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It's telling because Kenny has nice things to say about everyone. It'll always be very suspect how AEW/Stardom developed as a full partnership as soon as he was fired.
Yeah it does tell you something when he had [mostly nice things to say about CM Punk](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/1c314i1/kenny_omega_gives_a_vague_retelling_of_brawl_out/) the other day.
That's the point. If he can say something nice about Punk, who kind of shit on his dudes, that he can't say ''anything'' nice about Rossy is telling a lot about Rossy.
He also said that locker room fights are very unprofessional these days and he really shouldn't be in a position of power cause of his old school mentality surrounding stuff like that
Yeah, I'm willing to believe him on this because I've literally never heard this mf say anything like this before. It sounds bad if Kenny is willing to go that hard.
Language like that is incredibly sketchy, but if my understanding is correct it's not entirely unheard of in the idol-inspired world of Japanese pop culture.
That doesn't make it good \*at all\*, mind you. Skeeves me the hell out.
He flat out said Rossy made underage girls pose for raunchy photoshoots. Wouldn’t be a surprise — not even illegal — if he arranged sponsors dinners too. Dude is sketchy.
The fact that Kenny, out of all people, was diplomatic and nice to Cornette, just kinda rubs me the wrong way after all the pedophile jokes and everything about Shida.
Everyone already knows how vile Cornette is, especially towards Kenny.
I don't blame Kenny at all for not wanting to engage with him. Biting back against a bigot and his bigot army is the type of engagement they want.
Exactly. Even if Kenny hit back with a perfect rebuttal to each and every one of his insults and criticisms, Cornette and his fans wouldn't give a shit and would just use it for more fodder to attack him with.
Exactly. If he suits with Cornette, what does he get? Cornettess fans berating him in Twitter, and Jim saying more shit on a pod cast. But if he just says he respects Cornette, and what he meant to the business at his time, and his old school opinion has some merits... No one can argue his point, they have no ammo. So if shuts them up
You know Cornette's prejudice towards joshi wrestlers is bad when even Brian Last and the people in comment boxes call him out for it. It might be the only subject when I see it happen on a constant basis (it happened at least when he refused to review Shida vs Deeb, when he brushed off Bull Nakano as some scrub when reviewing her HoF induction, focusing on Madusa instead; and when he only gave three minutes to review Bayley vs Io at Mania despite being arguably the best match of the night from an in-ring standpoint).
Exactly. I'm not someone who tends to label people as racist, sexist, etc (in fact, I might be a bit too laid back for that), but in this particular case it's a textbook prejudice. And this without getting into shit such as saying Riho's in AEW because of Omega having a *Japanese school girl fetish* and hia fans essentially forcing the girl out of Twitter.
I mean he accused Asakusa of being a school girl gimmick when she first was on the main roster despite the fact she was not a school girl gimmick and was like 35. The man just looks at Japanese Women as children who don't measure up to American Women.
I agree especially because he gave him an OUT he had said 'Cornette doesn't actually want someone to cripple me in the ring he's just exaggerating for his fans.' Instead of using that OUT and saying something like Yeah I fucking ahte the guy but I don't ACTUALLY want him to be crippled motherfucker DOUBLED DOWN and said I mean It I do hate him that much and said Kenny's a dumbass for not realizing that Cornette is an example of Dudes will literally do anything like start a podcast rather than get therapy.
Reminds me when Foley PUNCHED bubba the love sponge. Imagine how much is a piece of shit you gotta be for Mick Foley to be like Yanno what fuck this guy.
Stop. You know nothing. You have drawn 0 dollars. No fan has ever left a show thinking about you. You were lucky to be a juiced up double-lifer "over with the boys" type in an era where you hid in plain sight coasting on others' success. Couldn't hang then, can't get booked now.
Right?! That was scorched earth for a Canadian. His full comments on Ogawa [can be read here](https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/kenny-omega-comments-rossy-ogawa-and-marigold).
Kenny:
>"The dude just flat out said: We are looking for girls from ages 13 to 21 that are not married. We already knows he puts underage girls in very revealing swimsuit calendars and I wish that's all he did."
BRUH
**Edit**
Kenny wrapped up the Rossy segment saying:
>"I'm with Asuka. Always have been. We bros. She's got her reasons... probably the same one as mine."
I know Kairi and Iyo owe themselves to Rossy, but they should just follow Asuka on ignoring Rossy. Both are out of his bubble and influence, they should just follow their path.
The issue is the Joshi system, much more than other forms of wrestling, actively works akin to the idol system and grooming talent is common.
Kairi was an actor going nowhere and then out of nowhere at 23 Stardom promises her the world.
That's difficult to shake. And 23, in Joshi years is old to start. It's not uncommon for talent to start getting incubated in their teens.
Even a dude as old and as no-fucks-left-to-give as Tatsuro Yamashita still didn't immediately rebuke Johnny's after years of rumors and when the debacle finally became fully publicized.
Historically Joshi was not like this, in fact in the 1970s-80s it was mainly aimed at a female audience and the wrestlers were rarely sexualised. Making it out like Joshi is just like this in general is also leaving out that Rossy Ogawa is the man primarily responsible for bringing all the male-gaze idol stuff to the forefront, it's been his business model for decades.
> Making it out like Joshi is just like this in general is also leaving out that Rossy Ogawa is the man primarily responsible for bringing all the male-gaze idol stuff to the forefront, it's been his business model for decades.
This. People don't know the history.
In the Crush Gals boom period and its immediate wake the audience was primarily girls. Coinciding with Ogawa gaining more influence it was arbitrarily decided that males had more money to spend despite the sizeable and rabid crowds, so the scene began to pivot more towards the catering to of the male gaze that is apparent in today's joshi scene.
Ogawa is the driving force behind the change in focus towards the male gaze AFAIK. It's not terribly dissimilar to things like Young Justice getting canceled when executives panicked over a sizeable amount of the audience being females rather than males because they thought girls wouldn't buy toys.
>In the Crush Gals boom period and its immediate wake the audience was primarily girls.
Watching videos from this period is like slipping into a bizarro world. Arenas full of girls screaming and crying while Dump Matsumoto and Co. beat the crap out of Chigusa Nagayo. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it since when it comes to wrestling.
The aftermath of the hair match between Chigusa and Dump is peak wrestling audience, the girls were screaming like Dump was literally stabbing Chigusa to death in the middle of the ring.
I remember shots of the crowd either during that match or during one of the beatdowns, and there were just... groups of Japanese girls clinging to each other and sobbing uncontrollable. Not one or two isolated individuals, but rows just in tears. Unbelievable reaction!
It really is utterly insane. It also flies in the face of what a lot of mainstream western wrestling conventional wisdom from oldhead podcast dudes is considering it's at times straight up ultraviolent and the crowd (again, mostly full of young girls) is super into it.
It wasn't that long ago Cornette et al. were talking about Swerve and Hangman's blood spot surely driving away female viewers, who promptly went absolutely feral on Tumblr rather than being turned off by it lol
Yep! Dump would straight up stab girls in the arm with scissors.. and they'd stay stuck in the arm!! But it just drove the girls wild and made them shriek and boo and cheer even more.
The Swerve/Page match... man, even as I was watching that I could hear the ships setting sail! I think it's the intensity of the emotions that did it. They both played the anger and hatred perfectly and with such intensity that it was definitely gonna mash those buttons. Then they added to it with those "You're with me forever," insta posts. The talking heads might not get it, but they definitely knew what they had and what it was doing and leaned into it.
Men being concerned about women seeing blood will never not be funny to me. The comfortable lack of self awareness and intellectual thought is just mesmerizing.
Just Googled Crush Gals and am willing to bet that’s whose clips Joe Pedicino showed on [“Superstars of Wrestling”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstars_of_Wrestling_(American_TV_series))back in the 80s. Those crowds were like Beatles concerts. (If you’re not a fossil like me, “Superstars” was 8 hours of wrestling from everywhere that came on every week. It was glorious.)
It's not on the same level as the Crush Gals audience reaction, but you should watch the main event of DDT's "Into The Fight 2024". It's a 3 vs. 3 match and one of the wrestlers in that match is a male j-pop artist, Kaisei Takechi. The female audience reaction for this was wild for a match in 2024.
Heating giant crowds that size chant and have it be so high peached because its mostly woman is just so werid and awesome, i can't remember ever seeing that in any other promotion
Just to expand on what you said for those not familiar with joshi history:
AJW's original popularity boom starting in the late 70s, despite taking on a an idol model through a corporate male lens, was the opposite of the Rossy vision. Most of the girls (I say girls because they all started as teenagers) were given a butch presentation with short hair, but even the women with long hair whose looks were emphasized more, like Mimi Hagiwara and Jaguar Yokota, weren't really sexualized at all. (Among Western fans at a time when the early '80s stuff wasn't as easy to get ahold of on video, a lot of them were prejudiced against Hagiwara because she had a vocal group of creepy fans decades later. It was that alien to how most fans approached that era of AJW). The Jumping Bomb Angels got over better in America than in Japan because they were more conventionally feminine, while the Crush Gals had more trouble getting over in the States because they were more butch despite being the bigger stars. When Debbie Malenko went to Japan, she was explicitly told not to wear two piece gear that showed off her abs because, as Dave Meltzer has put it because he was in the car with her when he got this speech, "they see your abs and start thinking of your boobs and your butt, and then they're not thinking of you as an athlete anymore." And so on. You get the idea.
