bleloch

Now, pre-Colonel DeBeers locking up with young boy Takashi Ishikawa is some good stuff. Wiskoski's booked as a fairly big deal there but whenever I saw him pop up in Mid-South during 1982 he was nothing more than a jobber. Kinda curious to track down more matches of his from that 78-85 stretch to see how he fared in other territories. On that note, this also ruled:

Were they Tsururyū Combi at some point then? I've only ever heard the name as Kakuryū Combi (same Kanji, I know) Edit: read their Wikipedia page to find out more info, and found this. Forgive my translation: He's not wrong.

That Kiyoshi Tamura clip is magnificent. What a pop! I love Tamura's deep bowing. He always came across (and still does in his YouTube videos these days) as a very humble guy.

I wonder why Hayashi did not end up in NOAH/DDT, but I wish his new group well. There aren't really any big names left from the Wrestle-1 closure that haven't already been snapped up. I expected guys like Koji Doi and Ganseki Tanaka to wander around the indy circuit but it seems they might have a place to land after all, so that's nice.

Could it be that the general mindset of the average Japanese fan at this time was losing faith in the idea that pro wrestling was as legitimate as they had initially thought? Thus forcing the competitors to adapt, in this case taking greater influence from outside actors such as the WWF and to a lesser extent JCP whose business was in using pro wrestling as a chassis for over-the-top live action dramatics. When you consider how much effort was put forth by Maeda in '88 to denounce the legitimacy of the other two companies, I imagine that would have dented the perception of the "sport" in a lot of fans' minds, although I've not read anything explicitly stating as such. Thinking about the start of the original UWF as well as Choshu leaving New Japan, the focus on entertainment over conveying legitimate competition moves gradually from that point onward, becoming particularly obvious in the Takeshi Gundan angle, for example. As a wrestler entering the industry during the change of eras, this paradigm shift must be more than apparent; and for those who eschewed U-style and joined one of the big two dojos would've surely absorbed the influence that late 80s US wrestling had on AJPW/NJPW around that time, excursion or no excursion. Another thing is that wrestlers coming in around this time would've been a young child during the Inoki/Tiger Mask stretch, where the appeal of pro wrestling began to really expand. This would have likely meant more people applying to the dojos for that reason, drowning out the field of codgers who, as you say, looked at pro wrestling as a job first. To parallel this thought, consider the number of AJW dojo applicants at the height of Chigusa's popularity, as she influenced so many schoolgirls to want to become pro wrestlers. Hopefully I'm making some sense!

I too consider the Heisei/Showa divide as relatively arbitrary. If "Heisei style" is to be defined by the adoption of entertainment aspects (thinking entrance stage, pyrotechnics, colourful wrestling attire and the like), the seeds were planted long before Hirohito popped his clogs. I look to events such as Tiger Mask's popularity, the Hogan/Inoki feud, Choshu's federation flip-flopping and the popularity of Newborn UWF as key indicators towards this trend, since each of them displayed a heretofore unseen vibrancy that was sorely lacking in the sport... well, that is if you discount Mighty Inoue's trunks in the 70s. In my view this shift reflected the rapid modernisation of Japan brought on by the bubble period, and while the rapid economic downturn at the beginning of the era had its' own impact on the profitability of the industry, by this point these modern facets were already indelibly etched into the style. In other words, to measure the development of the style against the change in imperial eras serves to complicate matters more than it does clarify. I think of 1984 as the year that really catalysed this shift in styles, and tend to separate wrestlers based on this divide instead.