2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 22-24, PART ONE [EARLY 1994 - TAKAO OMORI, MISAWA/KOBASHI VS BABA/HANSEN, UWFi TOURNAMENT, CHAMPION CARNIVAL, TIMESLOT CUT]

[KinchStalker]

2019 FOUR PILLARS BIO: CHAPTERS 22-24, PART ONE

I have completed the second half of part three of The Rainbow over the Night, which covers the sixteen months from the start of 1994 through the 1995 Champion Carnival and concurrent Bridge of Dreams Tokyo Dome show held by Weekly Pro Wrestling, albeit through the discursive approach that has become characteristic of this book. This stretch hasn’t been as revealing as what came before, and much of the next two chapters are more about Weekly Pro than AJPW, but I can squeeze some stuff out of it.

First, though, I have been getting the author’s name wrong this whole time: he’s Hidetoshi Ichinose, not Ichise. I will go back and correct earlier posts. This covers the notable material from chapter 22.

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TAKAO OMORI AND THE 1994 ASUNARO CUP

 

Each 1990s iteration of the NYGS thus far had had a special gimmick: the Kobashi, Taue, and Akiyama trial series of 1990, 1991, and 1993, and the novel tag title contendership tournament of 1992. 1994 would continue this trend with the revived Asunaro Cup. Ichinose brings this up to segue into the topic of Takao Omori, who “made his blood run hot” at the afterparty of the first AJPW show of the year when he stated his intent to perform well in the tournament and get a good writeup in Weekly Pro. 

Omori was born in 1969, and got into wrestling through the Tiger Mask boom while in the sixth grade. Influenced by his older brother, Omori followed both AJPW and NJPW and became a “maniacal fan”. He recalls wrestling with his friends in junior high and practicing dropkicks in the concrete-floored hallways of his school. Omori entered the high school judo club, but decided to pursue gridiron football during his university years, as he wanted to enjoy campus life to an extent that he wouldn’t if he joined an athletic club, but figured that football was similar enough to pro wrestling. He played as a defensive end. During his junior year, the discussion of employment began amongst his peers.¹ The bubble economy was in its twilight, but it was still a seller’s market for the students. Omori was uncomfortable at how his classmates flocked to companies based on salary and name recognition, but he wanted to find a job to reassure his family. It was then that he saw an All Japan recruitment notice in an issue of Weekly Pro. AJPW and NJPW were the only options Omori considered (no UWF), so he sent an application. It was accepted, and Omori was invited to a Korakuen show in March 1991 to meet Baba. Omori was prepared to drop out in order to join immediately, but Baba discouraged this, as he wanted Omori to have an education to fall back on if his wrestling career failed. 

Omori would earn his degree, but would also gain a head start on wrestling conditioning. After leaving the football team, he enrolled in Animal Hamaguchi’s wrestling school for the last three months of his senior year. The dojo held classes on Satudays, taught by Shoichi Funaki (yes, *that* Funaki), but he would also spar with Hamaguchi and 20 to 30 other students. One of those was Shinjiro Ōtani, who had entered the school six months before Omori; it’s because of this that Omori still refers to him with the “san” honorific despite being three years his senior. Omori took the entrance exam in March 1992, one month after Akiyama announced his signing with AJPW. There had been 40-50 other people who had visited that 1991 Korakuen show after submitting their applications, but Omori recalls that every single one who went through with it alongside it ran away during their first night. His tenure at the Hamaguchi Gym had done little to prepare him for the demands of the training regiment, to say nothing of the culture shock of starting from the bottom of this hierarchy and performing chores, but Omori persisted. According to Kawada, by this time Baba had actually softened the training regimen to encourage trainees to stick with it; Ichinose writes that “it is easy to infer” that Baba had reformed the disciplinary component and the bullying which often arose. Nevertheless, the life of a trainee had been too much for many.

