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Learning About AJPW


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I think I can answer nearly all of your questions with "Japanese business culture works differently than it does here."  Let's run down the list.

1: Baba was the booker, AJPW was a mom and pop shop but all of the actual wrestling stuff was handled by Giant Baba himself. Mrs. Baba needed a wrestler to handle that part of it and Misawa made the most sense. She did try and flex her muscles with him and he left. She no longer owns any part of AJPW as far as I know.

2. No clue on ratings but I know that both AJPW and NJPW (just like WWE and WCW) had up and down periods in the ratings over the years.

3. "Japanese business culture works differently than it does here."  TV deals included.

4. NJPW did it out of respect for Baba's memory AND to spike their own houses as they were down somewhat in the early 2000's. By that point, it was clear AJPW was no threat to NJPW anymore. From what I remember, the booking was relatively fair to both companies.

5. The best talent AJPW had was gone. It would be like a buying a house Elvis used to live in just to try and make a new Elvis. Reputation does nothing when the talent has flown and it all did.

6. "Japanese business culture works differently than it does here." 

7. Which backstabber are we referring to?

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1:" AJPW was a mom and pop shop " um. it was a huge company with tons of employees. that is the exact opposite of"mom and pop shops" :/. were there more reasons that lead to the other wrestlers leaving with misawa?i just cant imagine a mass quitting spree just because a wrestler-turned-booker quit,no matter how popular said guy was. he wasnt even screwed or backstabbed like bret did,yet very few people quit over montreal(IIRC only rick rude,davey boy smith,and ,for one day only,Foley). heck vince literally told anyone who wants to leave to do so and no one did lol. i know that the Japanese care about camaraderie far more than the americans,but someone leaving over creative differences is as normal as breathing in wrestling lol.

3:no matter what the culture is,a TV contract is legally binding to both parties. the japanese are business men too. they cant simply just leave.

4:so even back then NJPW had pretty much won. good on them for actually being good and not assholes like vince lol. "help and be helped"is not in vince's dictionary XD

5:that point is simply not true in wrestling though. again,look at WWF in 1994. all their big names were gone. yet in only 3 years they created new big names. look at heyman in ECW. he created stars out of garbage.in professional wrestling,one smart booker is all you need to fill your roster with stars. as for your reputation point,even when WWF in 1994 was like this,it was still the place that most new wrestlers hoped to go to. why?because of its reputation and name. reputation gives you the best of the hungry new talent,who can easily be converted to stars within 1 or 2 years. reputation ALWAYS maters

6:i get that in cases like when Iwata slashed his salary in half,because he was the president of Nintendo and made/approved the decisions that led to the 3ds not selling well,thus he felt personally responsible and punished himself by cutting his salary in half. however,in this case not only was the matter in no way,shape,or form Muta's fault,not even indirectly,but that was a matter that wasnt uncommon at all in wrestling,and was even advocated by multiple bookers to settle your differences in the locker room so that it doesnt spill out into the ring. so,why was this one case so much of a big deal?

7:both of them,although atleast tenryu was somewhat understandable because they were desperate.

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I realize you may disagree with what I'm telling you on these matters, but the facts are what they are.

1: Baba and his wife ran everything. All decisions were made by them, regardless of the size of the company. Some of the long term contracts with talent were handshake deals.

3. NTV's television show followed NOAH. This isn't subject to conjecture. That is what happened. It might not be possible here but it was there and it happened.

5. In Japan, in 2000 and after, it was 100% true. Thus, what happened, happened.

6. Mutoh felt personally responsible and it happened on his watch as boss so he did what he did.

7. I don't think there were a lot of volunteers lining up to captain a burning ship. Plus, Mrs. Baba was notoriously hard to work with. Ultimately, the soul of AJPW as it was belonged to Giant Baba and when he died, the company started it's decline. As it sits, AJPW is sort of the ROH of Japan.

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i hope you dont misunderstand me. i am not disagreeing(except for point 4). i am just trying to understand it.i am thankful for your replies and i hope mine didnt annoy you :)

 

1:so it was basically the same deal as the WWF in the 80s. gotcha.

4:because no decent booker was there at the time. no matter how bad their roster was,it certainly was better than what heyman had to work with. good bookers turn chicken s*** into chicken salad.

7:if AJPW is currently japan's ROH(3rd company),then what is japan's TNA(2nd company)? NOAH?

 

 

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Slightly off topic but NOAH has definitely fallen behind, I think DG and DDT have passed them in the last three years or so. I'm not even sure if AJPW is #3. Course its hard to get an exact ranking as it would depend on what was used to measure between TV deals, number of shows, attendance numbers, etc.

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A very rich man did bought it in 2012 but it didn't work out. Dudes name was nobuo shiraishi and he wanted to turn Ajpw into a shoot mma hybird. Which many fans decided to leave in protest. It never happened at all anyway. 

He did close down the ltd that Baba created and Mutoh owned later. Had massive debts. Jun's Ajpw is the third version of it, established in 2014. Still carrying on the old history of course.

