North American wrestling influence in other countries

[Lance Uppercut]

These days, it seems like every cool new move is probably from Japan and “stolen” by someone who watched the G1 or stardom.

How often does it go the other way?

Obviously there’s lucha and the hurricanrana. There were a crapload of Josh’s who were using the tiger faint kick in nxt and AEW. Did that come first or the 619?

All I know that I’ve seen Japan obviously influenced by NA wrestling is The royal rumble style battle Royals, and guys winning briefcases for title shots. Now that I think about it, aside from death match companies, do they even do gimmick matches there?

[Fundertaker]

Aug 24, 2023 3:28:00 GMT -5 Lance Uppercut said:

These days, it seems like every cool new move is probably from Japan and “stolen” by someone who watched the G1 or stardom.

How often does it go the other way?

Obviously there’s lucha and the hurricanrana. There were a crapload of Josh’s who were using the tiger faint kick in nxt and AEW. Did that come first or the 619?

All I know that I’ve seen Japan obviously influenced by NA wrestling is The royal rumble style battle Royals, and guys winning briefcases for title shots. Now that I think about it, aside from death match companies, do they even do gimmick matches there?

The Tiger Faint Kick comes from the original Tiger Mask as the name implies, so that came first.

The top turnbuckle flippy moves you see Japanese wrestlers do these days are mostly from American influence, aside from the Shooting Star Press.

Also, there's a lot more "entertainment style" stuff happening in Japanese wrestling and that comes straight from American influence.

[Jaws the Shark]

I think Japanese wrestling is far more influenced by American wrestling than some people realise. I used to think that Japan was its own completely separate wrestling culture, and in some ways it is, but in a lot of ways it isn't, and a lot of the characters and tropes come from American wrestling, or are at least influenced by it: the King's Road style which is pretty much viewed as the quintessential style of Japanese wrestling was all influenced by the territorial style of long, physical narrative matches, and characters like white meat babyfaces, bastard heels, blond heels, evil foreigners and others have all shown up in Japan and are probably as ubiquitous there as in the States.

Gimmick matches are pretty rare in the big men's companies, although the long defunct IWE had cage matches in the seventies, and there's been some pretty out-there ones, like the Ganryujima Island deathmatch in the eighties in NJPW. Interestingly, I think the joshi companies were far more inclined towards gimmick matches, AJW had cage matches and chain matches and all kinds of fun things.

[Bo Rida]

Japanese wrestling has allways borrowed from American, British and Mexican wrestling, hence the importance they place on excursions for young wrestlers.

DDT essentially exists as a parody of American wrestling with things like their their boss being an Austin cosplayer and the Ironman Heavymetalweight Championship belt being their version of the hardcore title with 24/7 rules. Bullet club is influenced by the nwo who themselves were influenced by a Japanese angle.

There's many of the usual and unusual gimmick matches but they tend to mostly be outside njpw and noah, cage and ladder matches are much rarer everywhere (as far as I'm aware anyway).

[Jaws the Shark]

Aug 24, 2023 4:27:49 GMT -5 Bo Rida said:

Japanese wrestling has allways borrowed from American, British and Mexican wrestling, hence the importance they place on excursions for young wrestlers.

This is an underrated influence in Japan, strong style and later the shoot/UWF style that emerged in the eighties borrowed seriously heavily from catch wrestling and wrestlers like Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson, who'd been students of Billy Riley, I think the UWF dojo was called the Snake Pit after Riley's gym.

[Bo Rida]

Aug 24, 2023 4:44:13 GMT -5 Jaws the Shark said:

Aug 24, 2023 4:27:49 GMT -5 Bo Rida said:

Japanese wrestling has allways borrowed from American, British and Mexican wrestling, hence the importance they place on excursions for young wrestlers.

This is an underrated influence in Japan, strong style and later the shoot/UWF style that emerged in the eighties borrowed seriously heavily from catch wrestling and wrestlers like Karl Gotch and Billy Robinson, who'd been students of Billy Riley, I think the UWF dojo was called the Snake Pit after Riley's gym.