Plans to debut Omori alongside Akiyama at the 25th Anniversary Korakuen show on September 17, 1992 were scrapped for a conventional debut match on October 16, against fellow young wrestler Satoru Asako. In just his second tour, though, Omori would have his first match against a gaikokujin (a loss to Billy Black on November 29). The following year, Omori notched his first wins against Kurt Beyer (three in the New Year Giant Series tour), and even got fed to Danny Spivey in the first show of his fourth tour. Omori would “graduate” from the undercard in 1993, but this accelerated path produced a talent which had not matured. This was starkly shown in a singles match against Kawada on the second night of the 1993 Fan Appreciation Day event on September 23, in which Omori recalled that Kawada “rolled him around in the palm of his hand”.

Omori was hungry to prove himself in the Asunaro Cup, and his stating such at the 1994 kickoff show’s afterparty lit a fire under Ichinose. The revived tournament would be a round-robin (with a final) between the seven wrestlers who had debuted from 1989-1992: Akiyama, Asako, Tamon Honda, Ryukaza Izumida, Masao Inoue, Omori, and Richard Slinger. Omori placed second with eight points to Akiyama’s twelve, and so the two wrestled the final on January 29 in Korakuen, 22 days after having their first tournament match against each other in Kochi. Ichinose writes that, while Omori was defeated, the content of the match was different than the Kawada match had been, as Omori had demonstrated and conveyed his “awareness” of Akiyama. He was rewarded by chants of his name amongst the Korakuen crowd. Unfortunately, Omori was not so well received by Weekly Pro, as Masayuki Sato’s match report was critical and did not acknowledge Omori’s warm reception. Omori was also criticized by his peers, which by his own admission led him to develop a certain stubbornness. One example of this was his Baba-angering refusal to wear navel-covering long tights. Ichinose writes that it took a while for Omori to sublimate this character trait into his style of wrestling, and that if he had then he would have fulfilled expectations earlier.

A DREAM MATCH AND A DREAM TOURNAMENT

 

1994 saw AJPW increase its annual number of Budokan shows from six to seven, which meant that every tour except the first held a card in the venue. It was a testament to the prosperity of the promotion in the early 90s, particularly in the Tokyo market, but Ichinose writes that “there is no doubt” that this decision only increased the burden that the Four Pillars were forced to bear, what with the losses of main-eventers Terry Gordy and Jumbo Tsuruta and the lack of a new force to take their place.

The new Budokan show was the last show of the Excite Series, on March 5. Notably, this would see Akiyama & Omori team up against the Holy Demon Army in the antepenultimate match, but the “dream match” that made the show a sellout was a Misawa/Kobashi vs. Baba/Hansen rematch. Although he had figured in some NYGS main events that played off of it, Baba had hesitated to run this match again, as it had only happened in the first place when he filled in for Ted DiBiase. He acquiesced due to fan demand, and planted seeds with “mischevious” comments to reporters at the January 9 show. At the “secret saloon” meeting with Ichinose, however, Baba angrily shot down the reporter’s suggestion to put the tag titles on the line and have Baba win. He considered it an insult to the belts and to himself, as he had intended for his (untelevised) 1989 shot at the tag titles alongside Rusher Kimura against the Olympians to be his last main-event title match. (According to the February 14 Observer, it was stipulated that if Baba & Hansen won this match, they would earn a title shot.)

Something interesting happened before the tour was set to begin. On February 15, UWF International held a press conference inviting five wrestlers to a Pro Wrestling World Tournament for the prize of 100 million yen. The five were Masakatsu Funaki, Shinya Hashimoto, Akira Maeda, Mitsuharu Misawa, and Genichiro Tenryu. Obviously this was never, ever going to happen, but I think it’s worth covering the fallout from this conference straight for the historical record. Four days later, Misawa was surrounded by reporters at the start-of-the-tour Korakuen show, to whom he said he had already received the invite.

