Mitsuharu Misawa was a Japanese professional wrestler and promoter. He is primarily known for his 18-year stint with All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), and for forming Pro Wrestling Noah in 2000. In the early 1990s, Misawa gained fame alongside Toshiaki Kawada, Kenta Kobashi, and Akira Taue, who came to be nicknamed AJPW's "Four Pillars of Heaven", and whose matches developed the ōdō style of puroresu and received significant critical acclaim. Despite never working in the United States during the 1990s, Misawa had a significant stylistic influence upon independent wrestling, through the popularity of his work among tape-traders worldwide including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
Steven Franklin Williams, best known under the ring name "Dr. Death" Steve Williams, was an American collegiate and professional wrestler and collegiate football player. He was known for his tenures in World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), and is a three-time professional wrestling world heavyweight champion, having won both the Herb Abrams and Bill Watts versions of the UWF World Heavyweight Championship and the AJPW Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship.
John Stanley "Stan" Hansen II, best known as Stan "The Lariat" Hansen, is an American retired professional wrestler.
Genichiro Shimada, better known as Genichiro Tenryu is a Japanese retired professional wrestler and professional wrestling promoter. At age 13, he entered sumo wrestling and stayed there for 13 years, after which he turned to Western-style professional wrestling. "Tenryu" was his shikona. He had two stints with All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), where he spent the majority of his career while also promoting Super World of Sports (SWS), Wrestle Association R (WAR) and Tenryu Project. He is widely considered to be one of the greatest professional wrestlers of all time. At the time of his retirement, professional wrestling journalist and historian Dave Meltzer wrote that "one could make a strong case [that Tenryu was] between the fourth and sixth biggest native star" in the history of Japanese professional wrestling.
Mitsuo Yoshida, better known by his ring name Riki Choshu, is a South Korean-Japanese retired professional wrestler who is best known for his longtime work in New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) as both a wrestler and a booker. He is considered one of Japan’s most influential wrestlers for his work in the 1980s and 1990s and is known as the first wrestler to popularize the Sasori-Gatame, better known in English as the Scorpion Deathlock or Sharpshooter. After leaving NJPW in 2002, he formed Fighting World of Japan Pro Wrestling (WJ), but eventually returned to New Japan in October 2005 as a site foreman, booker and part-time wrestler. Choshu once again left NJPW in 2010 and primarily worked in Tatsumi Fujinami’s Dradition, as well as his own self-produced Power Hall events as a freelancer. Choshu was a second generation Zainichi Korean. He was naturalized in 2016.
Atsushi Onita is a Japanese actor, politician, and semi-retired professional wrestler. He is best known for his work in Frontier Martial-Arts Wrestling (FMW) and is credited with introducing the deathmatch style of professional wrestling to Japan. He is a former All Asia Tag Team Champions alongside Yoshitatsu.
Maunakea Mossman is an American semi-retired professional wrestler, better known under his stage name Taiyō Kea (太陽ケア). Best known for his work in All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), he is the only wrestler in AJPW's history to have held the Triple Crown Heavyweight Championship, the World Tag Team Championship and the World Junior Heavyweight Championship.
Isao Takagi who goes by the ring name Arashi (嵐), is a Japanese professional wrestler from Moriguchi, Osaka Prefecture, who works for Dradition. He has previously worked for All Japan Pro Wrestling.
Shiro Koshinaka is a Japanese professional wrestler who has competed in All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) and Wrestle Association "R" (WAR) during the 1980s and 1990s. He was also the first IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion.
Masanobu Fuchi is a Japanese professional wrestler signed to All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), where he is also a director and the co-head booker. Fuchi has exclusively worked for All Japan since his debut in 1974, and holds the record for the longest World Junior Heavyweight Championship reign at 1,309 days. Fuchi became a freelancer in 2009, but officially re-signed with AJPW in 2013 as both a director and wrestler, making him the longest tenured member of the All Japan roster.
George Hines is an American retired professional wrestler, best known by his ringname Jackie Fulton, who competed in regional and independent promotions including the American Wrestling Association, East Coast Championship Wrestling, the National Wrestling Alliance, World Championship Wrestling and, most notably, his brief but memorable stint in Smoky Mountain Wrestling where he teamed with his real life brother Bobby Fulton as The Fantastics.