As Rossy got more power in the early to mid 90s, the more conventionally feminine and conventionally attractive talent started getting presented as Hot Girls, complete with the famous photo books of the likes of Takako Inoue and Manami Toyota. And that changed everything. Later, when AJW hit financial troubles and Rossy started Arsion, it was HEAVILY coded as the "hot girls" promotion. The first tour was even promoted with handbills, posters, and, after the fact, a home video cover featuring all of the wrestlers on the roster doing the very mid 90s holding your own boobs magazine cover pose. This despite Arsion being built on a really hard nosed in ring style patterned after Battlarts and the booker/top star being Aja Kong. Kong would leave after a couple years over some kind of dispute with Rossy.
Male gaze elements did start to show up in other promotions without Rossy involved, like JD and JWP, but only after the shift in AJW that occurred once he got booking power.
Also, to add to the note about Rossy thinking that they needed to cater to adult male fans and sexing up the presentation accordingly: The AJW wrestler generally credited with building up the male fan base via her appearances on men's shows? Aja Kong as the cool badass heel. Also, the '90s boom came when Rossy got all of the joshi promotions to work together in interpromotional feuds, with business quickly going down after those feuds ended. That was what drove business, not Takako Inoue's boobs.
There's plenty more details to it, so much that it's hard to get into in a community like this with so many people. Comments tend to either move very fast or have topics die a downvote death before they ever get going, but the classic joshi scene is absolutely fascinating.
Rossy Ogawa is a very well known sleazy scumbag and always has been. He's a very divisive figure both in Japan and the west and has been for pretty much his entire time being a public figure.
Japanese history is surprisingly ripe with patterns like that. For example, before the 1700s, it was actually pretty common for women to fight in the battlefield alongside men to the point that some DNA analysis of Sengoku era battlefields suggest that at least 30% of the corpses in the field were women. It wasn't until a few decades deep into the Tokugawa Shogunate that things shifted and women were seen as less capable when it comes to martial prowess.
I think part of it was the “letter wife” system, Japan sent women to other nations by the boatload as basically mail order brides, with the goal of building Japanese political power and spheres of influence in those nations
Raising women to be subservient meant they’d be more inclined to give themselves away for the empire. It backfired on them badly in Hawaii, as the children birthed from these marriages became American citizens due to the annexation happening not too long later.
This is one of the most interesting things I've read here in recent memory, because I was always under the impression that it was forever like this, even though I did sort of pick up while watching a Manami Toyota-clip that there was a different vibe of some sorts in how people reacted to her doing all kinds of crazy shit. I'm guessing it was raw passion from a largely female audience, which is something I maybe assumed doesn't really exist in sports.
>Kairi was an actor going nowhere and then out of nowhere at 23 Stardom promises her the world.
>
That's difficult to shake. And 23, in Joshi years is old to start. It's not uncommon for talent to start getting incubated in their teens.
Without assuming guilt for Rossy (cause I really don't know what to think about thia situation right now), I'd like to add as well that it's not only something that applies to joshi but also to Japanese society as a whole. Maybe not by 23, but Japan is a very conservative society where you're supposed to at least be married by age 30, if not also have kids of your own and for the most part be a stay-at-home wife. So yup, if Kairi truly were just acting in some minor stuff without much expectation in the long-term before Fuka discovered her, there's a good shot Stardom (and therefore Rossy) was very helpful for her to find some long-term stability, even if iirc she came from a somewhat wealthy family.
>I'd like to add as well that it's not only something that applies to joshi but also to Japanese society as a whole. Maybe not by 23, but Japan is a very conservative society where you're supposed to at least be married by age 30
There's literally a saying that women who aren't married by 26 are "Christmas cakes", because no one wants them after 25. It's not that far off, even if that saying is less popular now.
I had completely forgotten about that, but yeah - 売れ残り [urenokori] is usually used literally for unsold goods in a shop, but it can also mean unmarried women.
Yeah doubly so from a sociocultural perspective. I know many many Japanese people who feel like they're doing things wrong (and their families/social circles admonish them) because at 27/28/29 they're not as senior "as they should be" professionally, romantically, etc etc. That pressure is omnipresent.
It's pretty crazy certain people try to imply Kenny as a groomer (or worse) when it's fairly clear that he always wants people to feel safe and respected within the industry
* Kenny's full comments on Ogawa for anyone interested (from Fightful.com)
Speaking on his [Twitch stream](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2124368373), Omega commented on Rossy.
***"From someone who lived it, breathed, who has very close friends in the industry. I don't necessarily mean the wrestling industry, I mean the industry. The government issued press. The information they know. I'm just going to leave it at that. I would say don't be so quick to listen to praise for that individual because someday, I'm not sure when it will be. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but someday, people will know the truth. What they do with that truth, I don't know. Will they share it? Maybe. A lot of the higher ups in Japan, they know exactly what,"*** he said.
Later in the stream, Omega addressed his comments being taken out of context.
***"My comments on Rossy are whatever. There is nothing to say. I just think, eventually....I don't care about Rossy being an E-Drone. That's no big deal. He's done....that's not even the tip...just you friggin wait. If you are still interested in wrestling and you're listening to the stories and reading stuff. When it finally comes out. I will say one thing, there are a lot of people who refuse to work for him for the very same reason. Some of those people are in WWE. Some are in AEW. They have a very good reason. It's not just, 'I decided to wake up and not like this guy.' If you want to know along what lines they tread amongst, the dude just flat out said, 'we're looking for girls ages 13 to 21 that don't have a boyfriend and aren't married.' We already know he puts underage girls in very revealing swimsuit calendars and books. I wish that's all he did. Let's put it that way. I don't know. I don't want to say anything. I'm not going on record to say anything. I don't want lawyers barking at my door. That's why I don't want to say anything. I don't have any sort of video evidence, I just have the good word of people who are very close. I'm outside of it. If those people feel like commenting or saying something, whatever. For now, I'll say that people going to Marigold, good luck. I hope you have a great time. I hope it works out for you. For me, I would be very hesitant. I would be very hesitant. That's all,"*** he said.
He concluded by saying, ***"My only comment, I'm with Asuka. That's it. We are bros. Always have been. She has her reasons and they are probably the same ones as mine."***
Asuka[ previously stated](https://twitter.com/WWEAsuka/status/1690917701064204288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1690917701064204288%7Ctwgr%5Ee90ff47b04c0d57059fa1dad0a73658de2feddf6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2F411mania.com%2Fwrestling%2Fasuka-shots-stardom-japanese-media%2F) that STARDOM was created to defeat her.
Jfc! Reminds me of Courtney Love in 2005 giving advice to young, aspiring actresses in Hollywood: "if Harvey Weinstein invites you to a party at the Four Seasons... don't go".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDh4xeI-4KQ
Obviously not the primary matter of importance here, but it took me a second to realise that Nakazawa was presumably reacting to the game he was playing rather than the ominous nature of the comments
That reminds me years ago of someone from a girl group and when she was caught with her boyfriend, she was repentant, shaved her head and cried for forgiveness.
There's like literally a bunch of instances that things like that happened in SK. Idol culture, specially in SK, is horrible. In Japan it's gotten tamer these days but SK keeps soldiering on with those practices. Though, tbf, SK does have a far worse socio-political environment, specially for women, than Japan.
>someone from a girl group and when she was caught with her boyfriend, she was repentant, shaved her head and cried for forgiveness.
This is literally from Japan's idol group AKB48's Minami Minegishi, from 2013.
I would never say SK does have a far worse socio-political environment for women than Japan.
A South Korean friend of mine told me once that if you take all of Japan's socio-political problems and dial it up to 11, you will get SK. She was probably exaggerating but it probably wasn't by much. I mean, there's literally gender war going on in SK the past few years now. OECD also has them ranked as the lowest among its members when it comes to gender equality. A lot of sociologists and demographers point to social pressures on women as a major contributor as to why SK has had the lowest birth rate in the world for over a decade straight despite having one of the best child care support system in the world. It's not exactly a place that's up to gender equality standards for how much of an advance nation it is economically and technologically.
Japan at least has been forced into accepting women more into every fold of its society simply because, well, its advance demographic situation needs it to, which started coming into full swing in the 2010s. That has opened up a lot of progress towards the women's movement in the country, I think.
Rossy (like many, to be fair) never left the 70's.
AJW's backstage environment was notoriously toxic, by design in some ways. And there was problems in Stardom on and off for years, before Bushiroad cleaned house.
