New Japan Pro Wrestling’s latest United States live event, the G1 Special in San Francisco, will air live on AXS TV from the Cow Palace arena on Saturday night.
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As part of the event’s promotion, company president Harold Meij announced on Friday that the Japanese promotion would be back in the United States for its next event, titled Fighting Spirit Unleashed, on Sept. 30.
That show will mark the third live event New Japan has held in the US in 2018 and the second to take place at the Walter Pyramid in Long Beach, California.
Two addition live events, The Lion’s Break Project, were also announced for Nov. 10-11 at the Anaheim Convention Center in Anaheim, California, and will feature the developmental talent from the company’s new dojo system that opened in Los Angeles in early 2018.
Meij, a Dutch businessman, took over operations as president of NJPW in June. During an interview with Japenese outlet The Mainichi shortly after he took the job, Meij promised the company would be looking to expand beyond its native country of Japan.
“My thinking hasn’t changed since my time at Takara Tomy. I want to expand the fan-base regardless of age, gender or nationality,” Meij said. “New Japan has fantastic content, so it has the possibility of picking up popularity overseas. At the moment, there are some 100,000 registered members on our video streaming service ‘New Japan Pro-Wrestling World,’ and 40,000 of them live outside Japan. I would like to aim for the international market with things like videos in English or events for foreign tourists.”
The promotion has become an international hub for top independent wrestling talent in recent years, producing current WWE stars like AJ Styles, Shinsuke Nakamura, Finn Balor and The Club while also bringing in some of the top stars from American promotion Ring of Honor and the Mexican lucha libre promotion Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL).
That influx of talent has brought a new diversity to company, which currently has five of its eight championships held by foreign talent (including WWE’s Chris Jericho as the IWGP Intercontinental Champion).
The current IWGP Heavyweight Champion Kenny Omega will defend his title for the first time at Saturday’s G1 Special when he’ll take on rival and WWE alum Cody (Rhodes). Omega recently spoke with legendary wrestling commentator Jim Ross on an episode of The Ross Report podcast and gave his thoughts on possibly working for WWE someday.
“When I think about the possibilities and stuff like that it does gets me excited. Every promotion has so many good guys there’s no way I would have a bad time going almost anywhere because the depth to the talent is so deep,” Omega said. :WWE right now has a very great collection of talent. I would feel like it’s a missed opportunity if I couldn’t work with them at some point.”
