Best And Worst Of NJPW: Kizuna Road 2019, June 16-17

Previously on NJPW: The IWGP Heavyweight and Intercontinental Championship matches were controversial in very different ways and everyone started gearing up for G1 SZN.

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And now, the best and worst of the Kizuna Road shows from June 16-17, 2019, at Korakuen Hall.

Worst: The New Japan Equivalent Of The Time Between WrestleMania And SummerSlam

It’s not good that NJPW has some tours for which expectations are way lower than other tours, but Kizuna Road is one of those tours. Some things on it are building for the G1 Climax and – this time around – for Southern Showdown, but there isn’t much to get excited for on Kizuna Road itself because they’re saving most of the good stuff for next month.

The June 17 show is a lot stronger and more entertaining, but the June 16 one feels like a house show and not a very motivated one. The matches, for the most part, aren’t great or even fresh, mostly featuring opponents who either aren’t really feuding or just wrestled the climax of this chapter of their feud. Though the Korakuen Hall crowd is friendly as usual, they’re understandably not that into it.

A production lowlight (but only noticeable for those who either watched the English commentary and then the backstage comments or watched part of both the English and Japanese commentary versions for some reason) is that the video part of the Japanese commentary version is somehow way darker and less saturated than the English commentary version. Behold:

I don’t know why this weird thing happened, but it happened!

A surprise production highlight for me was the return of Mavs Gillis to commentary. His earlier work calling New Japan didn’t make a strong impression on me, but on these shows, he sounds like an engaged and informed sports broadcaster. I guess that’s the bare minimum standard for a commentator for a wrestling show that presents itself more like sports than others, but it’s worth pointing out.

Worst: El Phantasmo Thread

The truly worst part of the June 16 show is the part for which there are reasons to have higher expectations, the main event IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team Championship match between Roppongi 3K and the Bullet Club team of Taiji Ishimori and El Phantasmo. It quickly includes unexpected bleeding from Yoh, but for a title match, it still feels anemic. It doesn’t help that the Tree of Woe Dick Grind continues to be the worst move in wrestling – something that takes so long to set up it completely breaks suspension of disbelief in a serious match and also is impossible to sell. But in the context of this match, even things that normally look good from these wrestlers don’t shine as much as they normally do.

New Japan’s really trying to get people to care about ELP and not one, but two British wrestling championships this spring/early summer and it is not working for me. I talked about my gripes with ELP that kept me from previously seeking him after his first Best of the Super Juniors match, and so far nothing has made my impression of him more positive than “the less good EDM guy than DJZ.” But also, I’m way less receptive to anything BritWres flavored than others (it took me until his victorious New Japan Cup run to appreciate ZSJ at all) and live New Japan audiences in places like Korakuen tend to enjoy gimmick-heavy foreign guest stars like ELP, who are something different from the usual NJPW performers and performers in other companies in Japan, to a certain degree.

However: The Horniest NJPW Show Of 2019 So Far

A redeeming factor of this show (I think?) is that it earns the dubious honor of being The Horniest NJPW Show Of 2019 So Far. We have:

• The return of “Tokyo Pimp” Yujiro Takahashi, who has been out with an eye injury since before the New Japan Cup
• Pieter!
• ELP mentioning that he and Ishimori are going to go party with Tokyo Pimp girls after their championship win
• Taguchi winning a match with half of his bare butt exposed
• Taguchi laying on the innuendo even thicker than usual!
• Taichi TIPPING Yoh for wrestling while hot and Yoh ACCEPTING IT

The whole unconventional ending with Taguchi saving Roppongi 3K, nobody understanding or reacting to El Phantasmo’s promo at all, and Sho and Yoh having to cut rare, live, in-ring losers’ promos at least sends the crowd home on a fun note. I will probably forget everything that happened in their tag title match pretty quickly, but I will remember the dejected poses of no-long-champions Sho and Yoh for – well, probably not forever, but for a while!

Best: Sign Suzuki Minoru’s Change.org Petition Or Else

Before the tour began, the Suzuki-gun vs. Chaos matches looked like they were only about previewing Zack Sabre Jr. vs. Yoshi-Hashi for the RevPro title. After the G1 lineup announcement, they’re still about that, but they’re also suddenly way more interesting for multiple reasons.