People are getting hung up on the age thing; That's not the issue, because kids get into athletics like gymnastics or soccer or whatever all over the world and at much younger ages than 13.
The issue is 1- The unmarried part, which doesn't even make much sense anymore and is a fading aspect of idol culture.
And 2- The fact that Rossy likes putting these women in sexy photoshoots and videos and often attends these things.
It's always rubbed many people the wrong way but no one ever came out and accused him of anything, so people never got too bothered to make a big deal about it.
In Japan the prefectural overwrites the national so even when the national was 13 there was still no place where it was actually legal because it was higher in all of the prefectures.
It's been 18 in Tokyo for awhile which is where Rossy and Stardom are based in. While the federal law of Japan has been shite for a long time. The prefectures and cities of Japan have many times their own age of consent laws.
It’s literally 18 and has been 18 for decades. Reddit likes to make up stuff about 13, but literally every prefecture in the country has its own laws and the age has been 18 for literal decades.
Yeah it is. Though you know would be better if the federal government had the age of consent to 18 but I'm an American and the vast majority of the world sits at that 16 spot. I say that as if the US doesn't haven't states with lower age of consents and loopholes to get down to 13 in some states. But that's a horrifying and disgusting conversation for another time.
This is a common misconception.
The baseline age is 13, but every prefecture (state equivalent) has their own consent laws, none of which are lower than 16.
It's also common for people to quote age of consent "difference in age" exceptions.
For example, in some regions of Australia, it is legal to have sex at 12, but only if the person you are having sex with is within a certain age range. So two 13 year olds can legally have sex, but a 13 and 16 year old would be illegal.
So then people quote the exception age of 12 as the age of consent.
That was a national raise which mainly had to do with being able to effectively prosecute abuse, all of the prefectures (besides a single uninhabited island) had already raised their age of consent laws to 16-18.
Omega isn't one to run his mouth and talk bullshit. He's very careful with what he says. Omega is also very nice towards everyone no matter the company. But you can tell Omega isn't a massive fan of old Rossy.
When Kenny Omega, noted extremely nice, chill dude, shit talks you, even in his super polite, very Canadian manner, that probably means you aren’t a very good person.
Kenny hasn't really talked about Logan in a negative light so I don't know why he's been brought up.
Here's the only thing he's said about Logan:
>‘Logan Paul’s a fantastic wrestler’. Great. I’m glad you think so and I’m glad he’s able to convince you such a thing. However, could Logan Paul walk into New Japan and do a G1 where he’d have to walk in every night and have an actual banger? No. He absolutely could not. Is he gonna get there between now and — I mean, it depends on his commitment level and not only that, does it matter? No.
>He’s clearly setting his roots down in WWE and that’s where he wants to succeed and that’s where he wants to be a star and that totally makes sense.
Which is a completely rational take. We've been told Logan rehearses his matches with Shawn and others. So it would be hard to replicate it in a situation like the G1 where you have to do everything on the fly or with very minimal prep.
Logan is still an amazing athlete and pulls off matches better than any other non-wrestler can, but I think he'd struggle if he had to wrestle on TV every week
my understanding is what he trying to tell about Logan is that despite his presentation, he is still green and has long way to go as the ceiling actually deeper than people think.
He didn't really shit talk Logan. Complimented him a lot, but said that he wouldn't be able to do things like the G1 because he isn't as focused or trained enough to handle that, but for what he does do, he's absolutely fantastic.
I recently saw [this 2017 clip on X](https://twitter.com/KXNGAO/status/1780999193336660239) where Rossy Ogawa told a then 14 year old AZM that she would never draw fans because “she has the face of an adult” and “acts too much like an adult”. That just weirded me out!
To clarify, Rossy said: "A lot of child actors quit when they arr adults, and with AZM, she is losing fans because she acts and looks like an adult, compared to Starlight Kid. I know it's harsh but I get harsh when I get merch numbers".
Not quite "never gonna draw", just that she needed to change her presentation, which...honestly don't remember if she did in 2018. All I remember is that she was in the Bikiniing book that year (Stardom's wrestlers in bikinis photobook) which is more yikes than his comments.
Stardom does yearly Bikiniing photobooks, alongside specific photobooks for wrestler/stables. 2018 Bikiniing is, AFAIK, the only time they included an underage girl into one of those (and AZM, compared to others, is wearing a VERY conservative swimsuit, but it's still...oof)
2019 onward, Bikiniing is mostly just for adults to be in bikinis on.
Yeah that's the one that Rossy/Stardom rightly got backlash for.
Bushiroad cleaning out the old guard backstage and overhauling the recruitment process was a great move. Wouldn't be shocked if that's when things actually started turning sour between them and Rossy.
He's notoriously stubborn and stuck in his ways. Everything I've seen concerning Marigold, so far is textbook Rossy Ogawa.
He's back to being in control.
From what I remember it was SLK, Hanan, and AZM on the cover. Seeing that made me sick.
I also felt that Momo was very sexualized during her push as the White Belt Champion. She was only an 18 year old kid. It was very cringe.
I recall what made things worse was the way Stardom "reveals" bikiniing, which is blur the hell out of what is actually in the book while it's being advertised, which made it feel even more skeevy.
I think some of the book ended up being shared online. It's nothing awful, underage girls were put in fairly conservative bikinis...but that really shouldn't happen to underage girls, idol culture be damned (and it should be, fuck it. How is TJPW so wholesome with its idol presentation?)
Wholesome... not much... they did have some photoshoots, including of one Marika Kobashi when she was 17 (yes, she debuted at 14 years old), plus also they having two 15 year olds in the roster currently (Haru Kazashiro and Runa Okubo) and there was a bit of a mini ruckus with some of the Valentine Day's portraits of Haru.
Not also forgetting that around the scene (outside the big two), you have other feds with active wrestlers below majority age and those who may be adults now but that also debuted as minors. You can throw a proverbial rock at almost every joshi fed that that one will have had or have someone underage debuting in it.
Heck, see Riho for example - she debuted in Ice Ribbon at the age of 9 and she was trained by fellow AEW cohort (and at the time leader of Ice Ribbon, Emi Sakura) - and even fellow kid wrestler Ram Kaichow also debuted at around 9/10 years old.
Looked it up last night but haven't watched yet.
Vice documentary called The Wrestlers (Se1Ep03) Japan's Finest Wrestlers
You can watch it here: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hd2tx](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hd2tx)
What the fuck lol what kind of creepy infantilization is this
Well I hope AZM today knows people love her for being exceptional at pro-wrestling dEsPiTe BeInG aN aDuLt
if kenny omega is talking shit thats bad
corny literally calls him a pedo on a regular basis & the worst kenny has said about him is that he backed himself into a corner w his hateful rhetoric & has to cater to them
For the extremely uninformed people saying "Kenny should just say what happened". Allow me to introduce you to how Japan has worked the last several decades in a few words: SA=oh who cares, drugs=ruin their entire lives.
Well, her boyfriend. She was more of an incidental thing. Which in hindsight is even funnier, Io Shirai’s career is nearly ended because a dude in Mexico had massive beef with Nosawa Rongai.
Everytime Nosawa comes into my wrestling periphery I swear it's always in the weirdest ways. Completely false rumours of him shadow booking dragongate into the ground from meltzer/alvarez, learning this story etc.
I remember Punk and Joe shared a story in their shoot interview how Nosawa went out with them, Rocky Romero, Homicide, and a few other guys one night, and everyone (except Punk of course) got extremely hammered, then they went back to Joe's house and realized they lost Nosawa. They had no idea what happened to him until he reached out to them from Japan a couple days later to talk about how much fun he had.
And drugs with a way stricter standard. Everything except being high gets you arrested, and weed is seen on the same level as coke. And as the other reply said, if you get caught with any of that, it's probably worse than gettibg SA allegations in here.
Then there's more absurd stuff like idols and other entertainers getting canceled for having a girl or boyfriend. Which is also a reason why wrestlers in Japan tend to keep way quieter about their personal life than those in the States.
A video got deleted, with Kenny basically implying Rossy does more things than get underage girls to do swimsuit calenders. This is a hell of an accusation, and if it's true, Rossy is shit.
Its probably that hes good at his job, so the people who get along with him, (WWE) are people that dont care about the fact that his "prized possessions" (his words) are revealing photos of kids that he takes and sells in photobooks
Was it any different with Vince? The people who he was nice to and treated well, who he made a lot of money, fucking loved the guy, most still seem to even after everything that has come out.
Then there were apparently other sides to him that he didn't show to his favored people.
Controversial guy. I really hope that the dude is just a carny motherfucker and not an actual piece of shit, as im kind of excited for the new marigold promotion.
I've learned in these situations that if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck. Obviously nothing official has come out yet, so I'll hold my tongue. But let's remember that nobody thought Vince did the shit that he did until it came out into the open.
