THE BEST YEAR OF WRESTLING IN JAPAN

Tiger Mask vs. Kuniaki Kobayashi

It is only my personal opinion, I think that the most exciting year of wrestling in Japan was the year of the Tiger Mask boom, in short, that was in 1982. I am a crazy fan of ALL JAPAN, but to my chagrin, NEW JAPAN was more popular than ALL JAPAN with wrestling fans. In those days I was a high-school student, and I was watching marvelous fights on TV with all my heart. The TV program of NEW JAPAN was on the air at eight on Friday night, and ALL JAPAN was at half past five on Saturday evening.

The popularity of NEW JAPAN reached the peak, because there was a Tiger Mask boom. Even a person who didn't know wrestling paid attention to Tiger's fights. A new star Tatsumi Fujinami kept WWF International Championship, and his rival Riki Choshu said to Fujinami "I don't want to play a part of a loser !" and challenged Fujinami. The ace of NEW JAPAN, Antonio Inoki established a new championship 'IWGP', Hulk Hogan, Andre The Giant, Adrian Adonis, and Dino Bravo took part in that league. And The Butcher moved to NEW JAPAN from ALL JAPAN.

On the other side, I was enjoying ALL JAPAN's fights, too. Though The Butcher went away, Stan Hansen suddenly joined in, fought against Baba very hard, and formed a terrible tag team with Brody. The popularity of the Funk brothers was in excellent, but Hansen said to them "You are fossils of Texas !!" Famous wrestlers came from USA one after another, a young star Jumbo Tsuruta challenged great champions, Race, Nick, and Flair. In that year, Tsuruta defeated Race for the first time with Flying Body Scissors Drop.

I liked young and a little unreliable Tsuruta. In the next year, He got International Championship from Brody. And in 1984, he defeated Nick and wrested the belt of AWA, at last he became one of the great wrestlers.