Primordial IWE Matches To Turn You Into Dust

                       (Written by jom)

     I have been on the planet Earth for a reasonable number of years now. These matches precede me by over double my age. It is baffling to me how much of this is in reasonably high quality, and I keep catching myself staring in amazement at the crispness of the Strong Kobayashi hammer fists. I just don't feel like we were meant to be able to see Rusher Kimura's early bloodletting spectacles in higher quality than the later ones. There has been some grave error in the fabric of the universe, and we can only use it to our own benefit. I ain't complaining though. Old ass IWE makes me happy :). 

Asataro Sano vs. Sankichi Fuji (10/29/1969)

     The very first IWE match on tape. It'll always be weird seeing matches from the 60s, especially from Japan. It's almost even more shocking that we have this match specifically, considering how few IWE young boy matches we have. We don't have a single bit of Masahiko Takasugi, Kodo Fuyuki, or Apollo Sugawara, but we somehow have an Asataro Sano match. Sano would be gone from the business by 1971, while Fuji would leave IWE for a life of working in the states, only returning years later for a short tour as Yasu Fuji (where he would have one of the promotion's best cage matches ever). Just by virtue of how fascinating this match is as a historical relic, it's worth checking out. The action itself is just about fine, though. Everything is weirdly stagnant and the progression of the match feels stilted but that comes more from the time period than anything else. Asataro Sano knows three moves and can't bring himself to string those moves together in any varying ways, but his dropkick is cool and he throws punches to the gut. Fuji is actually a very solid heel for someone so early into their career, catching Sano with punches to the jaw in headlocks and sticking his thumb in Sano's throat when the ref isn't looking. He also randomly hits a bodyslam on the floor which gets zero pop from the crowd but a big pop from me. I can't say this is anything more than perfectly fine when it comes to the in-ring stuff, but it's definitely something I think people should watch, just to see how much wrestling has changed in the last 50+ years.

Rusher Kimura vs. Billy Robinson (06/03/1974)

    Strong chance this is the biggest footage tragedy in IWE history. Bigger than Wahoo/Kusatsu, bigger than any of the other 8mm film I've seen so far. Arguably, the only one of greater magnitude is the original IWE cage match of Rusher vs. Dr. Death, and that one feels like less of a tragedy and more of an inevitability considering the circumstances around the match's broadcast. We have a little over a third of this match, and no audio at that, and even with so much missing I think there's a high likelihood that this is one of IWE's greatest matches ever. Kimura is a hammer and Robinson is a scalpel, and those two truths come to define the match. Both men get a chance to show how well rounded they are early on, with Kimura doing some great wristlock work on Robinson in the early portions and Robinson responding with nasty elbows and uppercuts, but the idea becomes set about halfway in that Rusher has Robinson entirely beat in a standing strike battle, and Robinson is forced to use all of his brain to avoid getting caught in a Rusher onslaught. I've never seen a wrestler so willing to block like Robinson. Especially nowadays when guys are totally fine with eating a strike to respond back with their own, Robinson stands out for how hard he tries to not get hit. When blocking isn't viable, he tries to eat Rusher alive with unrelenting strike combos, and that strategy is proved to be a double-edged sword when Rusher eats it all and tsuppari strike's him to hell. This is a battle of masters, two of the very best deep within their zones, and it delivers on all fronts. If we ever get the full version of this (which I have to assume doesn't exist anymore), I'm sure it'll stand out as a top 5er at the very least. It's able to land in the upper echelon just as it is now.

