The Best And Worst Of New Japan/ROH Honor Rising 2018

Previously on NJPW: The Golden Lovers reunited, Hiromu Takahashi decided flippy wrestlers were cats, and Bullet Club was decidedly not fine.

You can watch New Japan Pro Wrestling shows on their streaming service, NJPW World, which costs 999 yen (about 9 USD.) They have their show schedule on the homepage. They also feature a new free match on the site every Monday and you can do a free trial month, so it’s a pretty easy service to test drive. Plus, AXS airs certain NJPW shows with commentary by Jim Ross and Josh Barnett.

Remember to share this column on Facebook, Twitter, or whatever social media you use, and leave a comment with your thoughts on the show and/or article. All feedback is appreciated and will help us keep up the NJPW coverage! And don’t forget to follow With Spandex on Twitter and like us on Facebook. You can also follow our home site Uproxx on Twitter, and follow me @emilyofpratt if you want.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYKH9dZARMs

Honor Rising is an annual supershow that NJPW has been doing with Ring of Honor since 2016. Most of the Bullet Club competes in ROH right now, and Kenny Omega vs. Cody is the main event of Supercard of Honor XII in April, so this mostly feels like a regular NJPW show with three (three!) Beer City Bruiser matches (when they said there would be two!)

Best: Soft Diplomacy Via Chanting

The Honor Rising promotional video really highlights CHANTING as a thing that happens in ROH. In a heartwarming example of cultural exchange, the Japanese crowd welcomes the ROH wrestlers by doing American-style wrestling chants.

There has been a sentiment that American fans should do a similar “homage” for U.S. New Japan shows, but that’s a tricky needle to thread. Please, please don’t do an approximation of a “Japanese fan” voice, because no matter how accurate and funny (and well-intentioned) you think it is, it will come out racist and not funny, but I really hope the Strong Style Evolved audience returns the favor this way.

Worst: Attempted Hoss Fight

Day 1 got off to a weak start with a tag match between Bullet Club (Fale and Takahashi) and Henare and Kitamura. The vets, both good wrestlers with well-defined characters, do a fine job, while the much greener Henare and Kitamura are clearly still figuring it out. The match soon becomes a hoss fight, with Fale facing off against his former student Henare and the now concerningly vascular Kitamura, but New Japan isn’t great at the Big Guy stuff and it’s not very exciting.

Fortunately, this was by far the worst match of both days of NJPW/ROH programming. Unfortunately, Kelly and Callis’ commentary got off to a weak start here, and after a few shows in a row with solid English language commentary we seem to be back to the status quo of these dudes annoying me.

Worst: The English Announce Team Returns To Form

I’m just going to give you the lowlights of Kelly and Callis for the whole show right here, and then I won’t have to talk about them for the rest of the article.

• Kelly says Fale and Takahashi are bringing “ROH flavor” during the first match with their use of the guardrails and turnbuckles, as if that doesn’t happen all the time in NJPW. Did y’all forget about Suzukigun?
• Kevin Kelly is cringe-inducingly worshipful of the Young Bucks’ wrestling and moneymaking abilities, as usual.
• As the gimmick rehabilitation of Henare is underway, and actually going surprisingly well in his match with the Beer City Bruiser, Callis asks “Does Henare speak English?” and Kelly quickly replies, “Yes, he speaks English.” Other wrestlers have made fun of the old-timey racist vibe of Henare’s gimmick (Juice made the spot-on “Chief Jay Strongbow, Jr.” and “Tantaka” comments, and Tanga Loa called him “Tonto” a few weeks earlier), but this just sounded like an old dude being racist, because Henare talks in post-match interviews all the time.
• Callis references my favorite ever call of his, “a Greco-Roman bite to the perenium,” but says Taguchi did this do Iizuka rather than the other way around. How did he forget that? Iizuka is the one who bites everything! Taguchi is the one who does the hip attacks! This happened so recently!
• And this was the absolute worst thing to me: at one point, Kelly tells Callis, “Don’t be a mark!” Hey Kevin Kelly, while we’re throwing around wrestling lingo to … impress the IWC, I guess? here’s another one for you: KAYFABE. I thought this was especially egregious since a big part of the appeal of NJPW to many people is that it looks more like a real sporting event than WWE or Impact.

Now that I have that off my chest, let’s get to the mostly-good rest of the show.