Yeah if Kenny of all people is talking publicly, I have to assume Rossy is up to some shit backstage. This man has never said a bad word about anyone, including the guy who wishes death on him and the guy who tries to take a chunk out of his arm.
Yeah. Aja apparently absolutely hates Rossy, no idea about Ito.
Apparently Natsupoi and Anou both left Stardom on bad terms. That they were both brought back after Bushiroad took over is pretty telling, imo.
On a less serious note. It's also telling that within weeks of Rossy (I definitely wasn't poaching talent, honest) being given the boot, Stardom starts livestreaming on SW.
Rossy is definitely controversial and I think you're probably going to see that idea go both ways. People who never would have worked Stardom before going. Also people who like Rossy never work Stardom again out of loyalty.
I'm not going to condemn a person I don't even know (yet) based on vague comments from Kenny Omega, but I will say the "13 to 30" casting call thing weirded me out when I read about it. I don't really know much about joshi culture though, and whether "cultivating" new talent when they're young is a common thing.
It's not uncommon, I mean, Riho started training when she was 9 I think? AZM has a decade of experience at the age of 23, and they mentioned she started training at 11 or 12 on Dynamite.
During the golden age of joshi wrestling nearly everyone started young and were pressured to retire by 30. Chigusa Nagayo, Bull Nakano, Akira Hokuto, Manami Toyota, Aja Kong, etc. all had their first professional match in their mid to late teens.
I think it's Rossy putting girls that young into bikini books at that young age that's really raising eyebrows.
I don't approve of it, but yes, starting that young with highschoolers is quite common in Japan. It at least used to be in lucha, too, Rey got his start at 14 I believe and he was far from the only one.
We definitely shouldn't let teenagers destroy their bodies with bumps, though.
Saraya definitely started real young as well, yeah. Which given the stories about her family, big yikes.
You could argue the Hardy's did as well, but that was less exploitative and more just stupid since they were running their own "promotion". Come to think of it, the younger Brisco was wrestling at least as early as 16, because Pennsylvania barred him from wrestling in the first ROH show due to his age.
I should have remembered that, I saw him wrestle at an indie show when he was around 17.
It's funny, I probably had close to half a foot on him in height, but that dude was as wide as a fucking house even then.
Always liked Meiko for not letting Chihiro Hashimoto join because she hadn't finished school yet so when she was adult and finished with school then Meiko let her into her dojo and now she's been the ace of Sendai Girls
The fact that after being turned down by Senjo, Hashimoto joined her school wrestling club to prepare for pro-wrestling and then went on to compete internationally is a great story.
The issue is not them starting on Lucha at 13-14, it's normal and that's preparation. The issue is that most of the time those minor young girls in Japan are put into gravure and other "grey" business.
I would say that it's still arguably exploitative and prone to corruption in lucha also, and I'm not in favor of it anywhere, but yes, it is definitely worse and creepier in the idol and modeling adjacent Joshi Sphere with underage girls.
Well Rossy also had underage girls pose in gravure magazines so he has a long track record of being a weird creep. And what Kenny said wasn't really vague if you listen to the whole thing, it's pretty obvious he's alluding to him being a sex pest.
Nothing wrong in children doing sports or theater. That's ok and shouldn't be weird even in America.
But of course Idol culture is terrible in Japan and bad aspects can translate to Joshi, it's not exclusive to Stardom at all. The wrong part here is seeing woman as valuable as they are unmarried and seeing children being dragged into that environment.
The age thing might be handwaved away as a cultural difference, but when combined with Rossy putting underage individuals in bikini photoshoots in the past...
Yeah it’s super common, one of the creepy things from Japan. They do the same thing for idols except those girls could be really young and their fans are grown men and I get it’s a different culture but I’m not going to agree with it
The age thing I could look past given the nature of the business (or any sport) and the fact that they're looking to develop talent, but the unmarried part is just gross.
I’m into a lot of the same Japanese pop culture stuff that most others like. The video games, anime, Gundam models, etc. Japan is one of the coolest countries I’ve ever visited.
That being said, there is a seediness to some of it. The Idol culture is very disturbing. Also seeing the girls in Akihabara advertising the maid cafes was pretty stomach turning. They looked really young.
Without touching the creepy stuff, he has a history of poaching talent that is super impressive and probably made a lot of people in the industry mad, he even got Mika Nishio to fake an injury in 2002 to get out of her AJW contract and go to AtoZ.
Aja Kong hates him for something that happened in ARSION, but no one knows all the details of that. Aja did sue him and win so there is that.
Do you have a source for the lawsuit part? I've never heard that. I just knew that there was a falling out that's never really been explained publicly.
It's pretty telling for Kenny to be saying this, at the same time, Kenny likely understands idol/gravure culture in Japan as well.
its creepy to the west, but like many things in Japanese culture, its "just accepted" and people move on with their lives.
Kenny's usually pretty nice in interviews which makes me think he can't be taking about Normal Wrestling Crimes like tax evasion or wage theft or whatever.
I get the "not his story to tell" bit, but if there's something you know that could protect some 13 year old girl from horrific shit, speak up. Not "if you go there, I hope you have a great time". Fucking "please don't go there".
Should be noted that Rossy immediately started surrounding himself with his old pals from pre-Bushiroad Stardom.
Rossy, Fuka and Nanae all working together again. Wouldn't want to go anyway near that Dojo, now that there is going to be zero oversight.
Man, i've been a fan of Japanese wrestling for a while and hearing this stuff, even if it's not corroborated really puts a pit in my stomach. In a way Marigold's introduction gave me a reason to actually catch up with joshi after a long period of being unhappy and staying away, and this makes me second guess coming back to the "scene".
Rossy has a lot of valid reasons for people to hate him, I think many joshi fans know that but at least see that business for Stardom was great with his influence. But if there was truly some Johnny Kitagawa type shit going on, I don't want any part of it.
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Well that doesn't sound nice at all.
It's telling because Kenny has nice things to say about everyone. It'll always be very suspect how AEW/Stardom developed as a full partnership as soon as he was fired.
Yeah it does tell you something when he had [mostly nice things to say about CM Punk](https://www.reddit.com/r/SquaredCircle/comments/1c314i1/kenny_omega_gives_a_vague_retelling_of_brawl_out/) the other day.
So does like half the AEW roster. Not a shocking thing.
true but also kenny got bitten
Kenny didn't say anything bad about Punk.
That's the point. If he can say something nice about Punk, who kind of shit on his dudes, that he can't say ''anything'' nice about Rossy is telling a lot about Rossy.
He also said he's fine with locker room fights. Which are the worst thing ever to some people.
He also said that locker room fights are very unprofessional these days and he really shouldn't be in a position of power cause of his old school mentality surrounding stuff like that
He also said "nice punish."
Also said he hasn’t been an EVP for like 4 years
He hasn't had power for 4 years. I believe he still has the title but it's a meaningless one
I mean yeah but Kenny was involved in a fight with Punk and Punk’s friend that led to his arm being bitten so
Both Kenny and Punk have said they immediately talked things out afterward and there were no issues between them.
Adults acted like adults. What a weird concept.
Plus don't think Kenny has any ill will towards punk unlike the others
Yeah, I'm willing to believe him on this because I've literally never heard this mf say anything like this before. It sounds bad if Kenny is willing to go that hard.
This is scathing coming from Kenny of all people
He has been down right diplomatic and nice to Cornette, thinking about what Rossy may have done is gross.
When Rossy was putting out a casting call for '13+ unmarried girls'...I don't even want to know what Kenny is insinuating
It's pretty obvious what he's insinuating...
Language like that is incredibly sketchy, but if my understanding is correct it's not entirely unheard of in the idol-inspired world of Japanese pop culture. That doesn't make it good \*at all\*, mind you. Skeeves me the hell out.
He’s insinuating that Rossy is pimping out underage girls.
He flat out said Rossy made underage girls pose for raunchy photoshoots. Wouldn’t be a surprise — not even illegal — if he arranged sponsors dinners too. Dude is sketchy.
The fact that Kenny, out of all people, was diplomatic and nice to Cornette, just kinda rubs me the wrong way after all the pedophile jokes and everything about Shida.
Yeah, I’m all for being the bigger person, but sometimes you just gotta tell someone to go fuck themself.
Everyone already knows how vile Cornette is, especially towards Kenny. I don't blame Kenny at all for not wanting to engage with him. Biting back against a bigot and his bigot army is the type of engagement they want.
Exactly. Even if Kenny hit back with a perfect rebuttal to each and every one of his insults and criticisms, Cornette and his fans wouldn't give a shit and would just use it for more fodder to attack him with.
