Hideki Suzuki Worth Watching

Hideki Suzuki vs. Shuji Ishikawa BJW 4/19/16

This was Suzuki working his big Puro heavyweight main event. This isn't a style I like as much as quasi shootstyle or maniacal WAR tag, but this was a fine version of that match. They started with some solid, but unmemorable mat work. Match begins to pick up when Ishikawa sits on a chair in the audience and encourages Suzuki to come join him. The slam forearms into each other and Ishikawa dumps Suzuki awkwardly ribs first on the ring apron which was super nasty looking. Ishikawa in control was a little dull to me, his stuff is just a bit short of the kind of real violence that makes the Ishikawa family so compelling. Whole time I just wished he was Takeshi or Yuki. Shuji is really the Mike Von Erich of the Ishikawas. Finish run felt like a finish run, some nasty stuff, but very alternating. I really have no idea what they were trying for with that finish. Not terrible, but this isn't the kind of thing that would make me seek either guy out. Suzuki luckily had some goodwill to burn.

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2015 Ongoing MOTY List: BJW Big Boys Go WAR

Twin Towers (Kohei Sato/Shuji Ishikawa) vs. Ryuichi Sekine/Ryuji Ito BJW 10/29

ER: What the hell took me so long to watch this match? This was the best WAR tag since WAR, a total baton pass that gets every damn thing right. They got a lumpy guy in Ishikawa, they got two different guys who throw hard kneelifts to the stomach, everyone throws a hard lariat, Sato throws a tough piledriver, everyone lands hard on every suplex, and these guys all take shots to every single part of their body. This was 17 minutes of breathless heavyweight tag wrestling, no wasted moments, always somebody eating a nasty shot or getting their neck twisted or getting slammed with someone's full weight. I kept waiting for this to come up for air, but they never did. We get a couple nasty trips tumbling and sliding through ringside chairs (always with nasty follow up attacks), constant hard clubbing arms, omnipresent kicks to the stomach, those knees from Sato kept making me want to barf, just total punishment. Sekine is the smallest guy in the match and tries to make up for that fact. He lands full weight on a top rope splash, and always voluntarily goes toe to toe with the Twin Towers, even when that ends up poorly for him more often than not. The long finishing stretch is Ishikawa and him throwing each other into chairs in increasingly painful ways, with Ishikawa dropping him with a side slam into a set up chair, and Ishikawa eating a superplex onto a stack of them. But much of the run was Ishikawa punishing heavyweight ways: an over shoulder piledriver, a high as hell angle powerbomb, a big lariat used as a killshot, making damn sure Sekine wasn't going to kick out. This is the kind of regularly surprising beating that would hold up in any era, really made every guy look like a cult legend.

PAS: This was a really good Big Japan Heavyweight tag, although lets pump the breaks a bit with the WAR comparisons, these guys are all good, but none of them are Takeshi Ishikawa, much less Tenryu. I always dug Sato in WAR and he is still a guy who will kick your lungs out, and Ishikawa is lumpy and nasty. Loved Sekine in this, really great underdog performance, I loved the spot where he squirmed his way out of a piledriver, only to deadlift Sato for a powerslam, I could hear the hernia's forming when he was squatting Sato. I really didn't like all of the chair stuff, didn't look particularly good, a couple of times guys were holding chairs waiting to be hit, and when guys are hitting this hard they don't need RVD spots. Finish run was really nasty with Ishikawa smushing Sekine and Sekine dying on his shield. Good stuff.


2015 MOTY MASTER LIST

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2018 Ongoing MOTY List: Ishikawa v. Speedball

7. Shuji Ishikawa v. Mike Bailey DDT 1/5

PAS: Really fun David v. Goliath match. Ishikawa is a lumpy WARish dude, kind of a poor man's Takeshi Ishikawa, and isn't afraid to hit hard and get kicked in the face and kneed in the kidneys. Bailey's moonsault double knee's are a nasty bit of offense and they are landed in cool ways, Ishikawa is on his hands and knees when they land which really makes them look hurty. There is a top rope version where Bailey flips right into a big knee. I also loved Ishikawa giant swinging Bailey right into chairs. Might have had a couple of 2 counts more then necessary, but it was fun stuff.

ER: If you gave me $1 for every gut busting Ishikawa knee I was willing to take, I would have zero dollars. Bailey would end up with far more dollars, because he is a crazy person who cares not about his own knees crashing into hard surfaces, nor meaty knees burying themselves into his stomach. Bailey flies into a bunch of crazy things with abandon - both his own wild moves and the beefy limbs of Ishikawa. We've all seen a zillion elbow exchanges over the years, so seeing these two break out kitchen sink knee exchanges is a real treat. Bailey is super fast and always seems to land well, he really is like a speedball bouncing around the ring. His lightning kick combo keeps getting faster, he throws in extra spins on kicks almost as if he was just getting bored, and he's got precise aim. Ishikawa is more of a lumpy bully, but able to surprise with speed bursts, a fun Takayama lite. I really got into the battle of knees, as Bailey tried a ton of moonsault and shooting star kneedrop combos and man do some of those landings kill, just points of knees right into the kidneys. But every time Bailey would miss (and crash knees first into the mat) Ishikawa would be there to dish some brutal kneelifts. We did roll into that overkill territory, where it felt like Bailey took way too much of a beating and kept kicking out the exact same way. It's a bummer that a vicious release dragon suplex can't even keep a guy on the mat for 5 seconds. Bailey gets dumped on his head and is back up kicking seconds later. I thought Ishikawa was pretty punishing down the stretch but felt his big moves were less big because of Bailey's kickouts. But we get a killer release German, an even better powerslam reversal with Bailey grabbing a dragon sleeper and dragging Ishikawa all the way down. The overkill was a bit much, but the work was a blast, no denying that.


