Jetlag

Thoughts on guys that received votes but weren't nominated Pt 3:

Oh no, Misawa fell off to be only #10. Tell it to the likes of Virus or Jim Breaks.

The problem is, how do you quantify someones charisma? How is Austin more charismatic than, say, Choshu, or Hashimoto, or Kandori, or Dusty Rhodes, or Dusty Rhodes, or Hacksaw Jim Duggan, or Chigusa Nagayo, or Inoki..? Yes, Misawa is the more stoic type, but I think the stoicness can be quite charismatic too, as evidenced by him regularily bringing Japanese audiences to a boil while hardly showing any emotion. Also, this list was supposed to center around in-ring work, and while charisma does factor in it shouldn't be the major deciding point.

I'd like to see what the Top 100 would look like if we only included ballots that included Yoshiaki Fujiwara.

I like Bull just fine, but her beating Chigusa seems kinda bullshit, given she has nowhere the resume of great matches that Chigusa has. Well, they are just one spot apart, so I guess it doesn't matter in this shotgun blast of a list.

I did not say she should not be in the Top 100 because of that. She should not be in the Top 100 because she's a terrible, repetitive, boring wrestler, and even the joshi superfans often don't find her that great. The last 10 years didn't really do anything to elevate her case, unlike others such as Meiko Satomura. Eddie was #12 last time, so he probably won't climb a ton, but I would still find it a bit strange if he did.

Toyota climbing 40 places compared to 2016. I'm not a fan of this. Feels like boomer-ish opinions got stronger, with this and other oddities like RVD climbing. Her thread hasn't had any activity in 5 years with people being mostly lukewarm. The most Toyota discourse i've seen on X is that supercut of her botches getting some traction.

It's amazing how Suzukis popularity has surged. Around 2010, I remember many being tired of his shit and considered his overly long singles matches a nightmare. The common take was that he was talented but tended to ruin matches with his buffoonery. The audience that got interested in NJPW after the resurgence with Okada seemingly can't get enough of his whacky antics, though.

If we're gonna include MMA fights as a basis for rating, Kazushi Sakuraba should be mandatory in everyones top 10 just for the time he tried to pull Royce Gracies pants off.

Roderick Strong feels very much like a Dean Malenko type of his time.

Thoughts on guys that received votes but weren't nominated - Part 2

I think maybe we should make a separate list for special cases like that.

Yeah, like the Kong match, and, uh... some brawls with Kandori and Ozaki? That Dream Rush tag? That Combat is also apart of? Combat has some pretty decent non-deathmatch work of her own. I'm not gonna say Tsuchiya is a superworker but she was a pretty effective heel and I've found her a lot better than many have given her credit for.

The curious thing about Megumi Kudo is that she gets all the praise and attention for those deathmatches, while her opponents Combat Toyoda and Shark Tsuchiya usually get none at all.

Some thoughts on wrestlers that received votes but weren't nominated:

Looking at some of the names people tried to vote for, yes I think the nominations were a good barrier. Also, if a person can't even make the effort to get a name nominated, what business do they have making a Top 100? It's supposed to be high effort and take several months of preparation.

The list feels like a collection of random names mostly so far. I am amazed Ultimo Dragon has barely moved an inch and RVD has even improved, while someone like Virus who actually added to his case in the last 10 years drops. Hirooki Goto almost a 100 places over Masahiro Chono after not even ranking at all in 2016? That IWGP title win sure did wonders for him. The #1 vote for Ultimo even mentions AEW. Without Ultimo Dragon, we wouldn't have AEW! Preach it.

He can still be contacted by email which is ( I think) the same as it always was.

Masanobu Kurisu ending up this high is kind of amazing for a cult hero who never really had an extended run of main events or anything safe for a minute in FMW in 1990.

Hasegawa, one of the guys behind Mutoha, is happy with Yasushi Satos ranking (making it above the likes of Gypsy Joe, Rusher Kimura and Jimmy Snuka) and wrote a little blog post: https://ameblo.jp/itako1818/entry-12965979197.html

The ranking of japanese indy talents such as Taro Yamada and Yuiga are garnering some happy reactions even among Japanese speakers:

