Wing Kanemura

[Dylan Waco]

Discuss Here.

[Dylan Waco]

In real time he was my favorite garbage promotion worker. I have no clue how he would play in hindsight, but I always found him to be almost a cross between the pageantry and showmanship of Onita, and the go-go, big spot style of Masato Tanaka. When I was going through the ECW fancams I found a couple of matches involving him which I really enjoyed their, but I have not watched any of his prime Japanese work in a long time. I get the impression from talking to Loss that the promotion WING may be something of a gold mine of fun stuff, but I'm not sure how much of that is conjecture. Still this feels like a guy who deserves a thread, and he is someone I will try to watch some stuff from over the course of the Summer.

[Loss]

It's pretty much entirely conjecture at this point. But it's absolutely something I want to explore. In terms of that generation of death match workers, I think Kanemura's working style most closely resembles Onita's out of everyone in that crop. And of course you can't talk about him without talking about that Kevin Sullivan match in SMW. What intrigued me about W*ING was seeing that they had a few matches at Korakuen Hall playing off of the SMW match.

[El-P]

On 4/24/2015 at 9:47 AM, Dylan Waco said:

In real time he was my favorite garbage promotion worker. I have no clue how he would play in hindsight, but I always found him to be almost a cross between the pageantry and showmanship of Onita, and the go-go, big spot style of Masato Tanaka.

 

Pretty much. I loved Kanemura too. Oddly I never took the dive into WING, but I'm convinced he peaked in FMW around 97/98 anyway. Always a lot of fun to watch, although he could get on autopilot once he got really banged up. 

Got #Speakingouted years before the fact too

[El McKell]

Two comments from the discord that are not related.

[TheBean]

Kanemura is a great worker overall for a time and probably the best death match wrestler, when he wants to be.

• Headhunters vs Miguel Perez Jr. & Yukihiro (Wing) Kanemura ( W*ING 05/09/93): Barbwire Cage match. I was hyped that I found this. Perez Jr. is a guy that I've become a fan of through W*ING. This match was fantastic with everyone tasting the wire, guys going off the top rope & cage etc. The fact that it was a non escape match was a plus. May have had some clipping (a constant with W*ING & IWA) but nothing offensive. A great death match, heck a great match in general.
• Masato Tanaka, Kuroda & Koji Nakagawa vs W*ing Kanemura, Hido & Hosaka (FMW - Exploding Barbwire match - 09/01/96): Fourteen plus minutes of brutal, dramatic deathmatch wrestling. The fighting was top notch and the barbwire and bomb spots were extremely meaningful in terms of the drama. Seriously, this was one of the best FMW matches and the best deathmatches that I've seen. Classic match
• Hayabusa & Jinsei Shinzaki vs Mr. Gannosuke & W*ING Kanemura (March '98 Michinoku Pro): 13 minutes of a 19 minute match which is typical of M-pro commercial tapes to save a little off the front end. Picks up with agressive, violent heel work focused on destroying the Hakushi. Jinsei's bleeding bad, get the falcon man in dammit!! With his home fans rooting him on, he's able to tag in emerald outfitted Hayabusa. These guys know what they are doing- the crowd is rocking and the camera work is only enhancing the viewing experience. Highly recommend checking this out!

• Kintaro Kanemura vs. Ryuji Ito (08/24/03 BJW): Kanemura works so much better with Ito than Shadow WX. Ito can still move, wants to do pro wrestling and while Kanemura is broken down some, he's willing to meet the young guy in the middle. As a result we get a great, dare I say classic Cage Death Match. While it isn't in the upper echelon of cage matches, this is right below as it conveys the intensity, they use the cage as a weapon, they use their other weapons but at almost 15 minutes, this never overstayed it's welcome. They do a little bit of everything and it hits just in the right way. I think one of the near falls should have ended it but, nothing afterwards feels superfluous. They made it work and went back to "wrestling" at the end. And that's a good sign for BJW to come. If you're a hard-core/garbage wrestling fan, I Highly Recommend this one.

More recommendations to come down the road...