All Japan Pro Wrestling

It might come to a real surprise to many readers of this blog that when I was younger, I was a big professional wrestling fan. So when Ranie’s friend Akihiro Tanaka invited me to watch the All Japan Pro-Wrestling show in nearby Yaizu last Sunday, I was pretty excited to go with him.

AJPW is a wrestling major league, with the some of the biggest international names in wrestling making their careers in Japan through out the years, including Ric Flair, Stan Hansen and the Funk Brothers. As well, it was the home for legendary Japanese names like Giant Baba, Great Kabuki and Jumbo Tsuruta.

All Japan Pro Wrestling star Muto Keiji

The auditorium, which had a crowd of about 400, was freezing, as was the atmosphere. The Japanese audiences are very quiet and reserved. They would politely golf-clap for a maneuver which had me awe-struck and yelling.

There were some former WWF wrestlers like D Lo Brown, Chuck Palumbo and Bull Buchanan performing at the show. But the highlight for me was standing about a meter away from Muto Keiji, one of Japan’s most popular wrestlers ever, who wrestled in North America during the 1980s under the name The Great Muta.