Ntv owned a percent of Mutohs Ajpw, which means they wouldn't let them find another national tv slot and time. That went away when the old Ajpw ltd got shut down.

Most feds in Japan are indys. Njpw is really the only big fed left with national tv. Even then its ratings are nothing compared to its hey days.

I'm sure Ajpw in the 90's was getting 4.0 ratings while Njpw would get around 10.0 and slightly more at the time. Most feds today get around 1.0. 

Puroresu in general is niche market, not the mainstream thing it was in the the 80's. Still more people was into Njpw 90's over Ajpw. Losing primetime effected both feds.

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All Japan's ratings were great for their time slot. It's just that the time slot sucked. You have to understand that cable TV basically doesn't exist in Japan. And no Japanese company had been pulling ratings high enough to warrant a prime time slot on network television since the early 80s. Every company had to deal with having their hours cut and being put in progressively worse slots, which made it difficult to create new stars. How big a star do you think Steve Austin would have become if Raw had only been half an hour long and aired at 3 in the morning on Sunday?

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10 minutes ago, Attila The Hut said:

This might be of some interest.

http://theditch.biz/misawa.html

Ditch's site is still alive?  I haven't thought about his match archives in years.  Kinda assumed everything had been taken down by now.

The link is part of his All Japan archive.  Are the other archives still online?  If I remember correctly, the other archives had slightly different urls.

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2 minutes ago, Horton Hears a Wooo!!! said:

Ditch's site is still alive?  I haven't thought about his match archives in years.  Kinda assumed everything had been taken down by now.

The link is part of his All Japan archive.  Are the other archives still online?  If I remember correctly, the other archives had slightly different urls.

He never took it down for some reason.  I used to download all my AJPW videos from there all the time.  I might have to create a YouTube account and upload all of them.  I have over a 1000 videos.  Some of those I downloaded off YouTube.  Then again, I'll probably get copyright dinged.

I think the http://ditch.lcwe.com URL still works.  Check that.

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On 1/27/2017 at 4:25 PM, Oyaji said:

Generally, Japanese = good guys, furrners = bad guys in All Japan though top stars like Hansen kind of changed that. The Triple Crown was the be all end all, but the two tag titles had some of the best matches, so just watching Triple Crown matches is going to leave a lot of blanks. Generally, the TC was on the ace of the promotion and his program generally went on last.

It's been ages but I know Misawa as Tiger Mask II had some really fun matches against Jumbo and they teamed together too.

Watching the dynamics of power slowly change over time is what made All Japan so fucking good. Due to their reliance on so few top stars, it was paramount that they did this but watching how things change between Misawa and Jumbo over the years and then Kawada and Misawa is long term, in-ring storytelling that will likely never be matched.

The Destroyer basically was the start of gaijin being accepted as faces, and the Funks completely destroyed the concept in the late 70s.  Hansen was also a gaijin that got cheered, but the Funks were super over as faces in the late 70s and early 80s.  It might have tapered off a bit when Terry had his first retirement though.

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17 hours ago, Attila The Hut said:

He never took it down for some reason.  I used to download all my AJPW videos from there all the time.  I might have to create a YouTube account and upload all of them.  I have over a 1000 videos.  Some of those I downloaded off YouTube.  Then again, I'll probably get copyright dinged.

I think the http://ditch.lcwe.com URL still works.  Check that.

thanks very much for the link man! it has a ton of awesome stuff :)

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ANIMAL WARRLIOR too

Is that the match with the complete botch on the Whassup?

EDIT: The one I'm talking about is where he bounces a foot away and lands with his face in the guy's crotch. This one might be even funnier because he slides into the guy's crotch like a bowling ball which I imagine hurt like hell.

 

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  • 1 month later...
On 2/5/2017 at 10:45 AM, Attila The Hut said:

He never took it down for some reason.  I used to download all my AJPW videos from there all the time.  I might have to create a YouTube account and upload all of them.  I have over a 1000 videos.  Some of those I downloaded off YouTube.  Then again, I'll probably get copyright dinged.

I think the http://ditch.lcwe.com URL still works.  Check that.

I was amazed to discover recently that those archives are still available. I've been working on getting as much All Japan downloaded as I can, along with prime NOAH and New Japan. Even though the site has been up for years since it was last updated, it could still disappear at any moment. That's how I'm treating it, anyway.

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The All Japan google drive archive has pretty much every match/show up to the NOAH split. I spent hundreds (probably thousands) on tapes and later Ginnetty DVDs. We're spoiled now and it's totally killer.

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18 hours ago, Oyaji said:

The All Japan google drive archive has pretty much every match/show up to the NOAH split. I spent hundreds (probably thousands) on tapes and later Ginnetty DVDs. We're spoiled now and it's totally killer.

I don't have that one. I have RealHero, which has the last few years of AJ, as well as bunches of other puro. It's amazing enough on its own. But it doesn't have shows. What's the link to that AJPW drive, if it's public?

 

ETA: Never mind, google is my friend. 

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I remember around 2014 he started getting busy with work. I thought it had something to do with an election or politics. Like he'd gotten a job doing polls or something. I may be making all that up. I miss those halcyon purotopia days.

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