Best: The Elusive Cheeseburger And The God Of War

We get two six-man tag matches between some of my favorite people on the card: the 125-pound Cheeseburger and his masked mentors Jushin Thunder Liger and Delirious vs. the Guerrillas of Destiny (Tama Tonga and Tanga Loa) with Hikuleo on the 23rd, and with Bad Luck Fale for a NEVER Openweight Six-Man Tag Team Championship defense on the 24th.

https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/967343164280442880

In terms of crowd reaction, Cheeseburger was the second-biggest babyface behind the Golden Lovers on these shows. The love Tokyo has for this guy is so pure and real and strong that he looks kind of confused by it. Cheeseburger has essentially no functional strength and only gets offense in when he can get some momentum, and whenever he does he makes the Bullet Club guys so angry. Liger is in top character form out here, too, as he saves Cheeseburger from attacks and treats him as if he is a small child and also his biological son.

Meanwhile, the section of Bullet Club not caught up in the Kenny vs. Cody drama has never looked better. The G.o.D. and Fale are a wonderfully cohesive tag team, and even Hikuleo looks relatively tough when he’s tagging with and working to impress his older brothers.

I’ve liked Tama Tonga a lot for a while now, but in the post-WK12 world he’s become one of my faves. If there’s any justice in this world, he’ll be the next Bullet Club leader, and the end of the latest Being The Elite episode seems to foreshadow that. Tama’s wrestling has improved a lot over the past few years and his “if Seth Rollins and Roman Reigns had a baby” gear was a heck of a glow up. He also cut the promo of his life after the Biz Cliz drama started Night 1 in Sapporo, which if you haven’t seen, you should do yourself a favor and watch right now. Tama hasn’t “come off the hinges to f*ck sh*t up” to get his respect YET, but he looks like a leader and a badass in these matches, and I am so excited for that to happen. However, I would also accept he and Cheeseburger feuding for like a year.

https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/967345462075412481

FinJuice And Other Adventures In Tag Team Wrestling

Honor Rising felt the most “promotional crossover” during some of these tag matches, in that the wrestling was good and the character spots were fun, but they didn’t have much significance outside of putting NJPW and ROH together and/or versus each other on tag teams.

The Dalton Castle, Jay Lethal, and Ryusuke Taguchi team made me happy because it allowed Taguchi to get a lot of coaching in. “Suddenly a soccer coach” might be the best ever gimmick for a middle-aged wrestler. I really thought the Mysterious Bag on the ring apron would contain orange slices, but it turned out to be three (3) chicken fingers, one for each team member. How thoughtful. And I loved that Taguchi apparently enjoyed working with Castle so much that he did a tribute to his entrance when he teamed with Flip Gordon on Day 2.

Best Friends (Chuckie T and Beretta) and Jay White, with their opposite aesthetics and views on friendship, never fully reached their odd throuple potential, but Beretta’s post-match comments made up for it. He interrupted Jay Switchblading it up to the camera, saying, “You always talk like you’re some kind of tough pervert, man. You’re Jay White,” which annoys Jay so much that he has to leave the room and come back later to finish his Starscreaming of Chaos. I now desperately need Beretta and Switchblade to interact on every show.

The Young Bucks, seemingly representing ROH and looking very much 206-plus pounds, got their cool Young Bucks stuff in and got an inevitable but still fun victory over FinJuice. The Young Bucks are so incredibly talented and athletic that I feel bad for not having much to say about their performance, but their NJPW matches tend to be pretty predictable. Maybe that will change now that they’re graduating to the heavyweight division. David Finlay and Juice Robinson, the newly dubbed FinJuice, are fun as a babyface tag team, and if their evolution as a regular pairing continues I think it could be good for the heavyweight tag division as well.

Worst: Hangman Page Gets His Moment

Hangman Page is by far the least compelling Bullet Club member to me. It’s nothing about his wrestling; it’s the gimmick and the fact that he’s almost always presented next to more interesting people. Plus, I didn’t think the Young Bucks could come up with a Bullet Club subgroup name that would make me roll my eyes more than “Superkliq,” but then “Hung Bucks” happened. Good job, guys.

