Tatsumi Fujinami

[William Bologna]

Tatsumi Fujinami (C/V3) VS (C) Kerry Von Erich '88.12.9 [IWGP & WCWA Double Heavyweight Championship Match]

We pick this up in progress. They spill outside and Kerry applies the dreaded face claw. I'm surprised at how downright Abdullish he was acting here - he even bit Fujinami's forehead. The bell rings, but I guess they both want to keep going so the ref lets them.

After some regular wrestling, Kerry claws Fujinami to the outside, and then they really start brawling. Von Erich misses a chairshot, but Fujinami doesn't. I've never seen him act this violent, actually. He hits Kerry repeatedly with the chair, leaving him clinging to the ring apron with blood pouring down his face. When another Von Erich (I don't know these guys - he looked like Tony Hawk) rolled him back into the ring, Fujinami commences to stomping the head wound until the ref pulls him off.

Both the ref and Tony Hawk Von Erich try to stop Fujinami from kicking the bleeding man in the head, but Fujinami will not relent. What has gotten into him? Finally the ref calls it, and Fujinami is briefly the WCWA Heavyweight Champion (he gave it back, I guess after his berserker rage subsided and he realized what he'd done).

This was really something, and I want to thank @paul sosnowski for the tip. I would have liked to have seen the whole match - did they gradually build to all this violence or was it on from the get-go? The former could have made this really great.

It's so odd. I've repeatedly criticized Fujinami for not bringing intensity when the situation calls for it, but here was gleefully getting Kerry Von Erich's blood all over the bottom of his boot. I guess those face claws really pissed him off.

[William Bologna]

Tatsumi Fujinami (C/V7) VS Jerry Lawler '89.3.16 [IWGP Heavyweight Championship Match]

Lawler, in full royal regalia and bearing the USWA title, really underlines the incoherence of New Japan Pro Wrestling's rules. He throws punches. Lots and lots of them. Regular standing punches, punches off the top rope, punches from every position. And nearly every single time he does it, the ref admonishes him. What's the point? We all know Lawler's not getting disqualified for this. He even makes a face to that effect - "Can you believe this guy?"

I haven't seen much of Lawler's work, but here he reveals himself to be a regular Tennessee Tenryu: lots of punches, big personality, and a certain awkwardness when he tries anything that isn't punching. He seems to be making some of these moves up as he does them. He, like, drapes Fujinami's back across his back and drops to his knees. I'm not describing it well, but I don't know who could.

Fujinami spends much of the match outwrestling Lawler but being outpunched. The coolest transition comes when Lawler tries a fist drop from the top, but Fujinami catches his fist, which is goofy as hell, and then Lawler makes this amazing cartoon face to demonstrate how discombobulated he is at this development.

Fujinami then proceeds to Lawler it up in the sense that he's all awkward all of a sudden. He puts on a figure four like it's his first time, and he gets the pin on a less than smooth vertical suplex rollthrough.

It was fun to see Lawler in this context. The fans didn't seem to know who he was or think that he could win, which took away from things a bit.

[William Bologna]

1986 Other matches July 25, 1986 Akita prefectural gymnasium IWGP Tag Championship Tatsumi Fujinami＆Kengo Kimura VS Kendo Nakazaki＆Mr.Pogo

KY Wakamatsu is here, complete with Mr. Pogo-style face paint. He never tried to look like a Strong Machine.

Kimura spends a lot of time getting beaten on. They double-team him, beat him up outside, exploit his bandaged flank. Lots of teased tags - they even do the thing where Fujinami gets tagged in and starts kicking ass (nearly literally), but the ref didn't see it and cuts him off. Then they do it again! It's really strange how much time Fujinami spends remonstrating with the ref. Pogo and Nagasaki are secondary opponents - the referee is the real enemy.

This is pretty corny, but it's also effective. The crowd is going nuts throughout, and the Akita Prefectural Gymnasium is filled with "Kengo!" chants.

Fujinami finally gets in, but we eventually return to our main event of Fujinami vs. Ref as the villains resort to choking Kimura with wrist tape. The ref ignores it and again pushes Fujinami back into his corner when he tries to do something about it. What's going on here, ref? Did Wakamatsu get to you? I mean, Nagasaki is choking Kimura with a foreign object in the middle of the ring, and you're pretending you can't see it even as everyone is pointing it out to you. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Things wind up getting really out of hand. Fujinami piledrives one of them onto a chair. Wakamatsu gets in there and winds up getting whipped into Pogo. It'd bedlam until Fujinami pins Pogo after a clothesline.

