(Written by jom)
06/29) Sanshiro Takagi vs. MIKAMI
MIKAMI's heel run after coming back from his IWA PR tour didn't last very long. I suppose he had the "too cool" issue (he was just too easy to root for), along with probably ten other reasons for why he turned face only a few months into his return. Since then, he's had a handful of individual heel performances, but he's never gone on a prolonged heel run. That makes this match almost heartbreaking because heel MIKAMI is something else. MIKAMI goes beyond the usual cockiness and bravado into a much crueler sort of work, full of little potshots and scrapes while cranking the heat up to eleven for all of his usual spots. He's still the athletic freak of nature he was before, but all of his athletic feats feel so much more pointed, more focused on hurting than wowing. He's also not afraid to throw punches, ranging from his fantastic worked ones to some jarring shoot ones, and his picks apart Takagi with big bombs like his horrifying swan dive dropkick to Takagi's knee. Takagi is always pretty solid on the back foot, and his comebacks land really well, especially thanks to MIKAMI's willingness to bump like a maniac and cry to high heaven while in Takagi's holds. It comes together to allow the two to work some really great sequences and have a natural back-and-forth flow while never losing the plot of MIKAMI being the biggest son of a bitch alive. Considering the roughness of some patches, the somewhat abrupt finish, and the unfortunate clipping, I wouldn't really call this a great match, but it has most of the elements of one, along with one of MIKAMI's sleeper greatest performances ever. I hope I one day get to peek into the alternate universe where MIKAMI's heel run lasted much longer.
07/06) Yuki Nishino vs. Naoshi Sano
Power violence squash match. Naoshi Sano comes out in the world's largest t-shirt and hits some poses. Nishino comes out dressed like Tazz, complete with black towel and being very short. Sano gets a hot start going with a full-force dropkick and a bunch of hard chops, and then Nishino hits a single chop harder than any of Sano's and everything goes to hell for our favorite lovable loser. Yuki Nishino is a crowbar with a mean streak and Sano is just a bump in the road for him. Sano's beating is so scary that I almost considered changing the article's title to "The Eternal Suffering of Naoshi Sano". Nishino revels in violence and comes at Sano like a rabid dog. Nishino throws headbutts like he's trying to chase down his opponent, to keep them from escaping the CTE like some kind of pussy. Nishino throws lariats like he's trying to break their nose. Yuki Nishino is a demon. Another name for the "they don't make wrestlers like this anymore (and maybe that's a good thing)" file.
Poison Sawada Black vs. Mitsunobu Kikuzawa
I have no idea why Sawada is "Poison Sawada Black" here. It's clearly a transitional phase between regular Sawada and JULIE, but it mostly consists of him having weird paint on his eyes. This match entirely exists for Kikuzawa's manager to get into heel manager shenanigans and accidentally win the Ironman Heavymetalweight belt off of Kikuzawa. The wrestling that comes before and after this is just fine. Kikuzawa has a great dropkick and Sawada does a cool rear naked choke spot, but absolutely none of it matters and the crowd does not care. Kikuzawa does an Onita-style promo after the match because who's gonna stop him.
Showa vs. MIKAMI
We love Phantom Funakoshi, don't we folks? Here he is as SHOWA, a masked gimmick that let him crank the showa-era wrestling tributes up to eleven, so I have to assume it's his dream come true. And this is a great match! It's got a couple moving parts to it, and both guys are so talented at everything that each story to the match is told excellently. A lot of this match's early portion is focused on grappling, with both guys making good movements on the mat and getting to show their stuff while being entirely in character. Showa pulls out some big time old school holds like the bow & arrow, and MIKAMI counters with face claws out of headlocks and double boot rakes. All the bigger spots, from both men's dropkicks to the late-stage bombs, feel so well-built considering the early match work, and they usually come swiftly and naturally. In a way, this feels like the kind of thing Mumeijuku would put on years later, with more of a 2000s juniors tinge to it. MIKAMI is also the coolest wrestler ever and his bombs are incredible. I don't mean to ramble on about how cool he is after already slightly doing that in the previously discussed Takagi match, but man, he's just so cool. Nobody has ever hit sentons like MIKAMI. The match's bullshit finish is very out of nowhere but fits the general vibes of the match itself, and it's a really fun way to wrap up such a good little match. Definitely one worth going out of your way to check out.