In both the tag match and the very good five-on-five elimination match main event of June 17, Lance Archer makes the case for why he should be in the tournament. The main points are 1) he is a gross monster, and 2) he is from Texas, where the opening night of the G1 is taking place. These two elements combine gloriously and hilariously into Archer now using the EBD Claw, aka the Everybody Dies Claw, aka the very popular in Japan “Iron Claw” used by fake-Nazi Texas wrestling patriarch Fritz Von Erich.

There couldn’t be a more appropriate new move for this character at this moment and given how much New Japan likes to book local talent to win in their home towns, this might mean I get to see Will Ospreay die by goofy old-timey brain claw with my own eyes. The case against Archer in the G1 is shown by some of his monster rampage being executed a little awkwardly, but when you look at who else is in his block and listen to how audiences respond to Archer’s shenanigans, he makes sense as an entrant to add variety and maybe play spoiler.

And I hate having to say a major highlight of a wrestling show isn’t actual wrestling, but the actual highlight, mostly non-wrestling category, of the June 16 show – which is also a highlight, wrestling and non-wrestling categories, of June 17 – is the fallout of Minoru Suzuki learning he isn’t in the G1. In real life, it’s very possible that 51-year-old Suzuki opted out of wrestling in the tournament. He’s working non-New Japan shows around that time (for Taka Michinoku’s new company on July 8 and in Takayamania II on August 26) and tag matches on the G1 tour. Especially with the storyline of him being extremely vengeful about not being the tournament, he could easily have a few big matches lined up in the fall – just not nine in a row in July and August.

While it might not make sense for Suzuki the performer to always work as strenuous of a schedule as the younger talent, it does make sense for Suzuki the character to freak out about not being given a schedule that indicates he’s one of the best heavyweights in the world. Unlike his babyface arch-rival Nagata who nobly retired from the G1 to make space for younger talent, the Suzuki character won’t release his death-grip on being the King of Pro Wrestling until he literally dies. If he does without changing his persona in other ways, the character loses his teeth and can’t be as serious of a threat anymore when needed.

So Suzuki responding to essentially being told that he isn’t in New Japan’s top twenty by going straight after the number one champion and certified golden boy Kazuchika Okada – with whom he’s historically had good in-ring chemistry – is perfect. We get some sequences of Okada vs. Suzuki until the old man finally, finally goes far enough to get straight-up disqualified. In kayfabe, these are big losses for Suzuki, but in reality, this angle is a winner for everyone so far.

While Ishii vs. Taichi is unsurprisingly still good, if not the freshest rivalry right now, the action between Yoshi-Hashi and ZSJ is way better than expected. This is partly because expectations for Kizuna Road are not that high, but also because even if you don’t enjoy anything about Yoshi-Hashi most of the time, seeing him heroically fight off Suzuki-gun to win the match as his team’s sole survivor and then attempt to cut a badass promo when he’s such a loser most of the year has some appeal. Go forth on your probably doomed quest to become RPW British Heavyweight Champion and a G1 entrant, Yoshi-Hashi, with the support of the audience but also no real faith in them that you’re going to win!

Best: Grabbing G1 Season By The Horns

The official start of G1 season doesn’t just make Suzuki and Yoshi-Hashi more motivated but seems to inject new energy in almost every character by June 17.

First, after a very solid tag match of Yuji Nagata and Shota Umino vs. Tomoaki Honma and Toa Henare, the backstage promos provide an example of a minor, but not unimportant detail in how the G1 is able to consistently feel so important. Not only are the main event of Wrestle Kingdom, the IWGP Heavyweight Championship, and the G1 connected in a way that elevates all of them, not only is the G1 legitimately physically taxing, and not only is the outcome of the G1 rarely impacted by screwy booking and/or non-wrestling authority figures getting involved, but every wrestler has their own take on it like it’s legitimately the most important thing that happens in the company every year.

Obviously, Umino and Henare want in ASAP, but Nagata and Honma also their different perspectives as veterans (and also kind of still want in.) It’s not a huge thing, but it fleshes out the New Japan universe in a way that makes it feel more human and helps make the G1 seem like a thing actual humans should care about.