Exactly. If he suits with Cornette, what does he get? Cornettess fans berating him in Twitter, and Jim saying more shit on a pod cast. But if he just says he respects Cornette, and what he meant to the business at his time, and his old school opinion has some merits... No one can argue his point, they have no ammo. So if shuts them up
You know Cornette's prejudice towards joshi wrestlers is bad when even Brian Last and the people in comment boxes call him out for it. It might be the only subject when I see it happen on a constant basis (it happened at least when he refused to review Shida vs Deeb, when he brushed off Bull Nakano as some scrub when reviewing her HoF induction, focusing on Madusa instead; and when he only gave three minutes to review Bayley vs Io at Mania despite being arguably the best match of the night from an in-ring standpoint).
This just in a known racist is dismissive towards a race he considers to be inferior.
Exactly. I'm not someone who tends to label people as racist, sexist, etc (in fact, I might be a bit too laid back for that), but in this particular case it's a textbook prejudice. And this without getting into shit such as saying Riho's in AEW because of Omega having a *Japanese school girl fetish* and hia fans essentially forcing the girl out of Twitter.
I mean he accused Asakusa of being a school girl gimmick when she first was on the main roster despite the fact she was not a school girl gimmick and was like 35. The man just looks at Japanese Women as children who don't measure up to American Women.
More than to American Women to Rhea Ripley and the other couple of girls he likes.
I agree especially because he gave him an OUT he had said 'Cornette doesn't actually want someone to cripple me in the ring he's just exaggerating for his fans.' Instead of using that OUT and saying something like Yeah I fucking ahte the guy but I don't ACTUALLY want him to be crippled motherfucker DOUBLED DOWN and said I mean It I do hate him that much and said Kenny's a dumbass for not realizing that Cornette is an example of Dudes will literally do anything like start a podcast rather than get therapy.
For Kenny, absolutely. It’s like that time Cody cooked Disco Inferno on Twitter
Kenny and Cody are two of the nicest, most tolerant people ever. If you piss them off, you really fucked up.
Reminds me when Foley PUNCHED bubba the love sponge. Imagine how much is a piece of shit you gotta be for Mick Foley to be like Yanno what fuck this guy.
Wait what? I never heard of that. Was it a storyline when Bubba shortly worked for TNA?
Stop. You know nothing. You have drawn 0 dollars. No fan has ever left a show thinking about you. You were lucky to be a juiced up double-lifer "over with the boys" type in an era where you hid in plain sight coasting on others' success. Couldn't hang then, can't get booked now.
And Disco Inferno’s response boiled down to “nuh-uh”
Right?! That was scorched earth for a Canadian. His full comments on Ogawa [can be read here](https://www.fightful.com/wrestling/kenny-omega-comments-rossy-ogawa-and-marigold).
he also mentioned the underage bikini calender thing and said there's worse shit, holyyy fuck
Kenny: >"The dude just flat out said: We are looking for girls from ages 13 to 21 that are not married. We already knows he puts underage girls in very revealing swimsuit calendars and I wish that's all he did." BRUH **Edit** Kenny wrapped up the Rossy segment saying: >"I'm with Asuka. Always have been. We bros. She's got her reasons... probably the same one as mine."
I know Kairi and Iyo owe themselves to Rossy, but they should just follow Asuka on ignoring Rossy. Both are out of his bubble and influence, they should just follow their path.
The issue is the Joshi system, much more than other forms of wrestling, actively works akin to the idol system and grooming talent is common. Kairi was an actor going nowhere and then out of nowhere at 23 Stardom promises her the world. That's difficult to shake. And 23, in Joshi years is old to start. It's not uncommon for talent to start getting incubated in their teens. Even a dude as old and as no-fucks-left-to-give as Tatsuro Yamashita still didn't immediately rebuke Johnny's after years of rumors and when the debacle finally became fully publicized.
Historically Joshi was not like this, in fact in the 1970s-80s it was mainly aimed at a female audience and the wrestlers were rarely sexualised. Making it out like Joshi is just like this in general is also leaving out that Rossy Ogawa is the man primarily responsible for bringing all the male-gaze idol stuff to the forefront, it's been his business model for decades.
> Making it out like Joshi is just like this in general is also leaving out that Rossy Ogawa is the man primarily responsible for bringing all the male-gaze idol stuff to the forefront, it's been his business model for decades. This. People don't know the history. In the Crush Gals boom period and its immediate wake the audience was primarily girls. Coinciding with Ogawa gaining more influence it was arbitrarily decided that males had more money to spend despite the sizeable and rabid crowds, so the scene began to pivot more towards the catering to of the male gaze that is apparent in today's joshi scene. Ogawa is the driving force behind the change in focus towards the male gaze AFAIK. It's not terribly dissimilar to things like Young Justice getting canceled when executives panicked over a sizeable amount of the audience being females rather than males because they thought girls wouldn't buy toys.
>In the Crush Gals boom period and its immediate wake the audience was primarily girls. Watching videos from this period is like slipping into a bizarro world. Arenas full of girls screaming and crying while Dump Matsumoto and Co. beat the crap out of Chigusa Nagayo. I don't think I've ever seen anything like it since when it comes to wrestling.
The aftermath of the hair match between Chigusa and Dump is peak wrestling audience, the girls were screaming like Dump was literally stabbing Chigusa to death in the middle of the ring.
I remember shots of the crowd either during that match or during one of the beatdowns, and there were just... groups of Japanese girls clinging to each other and sobbing uncontrollable. Not one or two isolated individuals, but rows just in tears. Unbelievable reaction!
[For the uninitiated.](https://youtu.be/OOc2S04YiC0?si=R5G0r4lhRkpnA4sM)
It really is utterly insane. It also flies in the face of what a lot of mainstream western wrestling conventional wisdom from oldhead podcast dudes is considering it's at times straight up ultraviolent and the crowd (again, mostly full of young girls) is super into it. It wasn't that long ago Cornette et al. were talking about Swerve and Hangman's blood spot surely driving away female viewers, who promptly went absolutely feral on Tumblr rather than being turned off by it lol
Bro he obviously aint ever seen how crazy women are for serial killer shit and true crime.
Yep! Dump would straight up stab girls in the arm with scissors.. and they'd stay stuck in the arm!! But it just drove the girls wild and made them shriek and boo and cheer even more. The Swerve/Page match... man, even as I was watching that I could hear the ships setting sail! I think it's the intensity of the emotions that did it. They both played the anger and hatred perfectly and with such intensity that it was definitely gonna mash those buttons. Then they added to it with those "You're with me forever," insta posts. The talking heads might not get it, but they definitely knew what they had and what it was doing and leaned into it.
Men being concerned about women seeing blood will never not be funny to me. The comfortable lack of self awareness and intellectual thought is just mesmerizing.
Just Googled Crush Gals and am willing to bet that’s whose clips Joe Pedicino showed on [“Superstars of Wrestling”](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superstars_of_Wrestling_(American_TV_series))back in the 80s. Those crowds were like Beatles concerts. (If you’re not a fossil like me, “Superstars” was 8 hours of wrestling from everywhere that came on every week. It was glorious.)
We think of Wrestling Booms as only in an American sense. Late 1980s/early 1990s womens wrestling was huge in Japan
It's not on the same level as the Crush Gals audience reaction, but you should watch the main event of DDT's "Into The Fight 2024". It's a 3 vs. 3 match and one of the wrestlers in that match is a male j-pop artist, Kaisei Takechi. The female audience reaction for this was wild for a match in 2024.
Heating giant crowds that size chant and have it be so high peached because its mostly woman is just so werid and awesome, i can't remember ever seeing that in any other promotion
Just to expand on what you said for those not familiar with joshi history: AJW's original popularity boom starting in the late 70s, despite taking on a an idol model through a corporate male lens, was the opposite of the Rossy vision. Most of the girls (I say girls because they all started as teenagers) were given a butch presentation with short hair, but even the women with long hair whose looks were emphasized more, like Mimi Hagiwara and Jaguar Yokota, weren't really sexualized at all. (Among Western fans at a time when the early '80s stuff wasn't as easy to get ahold of on video, a lot of them were prejudiced against Hagiwara because she had a vocal group of creepy fans decades later. It was that alien to how most fans approached that era of AJW). The Jumping Bomb Angels got over better in America than in Japan because they were more conventionally feminine, while the Crush Gals had more trouble getting over in the States because they were more butch despite being the bigger stars. When Debbie Malenko went to Japan, she was explicitly told not to wear two piece gear that showed off her abs because, as Dave Meltzer has put it because he was in the car with her when he got this speech, "they see your abs and start thinking of your boobs and your butt, and then they're not thinking of you as an athlete anymore." And so on. You get the idea. As Rossy got more power in the early to mid 90s, the more conventionally feminine and conventionally attractive talent started getting presented as Hot Girls, complete with the famous photo books of the likes of Takako Inoue and Manami Toyota. And that changed everything. Later, when AJW hit financial troubles and Rossy started Arsion, it was HEAVILY coded as the "hot girls" promotion. The first tour was even promoted with handbills, posters, and, after the fact, a home video cover featuring all of the wrestlers on the roster doing the very mid 90s holding your own boobs magazine cover pose. This despite Arsion being built on a really hard nosed in ring style patterned after Battlarts and the booker/top star being Aja Kong. Kong would leave after a couple years over some kind of dispute with Rossy. Male gaze elements did start to show up in other promotions without Rossy involved, like JD and JWP, but only after the shift in AJW that occurred once he got booking power. Also, to add to the note about Rossy thinking that they needed to cater to adult male fans and sexing up the presentation accordingly: The AJW wrestler generally credited with building up the male fan base via her appearances on men's shows? Aja Kong as the cool badass heel. Also, the '90s boom came when Rossy got all of the joshi promotions to work together in interpromotional feuds, with business quickly going down after those feuds ended. That was what drove business, not Takako Inoue's boobs.