"In a word, it's a moot point. Even if a billion dollars or ten billion dollars were raised, what I’ve done for 13 years in All-Japan would fall apart if I participated. So how can a Mitsubishi employee work part-time at Mitsubishi? If you really wanted to make a reasonable proposal, you would have sent it to the president, not me. I'm Mitsuharu Misawa, a professional wrestler, but I'm also Misawa of All Japan. Takada is trying hard to get pro-wrestling recognized as a sport, isn't he? If you do this, people will think that wrestling is like that again. The fans may say they want to see it, but this is my answer... I wonder if UWF International wrote to me thinking I'd actually appear.”

Ichinose doesn’t say whether any of the other invitees called UWFi’s bluff so frankly, but all five declined the invitation by the March 10 deadline. The following day, UWFi director Yukimitsu Kando held another press conference, in which he remarked it was a pity that Misawa had not responded as a champion, but “in the manner of a businessman or civil servant”. Shigeo Miyato echoed this, saying something to the effect of “I don't think it's right for people who are usually covered in blood from fighting outside the ring or hitting each other with a chair to follow the rules of society only on such occasions.” Ichinose writes that this betrayed Miyato’s fundamental ignorance of what All Japan had become and revealed that they never could have gotten on the same page. The tournament never happened, and while RINGS did propose an interpromotional match, that never bore fruit either. Misawa’s comments made AJPW’s isolationist policy clear, and the possibility that they would participate in the Super J-Cup which actually did happen that April was a moot point.

CARNIVAL AND THE TIMESLOT CUT

 

Ichinose does not mention the story surrounding the 1994 Champion Carnival that has since widely circulated in Western circles: that is, that Misawa’s neck injury at the hands of Doug Furnas on March 21 was a work to write him out of the tournament, or at the very least exaggerated. In the section before he covers the Misawa/Furnas match—but after he ends the previous section by mentioning Misawa’s “unfortunate accident”—Ichinose happens to write about “the etiquette of an All Japan reporter”, as well as his his conservative approach to covering matches that become shoots (such as Maeda vs Andre and Jackie Sato vs Shinobu Kandori). He recollects an incident when, early in his career, he used “babyface” and “heel” in an interview with All Japan, only for Baba to ask what those terms meant. It could be interpreted as an implied admission for those in the know that something *did* happen, but that Ichinose does not wish to break kayfabe. As revelatory as his book has been, as far back as he has peeled the curtain, Ichinose is fundamentally an Apterist writer. Needless to say, he makes no mention of the claim (printed in the April 11 Observer) that Kawada had been booked to pin Misawa for the first time in a tournament match.

It was while the tournament was underway that the AJPW Relay television program was cut from an hour to thirty minutes, with the broadcast rights fee likewise slashed. The contemporaneous Observers made frequent note of the program’s ratings decline over the previous two years (while acknowledging that its viewership share was excellent considering its late-night timeslot), but Ichinose states that this was tied to an overall viewership decline for the network. The beginning of the Lost Decade had reduced the network’s sponsors, and the network’s most lucrative program, the Yomiuri Giants’ baseball games, had been hit hard. Executives considered cutting AJPW entirely, but according to the March 21 Observer, the promotion was eventually given the choice between a half-hour weekly show or a one-hour biweekly show. The change took effect for the April 2 episode.

A couple housekeeping notes on the Champion Carnival to close out this post. Kawada defeated Williams in the final match, which was the first Carnival final to be held in the Budokan. Despite going head-to-head with the Super J-Cup final in the Ryogoku Kokugikan, AJPW continued their Tokyo sellout streak. Six days earlier, Kobashi got his first pinfall over Hansen in a tournament match.

Spoiler

1. A bit of cultural context may be useful. Japanese companies hire college graduates in batches as they graduate, but these are presaged by informal employment offers which students typically seek in their junior year. (This early selection process didn’t really take hold until the wartime economy of the First World War, but it persisted afterwards. An employment agreement signed in 1929 attempted to curb this trend, but it was frequently broken even after the economy recovered, and by the occupation period this practice had become too ingrained to phase out. By the time the agreement was formally abolished in 1996, it was an obscure law.)