’ relationship had obviously begun to form, but Vince hadn’t totally burned the bridge by jacking up the fee yet. So this appealed to Sakaguchi because Choshu would not only be separated from Otsuka, but could also help repair their relationship with what had been their most fruitful American partnership.

Sakaguchi announced backstage on September 18 that Choshu would be going on expedition, and Ishingun vowed to unite with Inoki. However, three days later, Ishingun held a press conference at the Capital Tokyo Hotel. (I believe this photo is from that conference.) Ten minutes beforehand, they had collectively submitted their notice to New Japan and announced they were joining Otsuka. Baba was not a part of the conference, but he showed up and stated that All Japan would be ready to accept them if they approached.

Then, even more of the New Japan roster would align with Otsuka. These included Eigen, who as previously mentioned had been one of NJPW Entertainment’s investors, and Otsuka’s friends Masanobu Kurisu, Nobuo Yasunaga, Shinichi Nakano, and Fumihiro Niikura. Killer Khan then joined at Otsuka’s invitation, and Masa Saito and referee Tiger Hattori did the same at Choshu’s request. Katsushi Takeda put up the money for everyone’s contracts. At this point, NJPW Entertainment merged with Riki Production to form Japan Pro.

Before Ishingun’s dramatic entrance into AJPW on December 8, 1984, Japan Pro also arranged the British Bulldogs’ ship-jumping to become AJPW gaijins, starting with the RWTL. The next year, they would also lure over the Calgary Hurricanes: Super Strong Machine, Hiro Saito, and Shunji Takano. (This is skipping ahead a bit, but I know that in late 1985 AJPW and NJPW would sign a no-pulling – or as machine translation hilariously puts it sometimes, no-pullout – agreement. This is why Dick Murdoch never came back to All Japan, even though he apparently wanted to.)

Before I go radio silent for a while to get the first of two mammoth chapters transcribed, here is a second post about JPW and what ultimately tore them apart. These are my attempts to chronicle events laid out in a series of Igapro posts, sourced from Vol. 47 of G Spirits magazine, the Nihon Sports Publications book Showa Pro Wrestling Restoration, and Kenta Tasaki’s biography of Choshu. This is by far the biggest headache I’ve ever had trying to write a coherent narrative in this thread, and I honestly doubt I pulled it off.

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JPW formally joined AJPW as a satellite promotion in January 1985, and completed their Tokyo dojo around this time. It was at its opening where Naoki Otsuka and Riki Choshu’s respective positions as JPW chairman and president were announced. However, the real head honchos were Otsuka and Katsushi Takeda, the NJPW Entertainment investor I mentioned in the first JPW post, who had also footed the bill for everyone’s salaries. Choshu’s function was only really that of an on-site supervisor.

Neither Baba nor Choshu were in the loop when Otsuka grabbed the Calgary Hurricanes, and Choshu was not happy about it. He didn’t want JPW’s relationship with New Japan to go even more sour than it was already, and to him this went against Otsuka’s stated ideal for JPW to be “a ring not controlled by Baba and Inoki”. Baba became wary and made an aggressive move, demanding that JPW’s workers signed contracts with him in exchange for an increase in the NTV broadcasting rights fee. JPW resisted this at first, but their events were not successful despite having borrowed All Japan talent, and negotiations for their own television presence on TBS (yes, the network that originally carried the IWE) broke down. Alas, JPW had to accept AJPW’s conditions to make up for the hit on their business, as well as pare down their events to one-off shows.

On December 15, 1985, the 23rd anniversary of Rikidōzan’s death, Baba and Inoki met at his grave to sign an anti-pullout agreement between their respective promotions, with lawyers on both sides as witnesses. (Chikara Momota, grandson of Rikidōzan, shared a great photo from this meeting, with him in his father Mitsuo’s arms alongside Baba, Inoki, and Jumbo.)

As a result of this, the Calgary Hurricanes were forced to revert to technically being New Japan talent until their contracts expired in March. Even then, Otsuka’s intent to use them to make JPW an independent promotion was dashed when they too were forced to sign with All Japan through the collective JPW agreement.