Another, more cohesive group way more directly and positively impacted by G1 season is Los Ingobernables de Japon. Their match with a Hontai team on the 16th is alright and features Evil not joining the team fist bump, but its most notable aspect is the first unexpectedly bloody moment of the show when Ibushi pays Naito back for the Dominion black eye with a gnarly split lip. Naito and Ibushi’s Dominion match felt like the logical end of this chapter of their feud or maybe even their feud in general and their interactions now have a dark tone. Their rivalry is all about pushing each other to extremes, they went to a very dangerous extreme, and now it seems like they might be pushing beyond that by spilling blood in a Kizuna Road ten-man tag. It’s very nice that the organizers of the G1 chose to keep these men away from each other for a while!

The Hiroyoshi Tenzan Comeback Match does feature some Naito vs. Ibushi, but it has a lot more than that going on and is overall a much better match. Naito is in full disrespectful heel mode against the returning veteran and we get multiple other good in-ring pairings. Plus, Sanada doesn’t release his submission hold after tapping out Tiger Mask with Skull End to show that he’s going to put the “cold” in “Cold Skull” this G1. It’s solid, motivated wrestling with extra some tournament drama seasoning.

And this is mostly unrelated to the G1, but the feud between G.O.D. and the NXTeam of Juice Robinson and Mikey Nicholls gets more interesting between the 16th and the 17th. The fighting spirit and sneakiness of Ren Narita stands out most of anything in the second night’s Bullet Club vs. Miscellaneous Good Guys tag match, but Nicholls and Robinson show a little bit more tag teamwork than they did the night before. The fact that they’re feuding (in a non-title capacity!) with G.O.D. is definitely a sign of the heavyweight tag team division being pretty empty right now and also of NJPW wanting to put every Australian possible on the Australia show. But with the amped-up aggression and Robinson and Nicholls’ brief history tagging in the past, it doesn’t feel like only a local interest feud anymore. (But it’s pretty obviously a local interest feud.)

Best/Worst: Something “NEVER Openweight Sex-Man Championship” Because Yujiro

While the impending G1 Climax tournament helps elevate a lot of the June 17 show, some things that may never be elevated higher than where they are now are the NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Team Championships. Togi Makabe, Toru Yano, and Ryusuke Taguchi successfully defend these against Chase Owens, Yujiro Takahashi, and ELP, and it is okay. Everyone seems to lean into this being a match of mostly low-level guys for the lowest-level titles. Yujiro doing the Tokyo Pimp version of Taguchi’s coaching is a good moment, as is Chase trying to torture Yano with his own curry.

ELP tying it into he and Taguchi’s RevPro Cruiserweight Championship match at the end is a smart decision, but this match doesn’t build much in building hype for it because 1) the ELP-Taguchi interactions didn’t play a role in the result and 2) it’s the RevPro Cruiserweight Championship. The biggest highlight of this match might actually be a different moment after it though: the backstage gag of Jay White asking Chase if they won and Chase lying about it as if White wouldn’t find out the truth immediately.

White’s promos in general sound better this tour too. An early post-excursion, post-WK 12 strength of his last year was character work and promos, but recently he’s sounded more like a generic heel, more of a “hate to hate” character than “love to hate,” more Baron Corbin than New Daniel Bryan. Maybe it was partly the “real world champion” bit so reminiscent of Matt Taven’s “real world champion” bit so shortly after the end of that ROH storyline and the purple ladder incident. But with a new, somewhat legitimate gripe about Chris Jericho getting a match with Okada before him and a return to cutting promos on behalf of other Bullet Club members that show why they would put up with him as the front man for the group, White now has more interesting material to work with.

He also has more interesting match-ups in the G1 than he’s been getting lately, and that could do him a lot of good. His bouts with Hirooki Goto and Juice Robinson have history, but he’s free of Okada and Tanahashi for a while. Guys like Naito, Taichi, Yano, Takagi, Ishii, and Moxley are all fresh opponents for White that make it easy to see him coming out of the tournament looking better than when he went in. Of course, anything could happen, and he could also come out of it looking worse! We’ll find out! But I’m optimistic.

But before we get to the G1, I’ll see you back here next week to talk about the third and final televised show of the Kizuna Road tour, headlined by matches for those very meaningful Revolution Pro Wrestling championships!