Rusher Kimura & Mighty Inoue vs. Danny Lynch & Butcher Lynch (01/06/1975)

    So, the Lynch Brothers (no relation to Jeff or David). Two of the strangest looking fellas I've never seen anyone talk about before. As far as I can tell, both of them come from the UK, which means their hobbit-like frame at least makes a little more sense. They look like the middle form in the Pokemon evolution chain going from Trashman to King Kong Bundy. They also work as oddly as they look: Danny does kung fu strikes while making Donald Duck noises, and Butcher goes for pure Britwres handstands and headscissors. They feel more like Saturday morning cartoon characters than gritty pro wrestlers, which makes the match in question feel even more surreal. This is the first Kimura bloodbath I've ever seen where Rusher isn't the heaviest bleeder; Danny Lynch gets some of the gnarliest juice in IWE history and spends half the match sporting a crimson mask. His blood is so coagulated too, splattering around the ring like Nickelodeon slime, especially during the points where Kimura literally stomps the blood out of his head. Kimura is pretty ruthless all around, chopping at the wound and even throwing a low blow at one point. Maybe he didn't appreciate Danny's attempt at Shaolin style martial arts, or maybe he just doesn't like people that look so round. Mighty Inoue falls more in line with the wacky fun that the Lynch Brothers imply with their inherent goofiness, mostly pulling off cool counters like one of the best back body drops I've ever seen, but he also gets in with the grittiness when he does a 1975 chair shot to one of the brothers and chokes the other with a cable on the outside. It's all such a bizarrely compelling affair, like turning on Wacky Races only to watch Dick Dastardly get waterboarded halfway into the episode. Definitely worth checking out to witness the passion of the Lynch Brothers. Also Rusher Kimura goes uber rage mode following the fuck finish and brutalizes referee Osamu Abe and booker Isao Yoshihara, so that's awesome.

Animal Hamaguchi vs. Mighty Inoue (09/26/1973)

    Absolute blast right here. This is spiritually much closer to the types of young boy matches you would see today compared to the Fuji/Sano match, albeit neither of these men are actually rookies. Hamaguchi and Inoue give Korakuen Hall a wonderful lightning-quick technical match, one full of techniques mostly foreign to the scene at this point. It's an amazing showcase of how talented both men are at this kind of relentless workrate action, and it's a great preview of not only their future work, but also the future of wrestling in Japan in general. I'd go so far as to say that this is the closest 1970s IWE ever got to hosting a spotfest, albeit the kind of spotfest is very different from the ones happening in the decades to come. I think the biggest boon of this match is just how good both men are at integrating struggle into their work. The execution is absolutely flawless, but the picture-perfect motions never sacrifice the realism of the work. Hamaguchi and Inoue fight over arm drags and cravates and every other hold they put each other through, all while finding more intricate ways to go about putting themselves into winning positions. This is supreme pro wrestling, and definitely stands out among the IWE crowd. It's a total heartbreaker that this would be the last time these two would face off in any capacity on tape until the Ishin Gundan invasion of AJPW in the mid-80s. This is a singles pairing that could've rocked the world.

Strong Kobayashi vs. Rusher Kimura (07/09/1973)

    The one. IWE's new ace versus the man who will become the true ace only a few years later. This is the first native-only title match in Japan in over a decade, and it has that big fight feel in droves. The crowd is super amped up before the bell even rings, and Kobayashi and Kimura know exactly how to play into that, crafting one of the better slow and deliberate title matches of the era. Similar to the Robinson match discussed earlier, this plays out partially as a striker against grappler sort of deal, with most of Kimura's big comeback moments coming from his nasty chops and Kobayashi taking back control with some of his best grappling I've yet seen. A lot of it is both creative and brutal, from the leg crucifix where he kept trying to squash Kimura's head like a grape to the body scissors with tailbone-shattering slams. It's certainly not the most exciting work at some points, but for most of the match, it's just active enough to keep you locked in. Kimura also does a great job of fighting out of the holds, mostly through chopping Kobayashi to hell while on the ground. The more energized moments of the match feel like great payoffs as well, especially the all-out brawl near the end of the first fall which I've posted to Twitter at least twice now. I think that the third fall would probably be the fork in the road for most people, as everything up to that point is pretty great, and the way they approach finishing the match either cements the match's status as great or knocks it down a peg depending on personal preference. For me, I think it's a fitting end to one of the most important title matches in IWE history, even if I also think there's a better version of the finish out there in another timeline. Regardless, this is more great stuff, maybe not either man's best work but something worth mentioning when discussing both men's strongest assortment of matches.