NJPW G1 Climax 29 profiles: Shingo Takagi, Toru Yano

We’re taking a closer look at each competitor before heading into New Japan’s annual double round-robin tournament, the G1 Climax, that will air all month on New Japan World and AXS TV.

Shingo Takagi

Shingo Takagi has already had a tremendous year with New Japan and it’s only July. The Dragon debuted last October at NJPW’s King of Pro Wrestling, where he was introduced as Los Ingobernables de Japon’s new pareja in lieu of the injured Hiromu Takashi. He was welcomed by the NJPW crowd without qualms and was booked as a nigh-invulnerable wrecking machine, winning the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Tag Team titles with BUSHI at Wrestle Kingdom 13 just four months after signing with the company.

Takagi’s singles match coming-out party in NJPW was this past Spring, where he stomped out every competitor in this year’s Best of the Super Juniors 26 tournament until the finals when he fell to Will Ospreay in a masterpiece of a match last month.

Despite his first loss in New Japan, Takagi’s momentum hasn’t slowed much since officially going freelance last September. He was more or less freelancing for much of 2018 before officially leaving his home company, the high-speed, lucha-infused Dragon Gate out of Kobe.

Takagi’s journey from Dragon Gate began just over a year ago in All Japan Pro Wrestling’s prestigious Champion Carnival where finished with eight points, or a total of four wins, and just weeks later, he was booked in Dragon Gate’s single-elimination King of Gate tournament, where he finished with four points. Months after that, Takagi took part in Pro Wrestling Guerrilla’s Battle of Los Angeles, arguably the hottest two-day indie tournament in the United States, and made it to the final three-way match where he and Bandido fell to Jeff Cobb and turned even more Western heads before making the jump to New Japan in Fall.

The big takeaway here is that since last April, Takagi has already been in four singles tournaments in Japan, grueling ones, and has come out of them more or less unscathed, and his BOSJ 26 run will be remembered for a long while. What this proves is that not only is Takagi ready for his first G1, but also there couldn’t be a better fit for the mother of pro wrestling singles tournaments, the G1, than the Dragon.

Toru Yano (NEVER Openweight Six Man Tag Team Champion)

The more time you spend thinking about it, the easier it is to realize that Toru Yano is the most polarizing wrestling in the G1 Climax this year — as per usual.

Most Western fans tend to love his irreverence or loathe his in-ring irony. Some fans even claim that Yano is the “best part of the G1,” which can only be interpreted as a mistranslation of them actually trying to say “We need bathroom breaks!” While Yano isn’t a bad wrestler, he’s mostly a comedy wrestler now and has been for a while. He was a top-class amateur wrestler at university, though you’d hardly ever believe that if you saw him today. It feels like he’s been on auto-pilot for a few years now, with the turnbuckle and DVD schticks already feeling beyond played out.

Despite the aforementioned no-fun description above, Yano does bring to the G1 an important function: losing. The G1 needs losers if Gedo and company’s goal is to get certain wrestlers over with their audience, and the simplest way of doing that is having them win lots of matches in a tournament. Yano has nothing to lose at this point, so regardless of how anyone feels about Yano’s character, he serves a purpose here. He’s there to get others over, to be the foil during when the booking committee needs him to be.

Is a comedy/dupe wrestler necessary in these tournaments? That’s a question for another time, but one way of avoiding monotony would be to simply book a different role player. A great example of this working out would be DOUKI’s last-minute edition to the BOSJ tournament, which turned out very well for him and for the quality of the tournament.

But again, and regardless of Yano-naysayers (like myself), he’s in for the long haul this summer. If you’re not used to him already, get used to him, and hopefully he might pull out a gem or two like he did a few summers ago with Kenny Omega.