Page has been on a winning streak lately and nobody has been appreciating that, including me, a person who accidentally said that Owens challenged White for the U.S. title after he lost it to Omega instead of Page in the first version of my Golden Lovers article and then totally forgot that was even part of that incident until the announce team brought it up. While his motivations make sense, I don’t care about this push at all. Maybe he’ll get more interesting under a spotlight.

Best: Hiromu Makes A Friend

The triple threat between Takahashi, Kushida, and Gordon featured some of the most exciting wrestling on these shows. The three-way match was a wonderful showcase of three wrestlers with very different styles beating the crap out of each other in creative ways. Kushida intelligently targets specific aspects of his opponents, Flip does a lot of cool flips, and Takahashi ruins people’s lives with ultraviolence. They exhaust each other to the point where they’re punching each other from their knees.

The match also sets up a feud that is sure to continue in this year’s Best of the Super Juniors tournament. Takahashi has found another flippy cat person he can obsess over! Gordon is even more of a showboat — or maybe just less of a strategist — than Will Ospreay, which should give this enough of a different vibe from Ospreay vs. Takahashi. The two men have good chemistry and I’m excited to see them in a singles match. May we all find someone who looks at us like Hiromu Takahashi looks at Flip Gordon. Actually, may we not, because we’ll wake up tied up in their basements.

https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/966982956714782720

Best/Worst: Three Beer City Bruiser Matches In Two Days When I Only Prepared Myself Mentally To Watch Two Beer City Bruiser Matches In Two Days

We ended up with more BCB than anticipated at Honor Rising, and I think it worked a lot more for the live Japanese audience than it did for me. Some people dig Beer City Bruiser as a territorial-days throwback in the States, but everything about him was unappealing to Tokyo. Using him to put over two of their least popular babyfaces, Goto and Henare, was a smart choice.

The match with Goto was fine, and the NEVER Openweight Champ looked more like a dignified Japanese warrior and an underdog in relation to the Bruiser. I doubt this will make me care more about Goto in the future, but the crowd strongly supported him here and was very into his classic babyface comeback against this gross monster foreign heel.

I’ve been more hyped for oral surgery than for Beer City Bruiser vs. Henare, but BCB’s heel work actually got me invested. Many kudos to him! The crowd loves Henare, which, like with Goto, I’m not sure will last, but it was nice to see. If they fix the gimmick and keep the will-fight-anyone spirit, I think Henare can be salvaged.

The Beer City Bruiser also inserts himself into the ROH World Championship match between Dalton Castle and Beretta. I’m not going to say much about it because this was a fully ROH match and this isn’t an ROH column, but it was good. Castle recruited some Young Lions to be Boys, which is really all I wanted from him on these shows, and let his arrogance get the better of him to allow BCB to compete in the match. The very injured Beretta was wrestling against doctor’s orders and would have probably had a better chance against Castle alone. It told a story you could easily get into, even if you’re not a regular ROH watcher.

Best: Korakuen Hall Is For Lovers

https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/967363250198368256

The reunited Gold Lovers main evented both nights of Honor Rising, in a six-man tag with Chase Owens vs. Cody, Marty Scurll, and Hangman Page on Day 1, and vs. Cody and Scurrl in a regular tag match on Day 2. Both matches featured great wrestling and great wrestling storytelling and had so much going on, and I think the best way to talk about it is player by player.

Chase Owens
Chase Owens is such a shoot and kayfabe good worker. He somehow feels both underrated and like he’s in the perfect place on the card. He’s now both an Honorary Tongan and sort of an honorary Golden Lover … maybe more of a third wheel who you don’t actually mind having around, because he’ll take most of the bumps. Kenny won his services in a basketball game and they do solid tag team work together, but I’m sure he’ll end up on the side of the BC OGs. They seem to appreciate him the most, anyway.

Hangman Page
I already talked about what’s going on with Page, but I’ll add that I think he works better as Cody’s angry sidekick than as a guy carrying out a vendetta on his own.

Marty Scurll

The Villain was recently seen on Being The Elite singing Avril Lavigne alone like he’s me in middle school. Now he has new all-white attire and his hair has gone completely gray from stress at the age of 29. He maintains that this feud is just between Kenny and Cody and that Villain Club is fine, but is clearly severely depressed. He refuses to snap Kenny’s fingers on Day 1, but confronts Kenny about abandoning Bullet Club on Day 2 and goes for it. Looks like he’s Team Cody for the foreseeable future.