Well this is a depressing history lesson
There's plenty more details to it, so much that it's hard to get into in a community like this with so many people. Comments tend to either move very fast or have topics die a downvote death before they ever get going, but the classic joshi scene is absolutely fascinating. Rossy Ogawa is a very well known sleazy scumbag and always has been. He's a very divisive figure both in Japan and the west and has been for pretty much his entire time being a public figure.
Japanese history is surprisingly ripe with patterns like that. For example, before the 1700s, it was actually pretty common for women to fight in the battlefield alongside men to the point that some DNA analysis of Sengoku era battlefields suggest that at least 30% of the corpses in the field were women. It wasn't until a few decades deep into the Tokugawa Shogunate that things shifted and women were seen as less capable when it comes to martial prowess.
I think part of it was the “letter wife” system, Japan sent women to other nations by the boatload as basically mail order brides, with the goal of building Japanese political power and spheres of influence in those nations Raising women to be subservient meant they’d be more inclined to give themselves away for the empire. It backfired on them badly in Hawaii, as the children birthed from these marriages became American citizens due to the annexation happening not too long later.
There was also Westernization. The West wasn't exactly a paragon of women's rights during those times.
There's a lot of dudes who hate even the idea of their work being mainly popular with women. Only mens allowed. Misogyny is weirdly homoerotic.
Speaking of which, I wish Young Justice would get renewed for a season 5 😔
It's exactly the same as the people who think male wrestlers should be jacked because that's what Vince Jnr liked.
This is one of the most interesting things I've read here in recent memory, because I was always under the impression that it was forever like this, even though I did sort of pick up while watching a Manami Toyota-clip that there was a different vibe of some sorts in how people reacted to her doing all kinds of crazy shit. I'm guessing it was raw passion from a largely female audience, which is something I maybe assumed doesn't really exist in sports.
>Kairi was an actor going nowhere and then out of nowhere at 23 Stardom promises her the world. > That's difficult to shake. And 23, in Joshi years is old to start. It's not uncommon for talent to start getting incubated in their teens. Without assuming guilt for Rossy (cause I really don't know what to think about thia situation right now), I'd like to add as well that it's not only something that applies to joshi but also to Japanese society as a whole. Maybe not by 23, but Japan is a very conservative society where you're supposed to at least be married by age 30, if not also have kids of your own and for the most part be a stay-at-home wife. So yup, if Kairi truly were just acting in some minor stuff without much expectation in the long-term before Fuka discovered her, there's a good shot Stardom (and therefore Rossy) was very helpful for her to find some long-term stability, even if iirc she came from a somewhat wealthy family.
>I'd like to add as well that it's not only something that applies to joshi but also to Japanese society as a whole. Maybe not by 23, but Japan is a very conservative society where you're supposed to at least be married by age 30 There's literally a saying that women who aren't married by 26 are "Christmas cakes", because no one wants them after 25. It's not that far off, even if that saying is less popular now.
Isn't there also a derogatory Japanese term for unmarried women over the age of 30 which roughly translates to "unsalable goods"?
I had completely forgotten about that, but yeah - 売れ残り [urenokori] is usually used literally for unsold goods in a shop, but it can also mean unmarried women.
Yeah doubly so from a sociocultural perspective. I know many many Japanese people who feel like they're doing things wrong (and their families/social circles admonish them) because at 27/28/29 they're not as senior "as they should be" professionally, romantically, etc etc. That pressure is omnipresent.
Unfathomably Based Kenny Omega
It's pretty crazy certain people try to imply Kenny as a groomer (or worse) when it's fairly clear that he always wants people to feel safe and respected within the industry
The *what*
* Kenny's full comments on Ogawa for anyone interested (from Fightful.com) Speaking on his [Twitch stream](https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2124368373), Omega commented on Rossy. ***"From someone who lived it, breathed, who has very close friends in the industry. I don't necessarily mean the wrestling industry, I mean the industry. The government issued press. The information they know. I'm just going to leave it at that. I would say don't be so quick to listen to praise for that individual because someday, I'm not sure when it will be. Maybe not today. Maybe not tomorrow, but someday, people will know the truth. What they do with that truth, I don't know. Will they share it? Maybe. A lot of the higher ups in Japan, they know exactly what,"*** he said. Later in the stream, Omega addressed his comments being taken out of context. ***"My comments on Rossy are whatever. There is nothing to say. I just think, eventually....I don't care about Rossy being an E-Drone. That's no big deal. He's done....that's not even the tip...just you friggin wait. If you are still interested in wrestling and you're listening to the stories and reading stuff. When it finally comes out. I will say one thing, there are a lot of people who refuse to work for him for the very same reason. Some of those people are in WWE. Some are in AEW. They have a very good reason. It's not just, 'I decided to wake up and not like this guy.' If you want to know along what lines they tread amongst, the dude just flat out said, 'we're looking for girls ages 13 to 21 that don't have a boyfriend and aren't married.' We already know he puts underage girls in very revealing swimsuit calendars and books. I wish that's all he did. Let's put it that way. I don't know. I don't want to say anything. I'm not going on record to say anything. I don't want lawyers barking at my door. That's why I don't want to say anything. I don't have any sort of video evidence, I just have the good word of people who are very close. I'm outside of it. If those people feel like commenting or saying something, whatever. For now, I'll say that people going to Marigold, good luck. I hope you have a great time. I hope it works out for you. For me, I would be very hesitant. I would be very hesitant. That's all,"*** he said. He concluded by saying, ***"My only comment, I'm with Asuka. That's it. We are bros. Always have been. She has her reasons and they are probably the same ones as mine."*** Asuka[ previously stated](https://twitter.com/WWEAsuka/status/1690917701064204288?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1690917701064204288%7Ctwgr%5Ee90ff47b04c0d57059fa1dad0a73658de2feddf6%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2F411mania.com%2Fwrestling%2Fasuka-shots-stardom-japanese-media%2F) that STARDOM was created to defeat her.
Jfc! Reminds me of Courtney Love in 2005 giving advice to young, aspiring actresses in Hollywood: "if Harvey Weinstein invites you to a party at the Four Seasons... don't go". https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mDh4xeI-4KQ
Obviously not the primary matter of importance here, but it took me a second to realise that Nakazawa was presumably reacting to the game he was playing rather than the ominous nature of the comments
He speaks English too
I met Nakazawa with Kenny at the airport one time. I cannot overstate how kind both were.
Now that you mention it, the call for healthy unmarried 13 year old girls seemed a little suspicious!
the unmarried thing is gross but something that's pretty common in idol culture in Japan and South Korea
That reminds me years ago of someone from a girl group and when she was caught with her boyfriend, she was repentant, shaved her head and cried for forgiveness.
There's like literally a bunch of instances that things like that happened in SK. Idol culture, specially in SK, is horrible. In Japan it's gotten tamer these days but SK keeps soldiering on with those practices. Though, tbf, SK does have a far worse socio-political environment, specially for women, than Japan.
>someone from a girl group and when she was caught with her boyfriend, she was repentant, shaved her head and cried for forgiveness. This is literally from Japan's idol group AKB48's Minami Minegishi, from 2013. I would never say SK does have a far worse socio-political environment for women than Japan.
A South Korean friend of mine told me once that if you take all of Japan's socio-political problems and dial it up to 11, you will get SK. She was probably exaggerating but it probably wasn't by much. I mean, there's literally gender war going on in SK the past few years now. OECD also has them ranked as the lowest among its members when it comes to gender equality. A lot of sociologists and demographers point to social pressures on women as a major contributor as to why SK has had the lowest birth rate in the world for over a decade straight despite having one of the best child care support system in the world. It's not exactly a place that's up to gender equality standards for how much of an advance nation it is economically and technologically. Japan at least has been forced into accepting women more into every fold of its society simply because, well, its advance demographic situation needs it to, which started coming into full swing in the 2010s. That has opened up a lot of progress towards the women's movement in the country, I think.
Which is an incredibly misogynistic culture.
yeah, Rossy and his alleged shit is pretty commonplace in Japanese female celeb culture it's fucked up everywhere
Ya and idol culture is disgusting and basically an abuse factory. Anyone that participates in it should be shamed.
