MID-Tier Match Reviews: Jun Akiyama vs. Yoshinari Ogawa for NOAH’s World Title

This is a match I’ve wanted to write about for a while because it’s such an interesting case study in booking complexity. It was a match born out of necessity rather than organic need. It was an example of trying to satisfy multiple and at times competing priorities during a period marked by a frantic need to improve business as much as possible. It showed just how hard it is to please everyone and no matter what decision a wrestling booker makes someone is going to be unhappy. Granted, most of us know these things already but it’s refreshing to see these ideals applied outside of the English-speaking world as well. And since NOAH was once an adored promotion atop the world and Jun Akiyama was once considered a future ace, it’s interesting to see where things went wrong for them both.

The Story

To Misawa and his followers, NOAH was meant to be the home of their own wrestling ideals. Free from Baba’s constraints, Misawa’s core philosophy was “Freedom and Conviction”, meaning that wrestlers could pursue whatever interpretation of pro wrestling they wanted so long as they backed up their decisions. Much of NOAH’s core audience, however, wanted more of the old Shitenno style, especially with three of the Four Heavenly Kings in NOAH. So Misawa’s decision making had to juggle these various interests and desires. At first Misawa carefully balanced the two ideologies with a mix of conventional booking and angles that never would’ve been seen in All Japan. Over the course of NOAH’s two-night inaugural event, Akiyama submitted Misawa in two minutes, destroyed Taue, turned on partner Kobashi and then beat Kobashi clean the following night. Kobashi got a measure of revenge four months later (more on that later) but once he was off for much-needed knee surgery, plans went ahead with building Akiyama up as NOAH’s undisputed ace. Akiyama continued his winning ways in NOAH and then in July 2001 he beat Misawa clean once again to win the GHC Heavyweight Championship. So far so good. Yet once Akiyama reached the top therein lay further challenges. The quality of his challengers didn’t translate into runaway success, despite NOAH’s top champion headlining NJPW’s 2002 January 4 Tokyo Dome show. Worse, everything NOAH did throughout 2001 and most of 2002 was wrapped in a sort of holding pattern as everyone was waiting for Kobashi to return. He came back in February 2002 but then reinjured his knees and had to take another five months off. Facing a dearth of top challengers and not wanting to centre the promotion on himself once again, Misawa decided to let his right-hand man challenge for the title. That man being the stick-thin little shit extraordinaire Yoshinari Ogawa.

Despite being a mainstay of AJPW’s junior heavyweight division and taking part in two outstanding tag matches with Misawa and Burning in 1999, Ogawa suffered from an overwhelming lack of aura. He didn’t look like a credible threat or someone with championship calibre. With his greasy hair, nonexistent physique, and arsenal of tricky techniques, Ogawa earned the appropriate nickname “Rat Boy” and played that up whenever he could. Yet despite being such a unique character in his company, Ogawa had absolutely no credibility as a heavyweight champion. Yes, he could do great counters. Yes, he could chain wrestle on the mat impressively enough. And yes, he was great at generating cheap heat. But he had no big wins or credibility going into this match, with his most recent singles matches being against guys his size in midcard matches. How could he possibly translate this complete lack of momentum into a win against the biggest healthy star in the company and the only man to beat three of the fabled Four Kings in 24 hours?

The Match

This took place on April 7, 2002.

This is for Akiyama’s GHC Heavyweight Championship. The bell rings and Ogawa hits first with a dropkick. He blocks a bunch of counters and lands a DDT. He follows with four Backdrop suplexes and a fifth bridging version for a two-count. Ogawa misses a corner shoulderblock and falls to ringside. Akiyama drops him on the metal barricade and does his apron-to-barricade kneedrop. In the ring, Akiyama pulls a page out of Ogawa’s playbook with an eye poke and a DDT of his own and a diving elbow to the back of the head. Ogawa blocks an Exploder suplex and lands a bunch of flash pins to a series of two-counts. Akiyama reverses one of these flash covers into his own and then drops Ogawa with a clothesline. Akiyama gets a near-fall off two Exploder suplexes so he teaches the Wrist-Clutch version. But Ogawa counters with a sudden cradle which gets three! Ogawa pins Akiyama with a counter cradle!

Winner and NEW GHC Heavyweight Champion after 4:20: Yoshinari Ogawa

You can watch the match here.

Review

On paper, everything about this situation made complete logical sense. NOAH’s audience had been thoroughly conditioned to expect long, taxing, heavyweight epics in title matches, meaning that there was no reason to engage with the opening actions beyond the odd polite applause. Ogawa’s fluke win threw all of that out the window and blindsided everyone watching. Shock value aside, there was also a practical reason for this as well: despite its time-tested quality, the Shitenno style was unsustainable long-term. Akiyama has written several times that he doesn’t see himself as being on the level of the Four Heavenly Kings, that he prefers Toshiaki Kawada’s way of thinking which involves putting more emotion and meaning into fewer moves, and that the head-spiky nature of what the Kings did should not be replicated. There was a time and place for it but it was never meant to be repeated ad infinitum, hence his willingness to move with the flow of the wrestling world rather than against it. This meant doing angles, adding MMA, cutting promos, and adding other elements that Baba forbade back in All Japan. Having all these 20-, 30-, and 40-minute hard-hitting wars was something only guys like Misawa and Kobashi could pull off regularly and since both were out of the picture for the moment, something like this was a much-needed palette cleanser for everyone involved.

That said, this match suffered because it absolutely killed Akiyama’s credibility. In a promotion driven by realism and a stronger emphasis on logic than most wrestling promotions, Ogawa’s win was a bit too much of a fluke. It was too surreal to be taken seriously: although Ogawa’s decision to blindside Akiyama and attack him while his guard was completely down was the right call, his offense still came across as pitiful. Imagine watching James Ellsworth suplexing John Cena more than once. No amount of hammering the viewer over the head with this idea of him being an underdog would make those actions convincing or believable. I get it, this was an attempt to shake things up and drum up intrigue. But despite those good intentions, there was simply too much of a disconnect between the business’s needs and its audience’s wants.

Final Rating: **1/2

This was a good idea on paper but a failure in execution since it did little to help NOAH’s fortunes and a lot to damage one of the people involved. Akiyama’s credibility took a nasty hit here and tarnished his image to an audience that had preconceptions of him from the 1990s. I get wanting to try something different or hot-shot a genuine surprise, but NOAH wasn’t really the place for that. Not only did Ogawa’s win come out of nowhere, so too did his title shot. Prior to this shot Ogawa’s singles wins were limited to junior heavyweight and random undercarders. So him winning devalued both Akiyama and the title in the eyes of NOAH’s traditional and respect-driven audience.

Then again, doing the title change presuming that Akiyama wasn’t drawing could’ve been avoided had Akiyama beaten Kobashi in December 2000. Even though their match on December 23, 2000 is, in my opinion, an outstanding King’s Road classic, it had the wrong conclusion with Kobashi evening the score instead of losing to Akiyama a second time. That was NOAH’s golden opportunity to really cement Akiyama as their ace and give fans more reason to expect an even bigger clash once Kobashi inevitably returned. Instead, it became business as usual before 2001 even began. As a result, Akiyama went into his world title challenge against Misawa in July 2001 “incomplete”, i.e. with lingering issues given his inability to beat Kobashi a second time.

So what we’re left with is a warning that highlights both the need to actually build challengers up with wins at the right times against the right opponents, and that doing a swerve for its own sake rarely pays off all the way.

Thanks for reading.