His supporting role here could be easily overlooked, but he gets in some great, old-school chain wrestling. He opens both matches going one on one with Omega (Day 1) and Ibushi (Day 2.) We haven’t seen him outside of a tag team in NJPW since WK12, and these matches made me hope to soon.

The Golden Lovers, Kenny Omega and Kota Ibushi

https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/966997429546569728

The babyface reaction these guys get from the crowd is beautiful. There’s so much smiling and high-fiving, and the announce team points out that reuniting with Omega has made Ibushi happier and more grounded. And here I thought Ibushi reuniting with Omega had only made me happier and more grounded!

The build to the full in-ring Golden Lovers reunion keeps you hooked. The tags between Omega and Ibushi keep getting broken up during the first match, and when we do see them do some tag team moves they’re a little awkward. The Golden Comeback mini documentary NJPW made teased a new V-Trigger/kamigoye finishing move and that they may or may not do the Golden Shower anymore, so if you did your supplemental watching, you know to look for those.

Omega and Ibushi truly reunite in the second match, when it’s just them as a tag team. Any stiffness from the 23rd is gone, and they even do a double cover, possibly the most romantic thing you can do in a wrestling ring (Please tweet me your Seth Rollins/Finn Bálor fan fiction based on this.) The Cross Slash has the crowd freaking out, and the first-ever Golden Trigger looks cool and fits how these men have evolved as performers over the years.

https://twitter.com/totaldivaseps/status/967363919487688704

All the Kenny vs. Cody stuff is such clear hero vs. villain melodrama, and it all works so well. Kenny is so massively over as a babyface that it makes me wonder if the next Omega vs. Okada match will have allignments opposite to the previous ones.

After their victory on the 24th, Kenny gets on the mic and says the Golden Lovers are reunited, and will show they’re the best tag team in the world. This summons the Young Bucks, who decide this is a perfect time to announce they’re moving up to the heavyweight division, and that they didn’t have an issue with what Kenny and Kota were doing until he made that claim.

This will keep the Bucks on Team Cody while leaving the door open for the Elite to be friends in the future even though they’re feuding now. Most importantly, this should be such a rad match between some of the best in the world. I wonder if they’re saving the Golden Shower to bust out against these flippy guys. (Holy carp, after I wrote this we learned we’re getting this dream match next month!)

Cody

Cody is the most effective heel on the planet for me right now. I hate his face so intensely, and everything about him makes me want to see him get beaten up. He heels it up so hard and so skillfully in these matches, doing Rise of the Terminator with Page, begging, and getting mad at the audience for their “Golden Lovers” chants. He does that great thing the Rock did in his Nation of Domination days where he gets so clearly upset about being booed.

He steps it up with his promo at the end of the first match, calling the Golden Lovers reunion a publicity stunt, saying you’re either Team Kenny or Team Cody (if I see you in a Team Cody shirt I will fight you in the street), and says Kenny is just using Kota. He goes full Disney villain with the closing line: “We having a saying on Being The Elite: ‘Bullet Club is Fine.’ And I’ll add one more thing: Bullet Club is mine.” Then he shows up to the next match with pants that say “Leader” on them, which is the “very stable genius” of showing you’re a good leader.

We get the most villainous and most obviously gay moment of Honor Rising when Cody straight up kisses Ibushi on the mouth. The fact that he thought a single kiss from him would break up confetti-inducing love is truly incredible narcissism. (Is there a way we can get Cody vs. Lex Luger? No?) Omega and Ibushi did a lot of saving each other from their opponents’ moves, but I was so glad Ibushi himself got to kick Cody’s ass for that one, because that is sexual assault. (Sidenote: Kenny retweeted a thread telling the story of the Golden Lovers that explicitly referred to it as a gay love story, so if you’re not reading the relationship that way, you’re reading it wrong.) I feel like Cody’s going to tie him to some train tracks next.

Bullet Club is anything but fine these days, and we’re getting great matches, promos, and character development out of it. I am very much Team Tama Tonga And Co. Should Just Murk Cody And Take Over Already, but I guess I can wait until we get there. I’ll see you back here after the March 6 anniversary show, which will include zero Bullet Club Civil War, but will have Suzuki and Makabe killing each other and that intra-Chaos champion vs. champion Okada vs. Ospreay match.