Kaientai Dojo: 3rd November 2008

I've skipped past a couple of K-Dojo shows since the August show, mainly because there wasn't much of particular interest. The September show has the Genkirin vs. Omega elimination tag which got me interested in Kunio Toshima - he's a guy who doesn't look the part at all, but his offence is ever so slightly rough around the edges and has a high energy and comes across a little bit like an everyman figure, especially fighting against some as douchy as Yuji Hino. He could be useful higher up the card, which I thought this match might have been the beginning of, but it doesn't appear to have happened. October had a big singles between Mashimo and JOE, which was fine, but nothing worth writing about.

Anyway, this November show has a bunch of good stuff. The opener was an exercise in putting over Hino as a.) big, b.) powerful, c.) awesome in all ways. He beats Raito with a lariat in fifteen seconds, then they do a restart. Asahi wants to stop Hino from coming in and ruining everyone's fun by doing the same thing again, but fails, leading to some amusing dissent between the two. The whole match is built around the premise that Hino could beat anyone with his lariat given half a chance, so the other team avoid him at all costs. Honestly, I read the results for this and thought it sounded stupid, but watching it was a blast, and a surprisingly smart one as well.

My favourite match from the show was the double title match between Makoto Oishi and MEN's Teioh. This was a match which had a great build to the finish because of what had been set-up in the previous months - MEN's beat Oishi in August with a number of backdrop drivers and Oishi had established his flash rollup as a match winner in the following months. They re-establish this early on, but it's too soon to get a win. Teioh dominates the middle of this, with Oishi fighting back which works as this whole run since June has been about setting Oishi up as a serious top guy. There's a couple of nice sequences here - Teioh blocking the rollup with the stretch armbar submission was good.

The last two matches were enjoyable enough. The tag title match was clipped down to mainly a long sprint, which featured another entertaining Toshima outing. The main event was Mashimo vs. Mochizuki. This started pretty well, with Mochizuki going after Mashimo's leg. Then Mashimo came back and went after Mochi's leg. Then both guys remembered that their legs were actually fine, and they fought down the stretch. I stop caring about the technical merits after six minutes when I realised how this was going to go, and enjoyed the spots and kicks. Mashimo pulls out a springboard SPIN FLY KICK, which I can't remember him doing before. A competitive indie title match - nothing great or smart, but enough effort to make it fun.