Ladies and gentlemen, after much wait and much hype, the time has come! New Japan Pro Wrestling brings you Wrestle Kingdom 14 – two days of it, in fact! The WrestleMania equivalent of Japan’s biggest promotion becomes all the bigger, starting tonight! This is sure to be one of the most incredible weekends in wrestling history! I’m Jordan Huie of the Overtimer and I’ll be here with my coverage of the shows as they happen!
With all my duties covering WWE and AEW I haven’t really had much time to talk about New Japan this past year, but I am a massive fan and I can’t let a stop at the Tokyo Dome go by without getting in on it! So let’s take a look at what we have on tap for Night 1!
Stardom Special Match: Mayu Iwatani & Arisa Hoshiki vs. Giulia & Hana Kimura
This is, of course, a Dark match so we won’t be seeing it unless it’s specially released in some form after the fact. But it’s still worth talking about it, because it’s very much a – as it says – special match, one that got a fair bit of buzz just for existing.
New Japan does not have a women’s division. Women wrestling on any of their shows is very rare, as is having any significant involvement in storylines. Effectively, it’s a facet that just isn’t there in the promotion. But when Bushiroad – New Japan’s parent company – acquired one of the most reputable Joshi promotions around in Stardom, that prompted much speculation that this might be changing.
Personally speaking, I’d love nothing more than to see New Japan introduce a Joshi division, but I wouldn’t expect it to happen anytime soon.
The very concept of men’s and women’s divisions isn’t really a thing in Japan for the most part, with promotions either being made solely for men or solely for women. Exceptions to this rule tend to be the more oddball and wacky companies like DDT. Even then, they generally go full intergender rather than dedicated men’s and women’s titles. It’s just one of the more cultural differences between Japanese products and much of the rest of the world.
Still, it’s a nice little friendly nod to what is now effectively a sister promotion, if you’ll pardon the pun. I’d like them to have more of a spotlight than this, but hey… baby steps.
For the match itself, well, we won’t be seeing it… but for Stardom it’s a major one in the sense that the World of Stardom Champion Mayu Iwatani is teaming with Wonder of Stardom Champion Arisa Hoshiki. Effectively that’d be their world and IC champs on one team. While it’s possible that this match will be used to setup future title matches, a significant dark match is still a dark match at the end of the day. I can’t help but think the champs win here. Putting them over strong seems like the best way to introduce Stardom to a crowd that’s perhaps never seen them before in the Tokyo Dome. So yeah, Mayu and Arisa over.