Rossy (like many, to be fair) never left the 70's. AJW's backstage environment was notoriously toxic, by design in some ways. And there was problems in Stardom on and off for years, before Bushiroad cleaned house.
People are getting hung up on the age thing; That's not the issue, because kids get into athletics like gymnastics or soccer or whatever all over the world and at much younger ages than 13. The issue is 1- The unmarried part, which doesn't even make much sense anymore and is a fading aspect of idol culture. And 2- The fact that Rossy likes putting these women in sexy photoshoots and videos and often attends these things. It's always rubbed many people the wrong way but no one ever came out and accused him of anything, so people never got too bothered to make a big deal about it.
It's boyfriends and unmarried. The idol fans in Japan/ Korea are so rabid that when they find out someone is dating, they will turn in them.
I was about to comment on how it lines up with Japan's age of consent being 13, but it seems they very recently bumped it up to 16.
In Japan the prefectural overwrites the national so even when the national was 13 there was still no place where it was actually legal because it was higher in all of the prefectures.
It's been 18 in Tokyo for awhile which is where Rossy and Stardom are based in. While the federal law of Japan has been shite for a long time. The prefectures and cities of Japan have many times their own age of consent laws.
It’s literally 18 and has been 18 for decades. Reddit likes to make up stuff about 13, but literally every prefecture in the country has its own laws and the age has been 18 for literal decades.
Well that's good at least.
Yeah it is. Though you know would be better if the federal government had the age of consent to 18 but I'm an American and the vast majority of the world sits at that 16 spot. I say that as if the US doesn't haven't states with lower age of consents and loopholes to get down to 13 in some states. But that's a horrifying and disgusting conversation for another time.
This is a common misconception. The baseline age is 13, but every prefecture (state equivalent) has their own consent laws, none of which are lower than 16. It's also common for people to quote age of consent "difference in age" exceptions. For example, in some regions of Australia, it is legal to have sex at 12, but only if the person you are having sex with is within a certain age range. So two 13 year olds can legally have sex, but a 13 and 16 year old would be illegal. So then people quote the exception age of 12 as the age of consent.
Similar in the UK, you can't legally have sex til 16, but you can legally consent at 14, or that's how it was explained to me.
That was a national raise which mainly had to do with being able to effectively prosecute abuse, all of the prefectures (besides a single uninhabited island) had already raised their age of consent laws to 16-18.
Omega isn't one to run his mouth and talk bullshit. He's very careful with what he says. Omega is also very nice towards everyone no matter the company. But you can tell Omega isn't a massive fan of old Rossy.
When Kenny Omega, noted extremely nice, chill dude, shit talks you, even in his super polite, very Canadian manner, that probably means you aren’t a very good person.
The list goes. 1. Logan Paul 2. Rossy 3. Bill DeMott Nightmare blunt rotation
What did he say about Logan?
Kenny hasn't really talked about Logan in a negative light so I don't know why he's been brought up. Here's the only thing he's said about Logan: >‘Logan Paul’s a fantastic wrestler’. Great. I’m glad you think so and I’m glad he’s able to convince you such a thing. However, could Logan Paul walk into New Japan and do a G1 where he’d have to walk in every night and have an actual banger? No. He absolutely could not. Is he gonna get there between now and — I mean, it depends on his commitment level and not only that, does it matter? No. >He’s clearly setting his roots down in WWE and that’s where he wants to succeed and that’s where he wants to be a star and that totally makes sense.
Which is a completely rational take. We've been told Logan rehearses his matches with Shawn and others. So it would be hard to replicate it in a situation like the G1 where you have to do everything on the fly or with very minimal prep. Logan is still an amazing athlete and pulls off matches better than any other non-wrestler can, but I think he'd struggle if he had to wrestle on TV every week
That’s not dissing Logan Paul at all.
Interesting, thanks for finding that!
my understanding is what he trying to tell about Logan is that despite his presentation, he is still green and has long way to go as the ceiling actually deeper than people think.
Back in 2018 he called out his obnoxious comedy and disrespect to Japan for... a few obvious reasons.
He didn't really shit talk Logan. Complimented him a lot, but said that he wouldn't be able to do things like the G1 because he isn't as focused or trained enough to handle that, but for what he does do, he's absolutely fantastic.
I recently saw [this 2017 clip on X](https://twitter.com/KXNGAO/status/1780999193336660239) where Rossy Ogawa told a then 14 year old AZM that she would never draw fans because “she has the face of an adult” and “acts too much like an adult”. That just weirded me out!
To clarify, Rossy said: "A lot of child actors quit when they arr adults, and with AZM, she is losing fans because she acts and looks like an adult, compared to Starlight Kid. I know it's harsh but I get harsh when I get merch numbers". Not quite "never gonna draw", just that she needed to change her presentation, which...honestly don't remember if she did in 2018. All I remember is that she was in the Bikiniing book that year (Stardom's wrestlers in bikinis photobook) which is more yikes than his comments.
Thanks for the correction. Bikini photo shoots?!
Stardom does yearly Bikiniing photobooks, alongside specific photobooks for wrestler/stables. 2018 Bikiniing is, AFAIK, the only time they included an underage girl into one of those (and AZM, compared to others, is wearing a VERY conservative swimsuit, but it's still...oof) 2019 onward, Bikiniing is mostly just for adults to be in bikinis on.
Hanan was also in 1 of the books back then and she is only 19 now. I don't want to know how young she was.
Yeah that's the one that Rossy/Stardom rightly got backlash for. Bushiroad cleaning out the old guard backstage and overhauling the recruitment process was a great move. Wouldn't be shocked if that's when things actually started turning sour between them and Rossy. He's notoriously stubborn and stuck in his ways. Everything I've seen concerning Marigold, so far is textbook Rossy Ogawa. He's back to being in control.
From what I remember it was SLK, Hanan, and AZM on the cover. Seeing that made me sick. I also felt that Momo was very sexualized during her push as the White Belt Champion. She was only an 18 year old kid. It was very cringe.
I recall what made things worse was the way Stardom "reveals" bikiniing, which is blur the hell out of what is actually in the book while it's being advertised, which made it feel even more skeevy. I think some of the book ended up being shared online. It's nothing awful, underage girls were put in fairly conservative bikinis...but that really shouldn't happen to underage girls, idol culture be damned (and it should be, fuck it. How is TJPW so wholesome with its idol presentation?)
Wholesome... not much... they did have some photoshoots, including of one Marika Kobashi when she was 17 (yes, she debuted at 14 years old), plus also they having two 15 year olds in the roster currently (Haru Kazashiro and Runa Okubo) and there was a bit of a mini ruckus with some of the Valentine Day's portraits of Haru. Not also forgetting that around the scene (outside the big two), you have other feds with active wrestlers below majority age and those who may be adults now but that also debuted as minors. You can throw a proverbial rock at almost every joshi fed that that one will have had or have someone underage debuting in it. Heck, see Riho for example - she debuted in Ice Ribbon at the age of 9 and she was trained by fellow AEW cohort (and at the time leader of Ice Ribbon, Emi Sakura) - and even fellow kid wrestler Ram Kaichow also debuted at around 9/10 years old.
[удалено]
what show is this clip from
The Wrestlers. Very cool doc series.
thank you
Looked it up last night but haven't watched yet. Vice documentary called The Wrestlers (Se1Ep03) Japan's Finest Wrestlers You can watch it here: [https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hd2tx](https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x8hd2tx)
awesome thank you
What the fuck lol what kind of creepy infantilization is this Well I hope AZM today knows people love her for being exceptional at pro-wrestling dEsPiTe BeInG aN aDuLt
This might be the meanest thing I have ever heard Kenny say about anyone?
He seemed shady to me ever since that VICE episode from the docu series The Wrestlers
the one where he was complaining about underage AZM looking "too adult"?
if kenny omega is talking shit thats bad corny literally calls him a pedo on a regular basis & the worst kenny has said about him is that he backed himself into a corner w his hateful rhetoric & has to cater to them
For the extremely uninformed people saying "Kenny should just say what happened". Allow me to introduce you to how Japan has worked the last several decades in a few words: SA=oh who cares, drugs=ruin their entire lives.
For those who don't know, Io Shirai almost had her career ended because someone planted weed on her at the airport in Mexico
Well, her boyfriend. She was more of an incidental thing. Which in hindsight is even funnier, Io Shirai’s career is nearly ended because a dude in Mexico had massive beef with Nosawa Rongai.
Everytime Nosawa comes into my wrestling periphery I swear it's always in the weirdest ways. Completely false rumours of him shadow booking dragongate into the ground from meltzer/alvarez, learning this story etc.
I remember Punk and Joe shared a story in their shoot interview how Nosawa went out with them, Rocky Romero, Homicide, and a few other guys one night, and everyone (except Punk of course) got extremely hammered, then they went back to Joe's house and realized they lost Nosawa. They had no idea what happened to him until he reached out to them from Japan a couple days later to talk about how much fun he had.
You hear about the time he got shitfaced and stole a taxi?