This match was a lot of fun and a good example of getting the most out of what you have. Nagasaki and Pogo aren't any good - they look like old men, Nagasaki likes rest holds, and Pogo throws the worst clothesline I've ever seen. I can't imagine they were perceived at having much of a chance to win the titles. But they get the crowd involved by working a different kind of match and adding a subplot about an incompetent referee.

[William Bologna]

New Year Professional Wrestling Special Dec 29, 1980 Madison Square Garden Tatsumi Fujinami ＶＳ Don Diamond

We're getting to the end of this thing. All that's left is stuff from the beginning and the end, so now we travel back to 1980 to see young Fujinami back when he used to go to New York all the time to defend his WWF Junior Heavyweight title.

Howard Finkel gets us started by introducing "Bad News" Allen Coage - he gets the full real name plus nickname. I don't know what he's doing there, but he points at Fujinami, who almost hits him.

We then get ten minutes of gentlemanly grappling. Two handshakes, a lot of rolling around, some head-scissors and a lot of arm drags. Fujinami wins abruptly with a German suplex.

The match has Japanese commentary. It's too bad - I was looking forward to Vince telling us what a scientific matchup this was dozen times and saying "look at this!" every time they did a move he didn't know.

This was fine, but it didn't really do anything for me. Neither man showed any personality. Most of what they did looked fine, and they did a lot for it being 1980, but they could have switched places and it wouldn't have made any difference.

I was able to find very little about Don Diamond, who wrestled for five years and then disappeared. He's kept a low enough profile that you start getting DDP and a guy from F-Troop on the second page of Google results.

[William Bologna]

Brady Fight Series August 30, New York, USA Madison Square Garden 1982 WWF International Heavy Gino Brito vs. Tatsumi Fujinami

I don't know what "Brady Fight Series" means. Brito is the WWF International Heavyweight Champion, a title represented by a belt made of cardboard and tinfoil. It looks like the first backyarder title.

We get a lot of armbars and shtick, and I guess I wasn't in the mood. The idea is that Brito keeps trying to punch Fujinami, which is against the rules. Deliberations over this last for 12 minutes until Fujinami wins, setting the stage for him and Choshu to fight over this hideous belt 138 times over the course of the early 1980s.

I was bored for all of this. The Diamond match was all about workrate, and it was OK. This was about Brito heeling and stooging, and I wasn't going for it. The guy's apparently some kind of strongarm loanshark in real life, so he was playing against type here.

In both cases, Fujinami gets a huge pop when he wins. Were they sweetening the audio, or was he really over in MSG? I could see the crowd being won over in the Diamond match - they worked really hard, and it was probably a breath of fresh air to a crowd accustomed to various Strongbows, but I don't see this one making any new fans.

[William Bologna]

POWER HALL 2019 -New Journey Begins- June 29,2019 Tokyo・Korakuen Hall THE FINAL RHAPSODY Riki Choshu & Shiro Koshinaka & Tomohiro Ishii vs. Tatsumi Fujinami & Keiji Muto & Togi Makabe

Isn't this a pleasant stroll down memory lane? Aside from the two youngsters (both in their 40s), we've got Muto, who's popped up three or four times in this thread (he was pretending to be a demon from hell one of those times, but it still counts). Koshinaka's had a few appearances. And of course Riki Choshu holds the unbreakable record for most times wrestling Tatsumi Fujinami.

Fun fact: Riki Choshu has been in nearly as many Fujinami matches as Fujinami himself!

It's a retirement match full of grandpas, so I wasn't expecting much. Everyone looks pretty good, actually. Choshu's in pretty good shape, and his lariats don't look any worse than they ever did. Muto can only move in short bursts, but he looks fine when he does.

Fujinami does almost nothing, which makes me wonder if he's not in as good shape as he looks. We have at least two more of these geriatric spectacles ahead of us, so I guess we'll see if he's got anything left.

