What This Blog Is

I've been watching Japanese wrestling since late 2001. I first became interested by watching WCW programming in the late 90s. They would often bring New Japan talent in and I found guys like Chono, Liger and Muta to be really interesting. I was also just fascinated by the idea of a foreign wrestling company. Games like Fire Pro Wrestling further added to this curiosity.

Fastforward to college and I took the plunge and bought the 1994 and 1995 Super J Cup shows. If you haven't followed Japanese wrestling those are the two shows most Americans start with when getting into the Japanese scene. I was pretty instantly hooked. I started buying New Japan shows on a regular basis and I've stuck with New Japan pretty consistently since 2001.

All Japan is a very different animal. I've seen the big bad matches from the 90s that get all the hype and praise. But I've never really taken the time to get to know the promotion. I've never watched the promotion with any kind of context to it.

That's where this blog comes in. I saw that I could get All Japan TV dating back to 1984. This was really appealing to me because it was just a new adventure for me to take. I could watch Jumbo Tsuruta dominate the 1980s and pass the torch over to Misawa and company in the 1990s. I could get a real feel for the context of All Japan over a really long period of time.

I decided to watch a number of the All Japan Classics DVDs first. I wanted to get an idea of what All Japan was like during the 1970s with Giant Baba on top. Once I worked my way through some of those I was going to start All Japan TV starting in 1984.

This blog is going to chronicle my travels through the world of All Japan Pro Wrestling. I intend to post videos of the matches when it's possible and to give some history lessons when I can. I don't intend for this to be a review of these matches and shows. I'm not going to do play by play and I'm not going to hand out star ratings. When I talk about matches, my plan is to just discuss what I liked and didn't like and maybe throw in some context when I can.

My goal is to update this blog a couple of times a week. I'll probably watch an episode or two of the TV a week when I get to it.