Sanshiro Takagi & Exciting Yoshida vs. Koichiro Kimura & Thanomsak Toba
This era of DDT, as discussed before on the blog, was weirdly reliable when it came to running bizarre hybrid shoot-style tags. The mix of WARist crowbars and martial arts expats led to a good handful of out-of-this-world brawls where guys flew at each other from across the ring to punch each other in the face. Sanshiro Takagi is decidedly not part of the usual crowd for these, but some sort of demon unlocks from his heart when put in the ring against Toba (probably caused by Toba getting up too early after the match-starting People's Stone Cold Forearm), and it turns this match into a highlight of the genre. Takagi's willingness to throw down is something to behold, throwing chops as hard as he possibly can and chucking out teep kicks to Toba's ribs every time Toba starts getting a little too hot at the wheel. Toba, of course, sells everything like death, ragdolling and bending his own body in weird ways in response to being yanked around. He also never calms down and turns every one punch into five punches because nobody else can combo like him. Kimura and Yoshida play second fiddle to both of their tag partners, but they each get extensive time to prove their worth, from Kimura's relentless soccer kicking and shoulder-dislocating crossface, to Yoshida's Hamaguchi tribute act and unhinged no-hands headbutts. Would I place this right beside the very best of the DDT shoot tags? Not exactly, but it's probably only a notch or two below the Ishii/Rider vs. Toba/Sasaki's of the world. Who knew Takagi had this kind of match in him? For all my stiffness freaks in the audience (assumedly all of you), this is essential.
07/13) No Rope Barbed Wire Death: Sanshiro Takagi vs. Atsushi Onita
Arguably the biggest match in Sanshiro Takagi's career, at least up to this point. Takagi, the charismatic ace of the indie scene's new hotness, takes on the charismatic ace that built the indie scene itself. I have to assume most people had the same guess as to how this match would be worked, myself included: complete fireworks brawling. That was exactly how Onita had been working his matches for the last two years, and Takagi was the best opponent for a singles match of that variety. This match, however, is not complete fireworks. I'm still not exactly sure what you would even call it. The match starts hot, then enters some early slow grappling, and then just... stays there for about 15 minutes. It's jarring, confusing, and, more than anything else, a complete betrayal of expectations. And it also makes complete sense, in a way. Atsushi Onita has spent most of his career working these matches against either larger, stronger forces, or hellions more malicious than him. He's almost always played the underdog, at most standing on equal footing while still fighting from underneath. Sanshiro Takagi is not more imposing than Onita, nor is he more malicious. Sanshiro Takagi is the top guy of a new indie, and Atsushi Onita is at the top of the world. There has never been a greater power discrepancy in the history of Onita deathmatches than this one. So Onita, faced with a foe weaker than him, finally playing the one in control, simply wrestles him to death. He puts on facelocks that bend Takagi's head nearly 180 degrees, and drops his knee onto Takagi's face with his full body weight. When Takagi gets a little fired up, he punches him as hard as he can and slaps on tight sleeper holds. It's textbook rookie annihilation, the kind of beatdown old trainers would give prospective trainees to try and make them quit the dojo. Atsushi Onita is young boy'ing Sanshiro Takagi in the biggest match of Takagi's career, and I buy it. It's also, sadly, not perfect. 15 minutes is a long time for something like this, especially with the expectation that a ring surrounded by barbed wire sets, and it gets a little too slow and uneventful at some points. For as invested as the crowd is, you can definitely tell they're just as tired as you are by the time things really heat up. That heating up doesn't feel particularly natural either, as Onita and Takagi talk shit to each other in an armbar until Onita decides to give up on his rookie-beating and throw Takagi head-first into the wire. Once they reach that point, the match turns into exactly what you would expect: tons of wire bumps, tons of powerbombs, all the big kickouts and yelling you assumed would happen in the first place. It's great, and it's what I wanted. Having said that, I really do think there's something to that 15 minutes. Maybe it could've been cut down or worked a little differently, but it's the kind of match development you could only get from a mind like Onita, and I love that it happened, even if it didn't go as well as it could've. Even with its faults, this is still a great match, and it leaves one to wonder just how much farther it could've gone with a few tweaks.