So obviously this wasn't any good, and it ends after Makabe knee drops Choshu four times. So long, Riki! I'll always remember that time you pinned Fujinami clean in the middle ring. If I recall correctly, it's the only time anyone did that to anyone in New Japan throughout the entirety of the 1980s.

[William Bologna]

The Destroyer Memorial Night Nov 15,2019 Tokyo・Ota City General Gymnasium 2ND MATCH Shiro Koshinaka & Jun Akiyama & Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Hiroyoshi Tenzan & Satoshi Kojima & Hiro Saito

Fujinami got old. It was bound to happen, I suppose.

Here he is heeled upon at the start and comes in for the finish, but he spends most of this holding the tag rope and watching Akiyama have a house show match with Tenzan and Kojima. Our man is still muscley as all hell, but his movements lack any fluidity. Koshinaka still looked OK, at least.

So this was kind of a downer. Ashes to ashes.

[William Bologna]

JYUSHIN THUNDER LIGER RETIREMENT MATCH Ⅰ Jyushin Thunder Liger & Tatsumi Fujinami & The Great Sasuke & Tiger Mask vs. Naoki Sano & Shinjiro Otani & Tatsuhito Takaiwa & Ryusuke Taguchi

Fujinami's really slumming it here. In the previous old man exhibition matches, he was surrounded by fellow champions. Here he tags in Great Sasuke for what I'm guessing was the first time in his career.

It's also a lot better than the other ones. A lot of these guys can still go, but sadly Fujinami isn't one of them. He comes in, does a couple dragon screws, and then nearly fails to apply a dragon sleeper. That's about it.

The other guys pick up the slack. Otani's great, especially when he boots Sasuke in the face while doing his boot-scraping bit to Liger. Sasuke tries to kill himself with a top rope flip to nowhere. Sano stiffs Tiger Mask with a spin kick, and Takaiwa crushes him with a to rope elbow drop. Tiger Mask is used the best way possible: Getting stiffed and crushed.

Two more matches to go, and then we can put this thing to bed.

[William Bologna]

Tatsumi Fujinami, Mitsuya Nagai & LEONA vs Shiro Koshinaka, Akitoshi Saito & Taniguchi (NOAH 10/1/17)

Welcome to Pro Wrestling NOAH's Great Nepotism Voyage in Yokahama. On this card, we have:

1. Two modern Von Erichs
2. Razor Ramon's extremely tall son
3. WWE Hall of Famer Tatsumi Fujinami teaming with bizarrely-named son, LEONA

I don't know why Fujinami named his child after disgraced American hotelier Leona Helmsley. Maybe the kid's mother insisted. Whatever the case, here he is playing the paint-by-numbers young lion role that you can see three or four times on an average New Japan card.

What little you hear about Fujinamito makes him sound like the poor man's Daichi Hashimoto, so I wasn't expecting much. He comes off fine, though. He doesn't look like much - he resembles his father neither in face nor physique - but he throws some good elbows and a couple mean-looking dropkicks.

His father, meanwhile, has settled into a pattern. He gets in a multi-man tag and doesn't do anything until he comes in, dragon screws two guys, and puts on a dragon sleeper. He does it every time, and it's usually all he does.

The rest of the crew works around the legend, and this winds up being a fun match. Shiro Koshinaka turned out to be one hell of an old man wrestler. He's been solid in every one of these geriatric showcases, which I guess is why he's usually in them.

[William Bologna]

'84 Bloody Fight Series August 24, 1984 Korakuen Hall Tatsumi Fujinami & Seiji Sakaguchi vs. Roger Smith & Duke Myers

I almost missed this one thanks to NJPW World's shoddy metadata - there is not a Fujinami tag on this match. I was poking around the bottom of the tags list to see who had one match on the service and happened to click on Roger Smith.

I don't know anything about either one of these guys. They have a look to them, though. A look that says, "These men have been yelled at by both Ole Anderson and Jim Cornette. There are certain counties they avoid entering. Best practice is not to give them their twenty dollar payoff until after the match because they might run off."

They're great! A lot of their offense revolves around combinations of headlocks and punches, and they make it work because their punches are superb. They act as sleazy as they look - Smith gets frustrated and punches Fujinami in the dick, and then atomic drops him for further dick damage. He presses his advantage with a feet-on-the-rope pin attempt.

