Now The Earth Was Corrupt in the Sight of Yoshiaki Fujiwara

Pete over at PWO unearthed a bunch of previously unseen New Japan HH which includes some previously unseen early Fujiwara jams. Because there is all of this Fujiwara handheld stuff, plus a couple more new PWFG shows, I am going to intro a Fujiwara advent calendar. New Fujiwara review every day until Christmas!


Yoshiaki Fujiwara/Riki Choshu vs. Roland Bock/Micha Nador NJPW 8/6/81 - GREAT

Neat chance to look at baby Choshu, young Fujiwara (who still looked 45) and a couple of Euro dudes with very little footage. This was an undercard tag, so it didn't have a lot of big dramatic moments, but it had a bunch of nifty smaller ones. Loved the opening Nador v. Fujiwara sections with Fujiwara doing a bunch of spots holding on to a hammerlock. There was also a cool fast reversal section between Nador and Fujiwara later in the match. Bock was fun as a steamroller, he looks like David Crosby but he portrays a powerhouse well, he comes in with some big shoulder blocks and finishes the match with a couple of violent Irish whips into the corner and a nice butterfly suplex.

Yoshiaki Fujiwara/Kengo Kimura/Osamu Kido vs. Animal Hamaguchi/Isamu Teranishi/Ryuma Go NJPW 8/29/82 - GREAT

This was sort of a Choshu's army style six-man before the Choshu's army was a thing. The IWE boys really brought the pace, Go especially was a workrate machine for 1982, he must have really had some demons for his career to end up where it did. Fujiwara isn't a guy you think about as a workrate sprint guy, but he was unsurprisingly awesome in this, throwing cool looking snap suplexes, hitting these cool open hand chops to the head, and isolating Hamaguchi and blasting him with headbutts. Finish was cool with Animal hitting a nifty airplane spin into fallaway slam on Fujiwara for the pin. I also liked how they kept brawling after the bell. I imagine they ran a variation of this trios every show and I imagine it was always great.

COMPLETE AND ACCURATE FUJIWARA