2018 MOTY MASTER LIST

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2017 Doesn't Make the List: Miyahara vs. Ishikawa 1 & 2

Kento Miyahara v. Shuji Ishikawa AJPW 5/21

Kento Miyahara v. Shuji Ishikawa AJPW 8/27

ER: Phil and I recently talked about how our MOTY list is very heavy on a certain North Carolina indy, and light on essentially everything else. Is it light on puro because we hate Japanese wrestling? No. Well, maybe. If it was 1994 then our 2017 list would have tons of Japanese wrestling. But this year we have 5 on our list. There are 4 others that Phil and I have each written up and are waiting on contributions from the other, so by the end of the year we may end up with almost 10! That seems low. So I asked some folks for 2017 Japan recommendations to see if we can add to the list a bit more, and we came back with these two matches. And I think if we took the best parts of these two matches, we have an easy list match. But the way each of the matches is actually constructed? I don't see it. There's a lot to like, some stuff to dislike, and at minimum we all learned a little bit more about the 2017 All Japan title scene.

Ishikawa is a guy who not that long ago would have been referred to as indy sleaze: He's wrestled in some shootstyle indies, he's wrestled in death matches, he has probably wrestled on a show that had no ring. But in 2017 he is a Triple Crown challenger, and that just shows how weird Japanese wrestling is in 2017. Miyahara was a NOAH guy who started around the time I stopped watching as much NOAH, and now he's kind of what mid-2000s Tanahashi was for New Japan, only for current All Japan.

There is nothing profound about my thoughts on these two matches, but let's go through my brief thoughts on each:

On the first match, the length felt right but they also took a long time to get going. Ishikawa worked over Miyahara's back in a kind of half-assed way. The stuff he did to the back sounded dangerous on paper, but Ishikawa's delivery is sloppy and disinterested: slam into the ringpost, powerbomb on the apron, chair to the ribs, stomp off the middle rope; the thought is there, but none of it looks very good. Ishikawa seems like maybe a top 5 wrestling Ishikawa. The back work doesn't really go anywhere, as Miyahara just decides to start making a comeback at some point. And I don't really buy his comeback. He had absorbed a lot of punishment, then just hit a dropkick to the knee, then made Ishikawa wait around bent at the waist for too long to hit a so-so shotgun kick. Halfway through, not loving it. Then we had some standing forearms and some fighting spirit convenient selling and I was feeling pretty duped. But the end run is a scorcher, 5 super hot minutes. Shoot, the match would have made list as a year of the sprint top contender if someone had just sent me the final 5 minutes and told me that was the match. Ishikawa starts throwing hard knees under the chin that look like they would break a neck, dumps him with a couple gnarly thunder fire drivers, we get some big kickouts, nice lariats, Ishikawa eats some big kicks, it's still a blast to hear Japanese announcers excitedly call a Splash Mountain, and Ishikawa getting the win was a genuine surprise. The last 5 created some goodwill, but not enough to get it to list.

The second match definitely had the better start. Ishikawa leaned into being Triple Crown champ and was now wearing actual trunks, ditching his garbage bag pants. His attack on Miyahara was focused and more dominating than the first match, with Miyahara taking some rough stuff including leaping off the apron and getting ole'd chin first into the guardrail. I thought Ishikawa looked more consistent in this match, but they peaked things way too early when Ishikawa gave Miyahara a thunder fire driver on the apron. It was a callback to them fighting on the apron in their first match, with this go 'round ending differently. But here it was used to essentially restart the match, and before long Miyahara was on offense for the first time in the match and the playing field was level. It was one of those shifts where Miyahara was selling 10 minutes of a beating, and suddenly Ishikawa delivers his biggest KO blow....and now Ishikawa is tired and Miyahara is invigorated. Shame, as the early match work was really satisfying. Sometimes I think Miyahara's big offense is a bit too flimsy, but there were some nasty moments down the stretch, notably when he caved in the back of Ishikawa's head with a shotgun kick. But Miyahara's fighting spirit spots come off as almost parody, and Ishikawa has a very expressionless face and uninteresting selling, which doesn't really help a fired up babyface like Miyahara. Both guys brought big bombs down the stretch, but really Ishikawa's knees and the thunder fire drivers looked nastier than almost anything Miyahara brought (except that brutal kick, which I would have bought as a finish). I didn't like how this match took a more satisfying journey to basically get to the most unsatisfying parts of the first match.

Both matches were fine, and it didn't feel like wasted time watching them. That sounds backhanded, but it's not meant to be. I'm happy I watched the two title matches. If we had the first 10 minutes of the second match, and the last 5 of the first match, I probably would have flipped. I saw they had a 15 minute match recently, which could be just what I need, but I could not find a copy of it. Someday, maybe.

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