Yep and on the cruiserweight style to with the original Tiger Mask and Liger spending time in Britain and/or facing British wrestlers in Japan.

[David-Arquette was in WCW 2000]

The 'American' style pretty much destroyed 'British' wrestling into the 90s. To the point where even the long running UK promotions were advertising 'American Wrestling' and tribute acts.

[XIII]

There’s a reason why Karl Gotch is still revered in Japan.  He essentially shaped the hard hitting puro style by bringing catch wrestling to Japan and helping to train Inoki and a bunch of other stars from that first wave after Rikidozan.  All of the brutal Japanese dojo training is straight out of Karl Gotch’s conditioning theory to this day.

[Bo Rida]

Oh the most recent one, despite the problems we've discussed to death women's wrestling is treated better in America than it has been previously. That's led to Japanese puro companies deciding it's time to move with the times and have women's matches on bigger cards.
Or they're being forced to due to online backlash but whatever the reason it's awkwardly happening.

That applies to other countries too.

[Dr. Bolty, Disaster Enby]

Aug 24, 2023 16:36:34 GMT -5 Bo Rida said:

Oh the most recent one, despite the problems we've discussed to death women's wrestling is treated better in America than it has been previously. That's led to Japanese puro companies deciding it's time to move with the times and have women's matches on bigger cards.
Or they're being forced to due to online backlash but whatever the reason it's awkwardly happening.

"Awkwardly happening" accurately describes Jazzy Yang getting to do three moves to end a women's tag match on a NOAH show that her father was booked on.

[James Fabiano]

Didn't FMW try to become more like Attitude Era WWF in the late 90s, hence Hayabusa becoming H and the anal explosion match?

[El Pollo Guerrera]

Aug 24, 2023 16:49:56 GMT -5 James Fabiano said:

Didn't FMW try to become more like Attitude Era WWF in the late 90s, hence Hayabusa becoming H and the anal explosion match?

I think so. After Onita retired, Kodo Fuyuki became the booker and decided to move away from 'garbage wrestling' and towards a more 'sports entertainment' promotion. They were doing romance angles with Shoichi Arai's "niece" (don't know if she really was), and a "sexually confused" wrestler named Azusa Kudo (very Goldust-like).

[Jaws the Shark]

Aug 24, 2023 5:42:51 GMT -5 David-Arquette was in WCW 2000 said:

The 'American' style pretty much destroyed 'British' wrestling into the 90s. To the point where even the long running UK promotions were advertising 'American Wrestling' and tribute acts.

The best thing about this is the early attempts to match the glitz of the WWF. Brian Dixon decided that what British wrestling needed was a rubbish ladder match held at Stringfellows for...some reason. 

The weird thing is that British wrestling ended up in this purgatory throughout the nineties where it wanted to emulate American wrestling but also couldn't really let the seventies and eighties go, so you ended up with this product that was really muddled and unfocused, and just not very good. It wasn't really until the FWA popped up in the noughties that anyone managed to really successfully do an American-style product.

There's an all-but-forgotten Britwres series from 1990 that was the brainchild of Jackie Pallo, who was aiming for "American style", which he managed to get on ITV Central. The concept is actually sound, but the presentation was seriously cheap and tacky - the one episode I've seen has interview segments taking place on sets where the design seems to have been modeled on McDonald's from the same era - and because it was so soon after wrestling got axed by ITV, the wrestlers were all Joint and All Star also-rans like Bearcat Brody and Prince Mann Singh, or extremely green blokes who shouldn't have been anywhere near a camera. So yeah, it wasn't great.

[Mozenrath]

Rikidozan essentially modeling how he did business on what he learned from North American (and Hawaiian) wrestling, and training Giant Baba and Inoki, means that the cornerstone of puro is basically American influenced. It just quite obviously developed into something unique over time, particularly due to Baba and Inoki having their own ideas on how to compete with one another and find a unique angle from which to do that from. Both definitely understood the value of gaijins, though, both as dastardly heels or white meat babyfaces so you don't get TOO xenophobic about it.