In 1986, further cracks in the JPW-AJPW relationship formed. 1986 marked the beginning of the Japanese asset price bubble, whose bursting in 1992 would be a major factor in what would initially become known as Japan’s Lost Decade, although subsequent difficulties would lead some commentators to stretch this out to the Lost 20, and then 30 years. Anyway, as the value of the JPW headquarters building went up, and all that money went into Takeda’s pocket, the talent grew resentful of the fact that he was receiving money both from JPW and from the property. The higher-ups, meanwhile, were frustrated with the wrestlers because they already had higher wages than those which New Japan had paid them.

As these conflicts began, Choshu was approached by JPW managing director Kazuyoshi Kato, who was also the head of JPW’s entertainment division, which is what Riki Production had officially become. Kato and Otsuka had been sales rivals during their tenures in New Japan, but they had joined forces in the coup attempt and subsequent JPW formation as their interests aligned. However, he now bristled over not being allowed to use JPW’s head office, and became Choshu’s confidant.

After the Osaka show on September 3, 1986, Baba and Takeda held a meeting to determine what was to be done about their profits not increasing despite their number of events doing so. Takeda stated that he only needed Choshu and Yatsu, and would restructure the rest to desaturate the roster and improve match quality. Takeda wasn’t just unpopular with the boys for meddling in their financial affairs; now he was trying to exert creative influence as well.

Rumors had been circulating for as long as the infighting had begun in 1986 that Choshu was considering a jump back to New Japan. He publicly denied it, but had stated off the record that he had met with Fujinami around this time, and Inoki had even claimed that Choshu had wanted to participate in the October 9, 1986 NJPW event. Meanwhile, Baba was using Jumbo, Tenryu, Hansen, and most recently, Hiroshi Wajima to keep Choshu in check.

On January 8, 1987 Otsuka met with former NJPW external relations head Toyohisa Sugita at the JPW headquarters. New Japan’s partnership with the UWF did not do the business they had wanted, and World Pro Wrestling was moved from its Friday primetime slot to a worse Monday slot that often saw it preempted and taken off the air by special programs. They wanted help, and TV Asahi, by now in control of New Japan, probably wanted Choshu back. Otsuka did not answer due to his affiliation with All Japan, but he did accept Inoki’s request for a meeting when Sugita passed it along. Choshu was also invited, and accepted. Inoki’s original intent was to get all of JPW back, but when Otsuka and Choshu came to meet him at New Japan headquarters, his focus narrowed. Otsuka would regret bringing Choshu along as Inoki offered Riki 100 million yen to return. After this meeting, Choshu began to seriously consider returning home.

The day after their meeting, an NJPW director named Tetsuo Baisho, who was a drinking buddy of Choshu’s, approached Kazuyoshi Kato. Baisho had been deposed by Otsuka during the 1983 coup attempt, and while he had since been reinstated, he was determined to make sure Otsuka never worked for New Japan again. They began to plan to draw a separate line to bring Choshu back to NJPW through Sugita instead of Otsuka.

On January 17, after defending the PWF title against Curt Hennig in his hometown, Choshu made waves when he namedropped Fujinami on live television during his postmatch interview with Kenji Wakabayashi. He was supposed to meet with Fujinami and Sakaguchi in Fukuoka afterwards, with Otsuka, Eigen, and Sugita also present. Choshu suddenly claimed the meeting had been canceled, but this seemed to be a misdirection as he went to meet with Sakaguchi anyway. By this point he felt that he had gone as far as he could go in All Japan, and the returning Masa Saito’s intentions to join back up with New Japan were also a factor in JPW’s internal tensions.

Around this time Baba would learn from Haruka Eigen about what was going on inside JPW. On February 3, he made his move, and approached Choshu and Yatsu to sign directly with All Japan instead of through JPW, breaking their promise to Otsuka. Choshu would take a break from here due to poor health, but he would later state that he had been “weighing the scales’, waiting out to see what would happen between AJPW, NJPW, and JPW. By this time, though, he was trying to convince Yatsu to come with him back to New Japan. However, Yatsu had already decided to stay, as despite his membership in Ishingun and ostensible support of Choshu, he was personally wary both of him and of NJPW.