The Ikki Kajiwara Memorial Show was a Japanese professional wrestling event held in 1988, and again in 1997, in memory of author and manga writer Ikki Kajiwara. Although Kajiwara was not directly connected to puroresu wrestling, he is credited with having created the Tiger Mask character, which has been a popular masked wrestler portrayed by four different Japanese wrestlers in All-Japan Pro Wrestling and New Japan Pro-Wrestling since the early 1980s.
The Giant Baba Memorial Six Man Tag Team Tournament, or simply the Giant Baba Six Man Cup, was a professional wrestling memorial event produced by the All-Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) promotion, which took place from April 13 to May 12, 2002, at the Nippon Budokan, Iwate Prefectural Gym, Niigata City Gym and Korakuen Hall in Tokyo, Japan. It was the third and final event honoring AJPW founder Shohei "Giant" Baba, the previous shows being the Giant Baba Memorial Spectacular and Giant Baba Memorial Cup in January 2001 and 2002 respectively. Seven professional wrestling matches were held over a three-week period, with both the tournament semi-finals and final match held at Korakuen Hall.
Hirokazu Nagai, better known as Mitsuya Nagai, is a Japanese professional wrestler and former mixed martial artist and kickboxer. A professional MMA competitor from 1991 until 2013, he fought the majority of his career in Fighting Network RINGS. Once a student of legendary professional wrestlers Satoru Sayama and Akira Maeda, Nagai holds notable victories over former King of Pancrase Super Heavyweight Champion Tsuyoshi Kosaka, Nobuaki Kakuda, four-time world kickboxing champion Andre Mannaart, Russian sambo champion Mikhail Ilyukhin, RINGS King of Kings 2000 Tournament runner up Valentijn Overeem, ADCC bronze medallist and RINGS Light Heavyweight title contender Chris Haseman, and Pancrase veteran Takaku Fuke. He also fought for K-1 in kickboxing.
The Champion Carnival is a professional wrestling tournament held by All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW). The tournament is also known by the nickname Haru no Saiten and is sometimes abbreviated to CC. Created by AJPW founder Giant Baba, the tournament has been held annually since 1973 and is the longest-running singles tournament in professional wrestling, while also ranking as the most prestigious event in the AJPW calendar. It is considered a successor to the World League, held by Japan Pro Wrestling Alliance (JWA) between 1959 and 1972, predating the New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) G1 Climax tournament by a year.
Wrestle Kingdom in Tokyo Dome was a professional wrestling pay-per-view (PPV) event co-produced by the New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) and All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) promotions, which took place at the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Japan on January 4, 2007. It was the 16th January 4 Tokyo Dome Show and the first held under the new "Wrestle Kingdom" name.
Destiny was the first Destiny professional wrestling event produced by Pro Wrestling Noah. The event took place on July 18, 2005 at the Tokyo Dome in Tokyo, Japan, and marked Noah's second event to take place in the arena, after 2004's Departure.
The 2000 All Japan Pro Wrestling mass exodus was an incident in the Japanese All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) professional wrestling promotion that took place throughout May and June 2000, and culminated in 24 of the 26 contracted native wrestlers leaving the promotion. Led by Mitsuharu Misawa, they later formed their own promotion, Pro Wrestling Noah.
The Wrestling Summit was a professional wrestling supercard show that was produced and scripted collaboratively between the US-based World Wrestling Federation (WWF) and the Japanese All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW) and New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) promotions. The joint venture show took place on April 13, 1990 in the Tokyo Dome, in Tokyo, Japan and reportedly drew 53,742 spectators. The event was the only time the three promotions produced a joint show, although NJPW and WWF had previously worked together in the 1970s and '80s.
This is a list chronicling the history of professional wrestling at the Tokyo Dome. The Tokyo Dome stadium in Bunkyo, Tokyo, Japan has hosted a number of professional wrestling supercard events over the years. These events often air on pay-per-view (PPV) or are recorded for a future television broadcast. New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW) is the promotion which has held the most shows at the Tokyo Dome, including the very first professional wrestling event in the Dome – Battle Satellite in Tokyo Dome on April 24, 1989. NJPW also holds their annual January 4 Tokyo Dome Show event, currently promoted under the Wrestle Kingdom name – Wrestle Kingdom is considered NJPW's biggest show of the year, their version of WrestleMania. The first January 4 show, Super Warriors in Tokyo Dome, took place in 1992 and has been held each year since then. With night two of Wrestle Kingdom 15, NJPW has held a total of 55 shows in the Tokyo Dome.
