Joseph and Colette Discuss Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Riki Choshu
NJPW Ace Watch rolls on as Colette and Joseph talk about one of the great rivalries of all time, Tatsumi Fujinami vs. Riki Choshu!
If you're a certain kind of wrestling dork, you've probably at least heard about the Greatest Wrestler Ever project, where once every 10 years a bunch of us submit our top 100 and, from the bubbling muck of obsession and blindspots, a kind of consensus pick for the Greatest Wrestler Ever emerges. Both Joseph and I submitted a ballot this year, and while Tatsumi Fujinami ranked quite high on Joseph's, he was nowhere to be found on mine. We're four years in on BIG EGG and are still discovering huge gaps between the two of us, if not in taste (Fujinami is very much my taste), then in knowledge (I am very much unaware of many, many wrestlers).
While the official anniversary of BIG EGG is likely better observed in November, when the first essay on this site went up, we did recently pass the four year anniversary of the announcement of this project. I love that it's still possible for these differences between Joseph and I to exist — I know more about things like Nitro-era WCW, he knows more about New Japan, and when we get together to talk about this stuff, we re-learn, again and again, our preferences and biases, which align so often that it's fun to see where they split hard.
This is not one of those weeks. Where Joseph and I disagree here is as to which of Fujinami and Choshu's 1988 matches is better, the one in May, or the one we covered together this week. That doesn't matter for the MASTERLIST, except to say, as I do somewhere beyond the paywall, that most wrestlers would kill to have two matches in their career as good as the two Fujinami and Choshu had over a one month stretch. If any of you have a line on the tag team material that exists between the two matches, please reach out.
Colette Arrand
UP NEXT: We're jumping forward a decade to welcome Shinya Hashimoto back to BIG EGG. Here he's chasing after the one accolade that's eluded him throughout his career, winning the G1 Climax. To do it, he'll need to get through Kazuo Yamazaki. Will Big Hash prevail, or will shoot style wrestling have its day? It's New Japan, so shoot style is probably gonna end up in the dirt with a bullet between its eyes, but I will endure. I must.
Colette Arrand
Joseph Montecillo
One thing that's interesting with how I went about making the selections for this month is that I ended up picking moments that highlight New Japan aces at fairly triumphant moments. Inoki's probably the one outlier here as countout victory over Andre is maybe not the most obvious defining victory. But this one with Fujinami overcoming Choshu is a real special one. It's a delight, and maybe slightly underdiscussed because it's not included on New Japan World as far as I know. We both watched the two 1988 matches for this week and I'm so glad you did which is why I want to ask how coming in at this point of their rivalry served as introduction to their dynamic.
Joseph Montecillo
Colette Arrand
I imagine there are some subtle nuances to it that I'm not picking up, like how things were before Choshu bailed for All Japan or, for that matter, how he was typically received outside of situations like this, but I can't imagine there being a higher peak for them than this? Maybe in match quality, I guess, but not in vibe? You have two things running at once here, which is the long-running tension between two men who are at the very top of the industry at this point, and you have the notion of promotional pride and honor on the line, as if Fujinami is defending Strong Style from a black-hearted betrayer, not just his title from a challenger. Taken as a whole, it's an incredible means of establishing Fujinami as having made it as champion — when the bell rings and he emerges victorious in the second match, you want to run through walls for him.
Colette Arrand