Outwardly, Choshu apologized to Baba for bailing before the Excite Series had ended, and promised to participate in the coming Champion Carnival tour, which as JPW president he was obligated to do. He also instructed Inoki to abide by the anti-pullout agreement.

However, Choshu announced at a JPW general meeting that while he would return for the Carnival, he would also end his affiliation with All Japan at the end of March to become a true independent. He professed that JPW would essentially return to its original intended form, as an independent promotion in which wrestlers from either promotion could participate due to series-by-series contracts with AJPW and NJPW.

Yatsu and Eigen protested, and accused Choshu of using this plan as merely a pretext to eventually just make JPW part of New Japan again. And needless to say, Baba was having none of it. JPW’s contract with All Japan stipulated that they were required to give six months’ notice if they declined to renew, and JPW were still considered All Japan talent under the anti-pullout agreement of 1985. So All Japan would have to be the ones to break their contract if JPW workers would ever be able to set foot inside a New Japan ring again. On top of this, there was no way that NJPW would agree to separate Otsuka and Choshu (despite Baisho’s attempts to the contrary).

The day before March 26, when Saito was slated to appear for New Japan once again, Choshu appeared at some reception and handed him a contract to withdraw from the Carnival. At this point Choshu himself was apparently still intending to participate in the Carnival. But then, Baba was told by Otsuka that it would be difficult for Choshu to do so, went to the JPW headquarters the day before the tour began. There, he demanded that Choshu and the others withdraw their independence and sign a new contract with All Japan, including Saito.

On the first day of the Carnival tour, as Otsuka and Takeda were out of town, Choshu holed up in the company headquarters intending to boycott with the following JPW employees: Saito, Kuniaki Kobayashi, Isamu Teranishi, Nobuo Yasunaga, Masanobu Kurisu, Shinji Sasazaki, Kensuke Sasaki, Tiger Hattori, Super Strong Machine, and Hiro Saito. Choshu did not want to lose his line with New Japan, so he was not going to acquiesce to Baba’s demands. The Calgary Hurricanes, while independent, were essentially a JPW subsidiary, and with the exception of Shunji Takano, whom Baba liked and was currently working in America, they felt they had gone as far as they could go in AJPW and were ready to return to New Japan.

But then, Masanobu Kurisu broke away and went to Korakuen Hall, where All Japan were to hold their show. He had no interest in returning to New Japan, and had only ever joined JPW in the first place due to his admiration of Otsuka.

On March 30, Otsuka and Takeda announced Choshu’s expulsion from New Japan. This left him free to return to NJPW, but now apparently he could not receive the 100 million yen which Inoki had promised. He had no bargaining power anymore, and had probably incurred a penalty fee for his actions, so he only got 10 million yen. (Choshu apparently denies this, for the record.)

Teranishi left Choshu’s faction. While Hamaguchi remained at Choshu’s side, he decided to retire as he “had promised he would retire if he caused trouble” when he joined JPW. Killer Khan was working in the WWF at this point, and was so disappointed by the news of JPW’s split that he retired. Hiroshi Hase, who was training overseas in Calgary, was asked by Choshu to return and come with him. His fellow JPW trainee on excursion, Fumisuke Niikura, was left behind because Eigen had invited him to join All Japan already.

When Choshu returned to New Japan, he did so through the base of Riki Production, which I guess was its own thing again (still headed by his buddy Kato). But as he did so without resolving matters with All Japan, both Baba and Otsuka hardened their stance. Apparently it was somehow due to this that World Pro Wrestling changed its timeslot once again to Tuesday nights, and they were unable to broadcast Choshu’s matches until October even though other ex-JPW guys gradually got back on television before him. Eventually Choshu and company signed directly with New Japan again, but Kato was unable to return alongside them and Riki Production was disbanded.

After Yatsu and the rest of the JPW holdouts signed directly with All Japan, Otsuka had no wrestlers left. They terminated their relationship with All Japan after the August 31, 1987 Budokan show, and after an AJW event that they had been contracted to promote, they disbanded entirely. Otsuka would leave the business entirely until, after the NOAH exodus, he offered his services to Motoko Baba as an outside consultant.