My Top 100: 1. Shinya Hashimoto 2. El Hijo Del Santo 3. Terry Funk 4. Negro Casas 5. Takeshi Ono 6. Blue Panther 7. Yoshiaki Fujiwara 8. Yuki Ishikawa 9. Yasushi Sato 10. Command Bolshoi 11. Genichiro Tenryu 12. Mitsuharu Misawa 13. Stan Hansen 14. Virus 15. Jim Breaks 16. Antonio Inoki 17. Volk Han 18. Tarzan Goto 19. Dick Murdoch 20. Tatsumi Fujinami 21. Shinobu Kandori 22. El Dandy 23. Aja Kong 24. Toshiaki Kawada 25. Akira Hokuto 26. Riki Choshu 27. Akira Maeda 28. Kiyoshi Tamura 29. Akira Taue 30. Devil Masami 31. Tsuyoshi Kikuchi 32. Chigusa Nagayo 33. Rey Mysterio Jr. 34. Masanobu Fuchi 35. Osamu Nishimura 36. LA Park 37. Dynamite Kansai 38. Greg Valentine 39. Mariko Yoshida 40. Gilbert Leduc 41. Roddy Piper 42. Low Ki 43. Black Terry 44. Vader 45. El Satanico 46. Wahoo McDaniel 47. Sangre Chicana 48. Meiko Satomura 49. Yoshihiro Takayama 50. Pirata Morgan 51. Yoshinari Ogawa 52. Jun Akiyama 53. Daisuke Ikeda 54. GENTARO 55. Jaguar Yokota 56. Alexander Otsuka 57. La Fiera 58. Keita Yano 59. Naoki Sano 60. William Regal 61. Jumbo Tsuruta 62. Jerry Lawler 63. Franz van Buyten 64. Super Dragon 65. Bobby Eaton 66. Nick Bockwinkel 67. Steve Grey 68. Katsumi Usuda 69. Buddy Rose 70. Jushin Liger 71. Great Sasuke 72. Bret Hart 73. Kenta Kobashi 74. Tanomusaku Toba 75. Negro Navarro 76. Bill Dundee 77. Mayumi Ozaki 78. Finlay 79. Daniel Bryan 80. Jackie Sato 81. Koki Kitahara 82. Dick Togo 83. Masao Orihara 84. Toshiyo Yamada 85. Hiroshi Watanabe 86. Carlos Amano 87. Eddie Guerrero 88. Harley Saito 89. Ran YuYu 90. Kazunari Murakami 91. Carl Malenko 92. Ric Flair 93. Fugofugo Yumeji 94. Ricky Morton 95. Alan Sarjeant 96. Inca Peruano 97. Tajiri 98. Dump Matsumoto 99. Ricky Steamboat 100. Anton Tejero Of course, immediately after sending I noticed that I forgot to add Tamon Honda. Fortunately I was able to figure out how to resend it and add Tamon somewhere in the 70s-90s range.

Many people consider Aja Kong to be a #1 contender when it comes to the women, but Dynamite Kansai feels hardly mentioned. But, to be honest, I think the gap between them is smaller than most people think. Dynamite Kansai is a lot more than a heavy hitter. I love Aja to death, but often she did the same thing. Kansai was able to adapt to a variety of different opponents in different ways, all while dealing with her own health problems. I keep finding awesome performances from here throughout the 2000s, she's still a pretty great monster working against underdogs like Carlos Amano or Chikayo Nagashima, great as a standing tall babyface going at it in crazy brawls with Ozaki and her underlings. I also dig her use of the iron claw. She was able to have great matches as late as 2011 (vs Ran YuYu) and 2016 (vs Sonoko Kato). She was also already quite good in her earliest appearances that we have in the 80s. It all sums up to a really formidable career.

Along with Hikari Fukuoka, she's the JWP ace who should get more talk but doesn't for reasons that are mysterious to me. Her matches aren't that hard to find anymore, and she is the kind of wrestler that should appeal to modern audiences. She's basically a workrate queen, the kind of worker that will hit 10 german suplexes really fast and then a knee to the face for good measure before going into an exchange of complicated pin combos before leaping to the tope rope in an instant and hitting a missile dropkick, and that was just the middle portion of the match. But she's capable of bringing substance to a match in a way that makes her more interesting to watch than the likes of Kurt Angle. Even though that kind of breackneck style wrestling is her trademark she's also capable of doing interesting matwork and selling. I have this theory that she's just not gimmicky enough as she's a pretty stoic wrestler.

I'm still a big Katsumi Usuda fan. In the last 10 years I've been able to watch even more BattlARTS (thanks to all those brave uploaders) and pretty much every time I check him out I come out being impressed. He's the kind of guy who puts in the effort to make even throwaway midcard matches interesting. Consistency is his key card as he's basically been the same guy for his entire 15+ year career, he just got better and better to the point where in late 2000s he was carrying half-baked rookies like Yuta Yoshikawa to great matches and having amazing matches against the likes of Keita Yano and Yujiro Yamamoto. His one sin is that he keeps doing the same calf slicer/armbar reversal spot in so many of his matches. That said, there are many wrestlers widely considered great who have nowhere near the great match resume of Katsumi Usuda.