Fujinami wins with a backslide, and what a fun note to go out on. Our boy won the last match. He almost screwed up the finish but didn't quite. We're back in 1984, and everything's better. People throw great punches, and Fujinami isn't a decrepit wreck.

So that's it. The last of . . . what, 120 matches? I wasn't counting. It only took a couple years.

I'll have some closing thoughts in a bit.

[William Bologna]

Lists!

Top Five Tatsumi Fujinami Matches That I Watched for This Thing:

5. Tatsumi Fujinami vs Riki Choshu 4/3/1983 - This was the one with the clean finish. They always worked well together, and I really liked two of their million matches (this and the one where Choshu won via countout). Choshu did not win me over in this project, though. He's a dude where you overlook the actual work because he's got presence, and I just didn't find his presence compelling. He's no Tenryu. Also he and Fujinami should never have teamed. It just looked wrong.

4. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Vader 4/24/1989 - Fujinami thrived against wrestlers who weren't like him. Vader was a great opponent for him because he was a big spherical American monster, and because he could stiff the hell out of Fujinami. None of the Vader stuff was bad - Fujinami was just too good at guiding him through matches - but this is where he had it all figured out.

 3. Antonio Inoki, Tatsumi Fujinami, Kengo Kimura, Umansoke Ueda, Kantaro Hoshino vs. Akira Maeda, Yoshiaki Fujiwara, Osamu Kido, Nobuhiko Takada, Kazuo Yamazaki 3/26/1986 - The UWF invasion is best thing that happened to this project and one of the best things ever in wrestling. This was just great, but I almost feel like I should take points off because it's so easy to be great in this context. One of the things I liked about it is how it underlined the strength of the bench. Kimura was a hell of a worker, but you never hear anyone talk about him. I had literally never heard of Hoshino in my life, but he steals the show. Kido was one of my favorite guys throughout this thing - he never looked less than great. 

2. Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Yoshiaki Fujiwara/Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Akira Maeda  5/1/1986 - These were part of the same 5 on 5 elimination match, so I'm putting them together. While watching all these 80s matches, I had my suspicions confirmed about a few guys I'd read about but hadn't watched. I figured I wouldn't like Bruiser Brody, and I didn't. I figured I'd like Dick Murdoch, and holy crap that guy is awesome. I'd heard a lot about Fujiwara as a dark horse best wrestler ever, and his performances did not argue against it. He and Fujinami had a tiny masterpiece here. It was bloody and intense and it made perfect sense, setting Fujinami up to get kicked into Hell by Maeda without making him look weak. Maeda doesn't have a lot going on except for kicks that he absolutely cannot control, but it turns out that you can get a lot out of that attribute, including two of Fujinami's better matches. Fujinami's the best wrestler in the world when he's getting hit hard.

1. Tatsumi Fujinami vs Dynamite Kid 2/5/1980 - Speaking of which! It bears repeating: Fujinami seems kind of mild-mannered, and he doesn't bring the intensity you want unless someone is forcing it out of him by cheating or being really large or stiffing him. Dynamite Kid is a bad guy - that's a shoot - but he doesn't cheat. He's just a dick. The beating he lays on Fujinami won't be matched until Hashimoto gets a hold of him, and it doesn't help that Fujinami comes into the match with a bandage on his head. That's just a bullseye to Dynamite. So you've got a compelling dynamic, flawless work, blood everywhere, and a beautiful finish.

[William Bologna]

Five Worst Wrestlers:

5. Masahiro Chono - His first match, when he challenged for the title in 1991, was really good. But the rest of the 90s were a dispiriting slog, and Chono was in a lot of those matches doing absolutely nothing. Yeah, he got injured, but who didn't?

4. Bam Bam Bigelow - He had two matches against Fujinami. In the first one he fell off the top rope and lost, so of course he got a title shot. He worked light as a feather and lost. This poor bastard teamed with Vader, who looked just like him but was way better? That's like having Bruiser Brody and John Nord team up - obviously, Bigelow and Brody are going to look terrible.

3. Bob Backlund - How in the hell did this weirdo ever headline anywhere? He's possessed of an intense anti-charisma. You want to look away from him.

2. Roland Bock - Bock's untrained and awkward moves could have been really effective if he'd been at all interested in what was going on, but his sad sack demeanor ensured it didn't work. His match (Inoki/Fujinami vs. Bock/Hansen) was a fascinating example of a wrestler trying to carry a teammate rather than an opponent. Hansen tried his damndest to get Bock through the match, but even Stan is capable of only so much.