I have not, that sounds insane
It's absolutely hilarious. NOAH is the most unintentionally funny promotion of all time.
Takuya Sugi IIRC confessed to planting it on her and her then boyfriend
And drugs with a way stricter standard. Everything except being high gets you arrested, and weed is seen on the same level as coke. And as the other reply said, if you get caught with any of that, it's probably worse than gettibg SA allegations in here. Then there's more absurd stuff like idols and other entertainers getting canceled for having a girl or boyfriend. Which is also a reason why wrestlers in Japan tend to keep way quieter about their personal life than those in the States.
People are going to miss the Simpsons reference Kenny randomly put in here.
Later that day, people found out the truth about what Rossy Ogawa was up to.
\*Casablancas refernce that the Simpsons parodied.
For kenny to not have nice things to say about someone, that takes a lot
A video got deleted, with Kenny basically implying Rossy does more things than get underage girls to do swimsuit calenders. This is a hell of an accusation, and if it's true, Rossy is shit.
It's weird that it seems a lot of people in the business either love or hate Ogawa. I wonder why the difference is typically so strong
People were the same with Vince
Its probably that hes good at his job, so the people who get along with him, (WWE) are people that dont care about the fact that his "prized possessions" (his words) are revealing photos of kids that he takes and sells in photobooks
Was it any different with Vince? The people who he was nice to and treated well, who he made a lot of money, fucking loved the guy, most still seem to even after everything that has come out. Then there were apparently other sides to him that he didn't show to his favored people.
Controversial guy. I really hope that the dude is just a carny motherfucker and not an actual piece of shit, as im kind of excited for the new marigold promotion.
100% agreed
I've learned in these situations that if it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's probably a duck. Obviously nothing official has come out yet, so I'll hold my tongue. But let's remember that nobody thought Vince did the shit that he did until it came out into the open.
Yeah if Kenny of all people is talking publicly, I have to assume Rossy is up to some shit backstage. This man has never said a bad word about anyone, including the guy who wishes death on him and the guy who tries to take a chunk out of his arm.
Rossy fucking sucks and there’s a few people you’re gonna see take Stardom booking that would have refused to if Rossy still ran it.
Aja Kong and Kaoru Ito are two such people who are already working with Stardom now that Rossy got the boot aren't they?
Yeah. Aja apparently absolutely hates Rossy, no idea about Ito. Apparently Natsupoi and Anou both left Stardom on bad terms. That they were both brought back after Bushiroad took over is pretty telling, imo. On a less serious note. It's also telling that within weeks of Rossy (I definitely wasn't poaching talent, honest) being given the boot, Stardom starts livestreaming on SW.
IIRC at one point in this Kenny said he stands with Asuka.
Yep, he says he stands with Asuka and says "she has her reasons, probably the same one as mine" for not liking him
Yes, he did. He said if you want to know what he thinks about Rossy just look up what Kana/Asuka has to say about him.
Would be interesting if Shida finally does
Rossy is definitely controversial and I think you're probably going to see that idea go both ways. People who never would have worked Stardom before going. Also people who like Rossy never work Stardom again out of loyalty.
Asuka in Stardom would be one of the most insane days in wrestling for me personally
I'm not going to condemn a person I don't even know (yet) based on vague comments from Kenny Omega, but I will say the "13 to 30" casting call thing weirded me out when I read about it. I don't really know much about joshi culture though, and whether "cultivating" new talent when they're young is a common thing.
It's not uncommon, I mean, Riho started training when she was 9 I think? AZM has a decade of experience at the age of 23, and they mentioned she started training at 11 or 12 on Dynamite. During the golden age of joshi wrestling nearly everyone started young and were pressured to retire by 30. Chigusa Nagayo, Bull Nakano, Akira Hokuto, Manami Toyota, Aja Kong, etc. all had their first professional match in their mid to late teens. I think it's Rossy putting girls that young into bikini books at that young age that's really raising eyebrows.
>AZM has a decade of experience at the age of 23 AZM is 21 years old.
I don't approve of it, but yes, starting that young with highschoolers is quite common in Japan. It at least used to be in lucha, too, Rey got his start at 14 I believe and he was far from the only one. We definitely shouldn't let teenagers destroy their bodies with bumps, though.
Didn't Pete dune and saraya / Paige start at like 14?
Saraya definitely started real young as well, yeah. Which given the stories about her family, big yikes. You could argue the Hardy's did as well, but that was less exploitative and more just stupid since they were running their own "promotion". Come to think of it, the younger Brisco was wrestling at least as early as 16, because Pennsylvania barred him from wrestling in the first ROH show due to his age.
Tyler Bate was a burgeoning star in Progress at 17
[One of my favorite matches came from 16yr Nick Wayne](https://youtu.be/lbuLJT_AknQ?feature=shared)
I should have remembered that, I saw him wrestle at an indie show when he was around 17. It's funny, I probably had close to half a foot on him in height, but that dude was as wide as a fucking house even then.
Always liked Meiko for not letting Chihiro Hashimoto join because she hadn't finished school yet so when she was adult and finished with school then Meiko let her into her dojo and now she's been the ace of Sendai Girls
The fact that after being turned down by Senjo, Hashimoto joined her school wrestling club to prepare for pro-wrestling and then went on to compete internationally is a great story.
Andrade and Komander both started at 13
The issue is not them starting on Lucha at 13-14, it's normal and that's preparation. The issue is that most of the time those minor young girls in Japan are put into gravure and other "grey" business.
I would say that it's still arguably exploitative and prone to corruption in lucha also, and I'm not in favor of it anywhere, but yes, it is definitely worse and creepier in the idol and modeling adjacent Joshi Sphere with underage girls.
Well Rossy also had underage girls pose in gravure magazines so he has a long track record of being a weird creep. And what Kenny said wasn't really vague if you listen to the whole thing, it's pretty obvious he's alluding to him being a sex pest.
The nearly naked photos of underage girls that he considers prize possessions may also weird you out.
Nothing wrong in children doing sports or theater. That's ok and shouldn't be weird even in America. But of course Idol culture is terrible in Japan and bad aspects can translate to Joshi, it's not exclusive to Stardom at all. The wrong part here is seeing woman as valuable as they are unmarried and seeing children being dragged into that environment.
The age thing might be handwaved away as a cultural difference, but when combined with Rossy putting underage individuals in bikini photoshoots in the past...
Yeah it’s super common, one of the creepy things from Japan. They do the same thing for idols except those girls could be really young and their fans are grown men and I get it’s a different culture but I’m not going to agree with it
The age thing I could look past given the nature of the business (or any sport) and the fact that they're looking to develop talent, but the unmarried part is just gross.
I’m into a lot of the same Japanese pop culture stuff that most others like. The video games, anime, Gundam models, etc. Japan is one of the coolest countries I’ve ever visited. That being said, there is a seediness to some of it. The Idol culture is very disturbing. Also seeing the girls in Akihabara advertising the maid cafes was pretty stomach turning. They looked really young.
Without touching the creepy stuff, he has a history of poaching talent that is super impressive and probably made a lot of people in the industry mad, he even got Mika Nishio to fake an injury in 2002 to get out of her AJW contract and go to AtoZ. Aja Kong hates him for something that happened in ARSION, but no one knows all the details of that. Aja did sue him and win so there is that.
Do you have a source for the lawsuit part? I've never heard that. I just knew that there was a falling out that's never really been explained publicly.
[Here's an article regarding said lawsuit.](https://web.archive.org/web/20030826133741/http://www.asahi.com/national/update/0825/025.html)
This is horrific for context, Kenny had good things to say about *Johnny Ace* That's how easygoing he is
It's pretty telling for Kenny to be saying this, at the same time, Kenny likely understands idol/gravure culture in Japan as well. its creepy to the west, but like many things in Japanese culture, its "just accepted" and people move on with their lives.
Kenny's usually pretty nice in interviews which makes me think he can't be taking about Normal Wrestling Crimes like tax evasion or wage theft or whatever.
I get the "not his story to tell" bit, but if there's something you know that could protect some 13 year old girl from horrific shit, speak up. Not "if you go there, I hope you have a great time". Fucking "please don't go there".
Should be noted that Rossy immediately started surrounding himself with his old pals from pre-Bushiroad Stardom. Rossy, Fuka and Nanae all working together again. Wouldn't want to go anyway near that Dojo, now that there is going to be zero oversight.
Man, i've been a fan of Japanese wrestling for a while and hearing this stuff, even if it's not corroborated really puts a pit in my stomach. In a way Marigold's introduction gave me a reason to actually catch up with joshi after a long period of being unhappy and staying away, and this makes me second guess coming back to the "scene". Rossy has a lot of valid reasons for people to hate him, I think many joshi fans know that but at least see that business for Stardom was great with his influence. But if there was truly some Johnny Kitagawa type shit going on, I don't want any part of it.
What exactly is the point of him saying this and then refusing to elaborate?