1. El Solitario - Seriously, the dude looked like Jerry Lewis in a mask. Absolutely the most puzzling, most incompetent opponent Fujinami ever had.

[William Bologna]

Final Thoughts: 

I have watched more Fujinami than any other wrestler by now (I don't think it's even close), but he still feels like an afterthought. I'm going to be pretentious and quote Borges:

“The Quixote,” clarifies Menard, “interests me deeply, but it does not seem— how shall I say it?—inevitable. I cannot imagine the universe without Edgar Allan Poe’s exclamation: Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted! or without the Bateau ivre or the Ancient Mariner, but I am quite capable of imagining it without the Quixote."

I cannot imagine the universe without Inoki or Choshu or Tenryu, but I can imagine it without Fujinami. I chalk this up to two things:

1. Booking. He was simply overshadowed by Inoki and Choshu. He was the champion six times, but was he ever actually the top guy? NJPW World doesn't give you a good sense of title reigns, but you never get the sense that Fujinami was doing anything but barely holding on. I watched him lose two non-title matches while he was champion - that never happened to Misawa. He won with rollups rather than ruining people with dragon suplexes. His penultimate reign was a fluke - Hashimoto beat the everloving hell out of him but got rolled up. He won it back in six minutes.

2. Work. He just didn't carry himself like a top guy. We all enjoyed the old days when he was the junior heavyweight ace. He got to have hot matches and do cool moves and show a little bit of fighting spirit. But when he moves up and he's standing next to Inoki, you just forget about him. 

As good as he was, I do not count Fujinami among the all-time greats. Consider:

Like any member of the solar system other than the sun, he needs an external source of heat.

• He's at his best when the other guy is being vicious. Dynamite, Tenryu, Murdoch, Hashimoto - hit him in the face and you get something to work with.
• Blood helps. I don't know when New Japan stopped blading regularly, but it really hurt Fujinami's work. That first bunch of matches have blood all over the place, and as barbaric as it is, it is a good substitute for personality.
• Cheating helps. Fujinami comes off as a straight-shooter, so when Jose Estrada or Roger Smith bend the rules you get some virtuous anger.
• He'll get fired up against outsiders. Hence the UWF feud being the high point of his career, and the WAR and Heisei Ishingun issues producing some good stuff as well.

And these aren't guarantees. There's a Choshu match where he gets so mad that he gets himself disqualified, but it's just not in him to act that angry. Flair gave him chance after chance to do bigtime babyface stuff, but it's not part of his repertoire. 

There are some technical problems - he really does screw up a lot of finishes, and it's not something he grows out of. He's doing it in the 80s, and he messes up the rollup with Hashimoto in 1994. His dropkicks have at least a 33% chance of whiffing. He's better than most people, but his case rests on work because his character is lacking, so any ding to his work is pretty damaging.

He got hurt in 1989 and was out for a year. It's funny - I couldn't point to anything in particular that he couldn't do when he came back, but the matches just got lousy. I think it's a general loss of explosiveness. He used to run the ropes so damn fast, and in the 90s he usually seems to be coasting.

So that's Fujinami. He's not perfect, but he did a lot good stuff, and no one ever looked better running the ropes.

[Frankensteiner]

Did Fujinami ever work heel/subtle heel in any match? Nothing comes to mind for me. There's matches where he's overly aggressive (e.g. against Kerry mentioned here before) but that's not really working heel.

[NintendoLogic]

I recall him being somewhat heelish in his tag match with Iizuka against the Steiners in WCW, but that's all that comes to mind off the top of my head.

[William Bologna]

The only thing I can think of is a singles match against Kengo Kimura where he jumps Kimura when his back is turned and whines to the ref about Kengo using closed fists, which he wasn't. He's kind of a jerk in that one.

I looked around to see if he played the bad guy during a guest spot in another promotion, but no dice. I dug up a WAR match from 1993 - Fujinami/Hase vs. Tenryu/Ishikawa - where Hase tries to get some heat going, but Fujinami was a perfect gentleman. He gets some boos when he breaks up a pin, but that's it. He even yells something into the mic after the match, but that only gets him respectful applause.