Lion's Pride: The Turbulent History of New Japan Pro Wrestling Kindle Edition

Lion's Pride is the story of New Japan Pro Wrestling.As with a lot of guys my age who were wrestling fans during the 1980s and 1990s, Japanese wrestling always held some mystique. I didn't see a single Japanese wrestling match until the dawn of the internet made it much easier to get tapes and such. Lion's Pride lifts the veil and reveals the inner workings of one of Japan's biggest wrestling organizations.As with all talk of Japanese wrestling, the book starts with Rikidozan and the Japanese Wrestling Association. From there, it follows the career of Antonio Inoki and his formation of New Japan. The many exoduses of talent are covered and New Japans ups and downs are many. Antonio Inoki, like many owner-wrestlers, booked himself over the rest of the talent time and time again. It's a wonder New Japan survived long enough for him to retire.The book talked a lot of the creation of stars like Tatsumi Fujinami and Riki Choshu in the 1980s, Keiji Muto, Masa Chono, and Shinya Hashimoto in the 1990s, and Tanahashi and others for the new millennium. The book concludes in 2015, with the rise of Bullet Club and the launch of New Japan's streaming service.Lion's Pride was really informative, highlighting some backstage stuff I wasn't privy to and expanding on a lot of things I'd only read about on Wikipedia. The writing was pretty good for a book of this type. I did think the organization was a little weird, deviating from the main narrative to talk about completely unrelated things. For the most part, however, the book did what it set out to do.

This is an excellent book for anyone wanting to know the deep history of wrestling in Japan, especially on the development of New Japan Pro Wrestling. The author does a great job laying the groundwork for what led to today's product. Without spoiling the book, there is attention given to failed experiments in the product, the positives and negatives of Antonio Inoki's approach as leader of the company, the various periods of success and failure of the company in general, and detail of information about the stars of the promotion (such as Inoki, Liger, Chono, Nakamura, Tanahashi, and many others). If you are a wrestling fan or are intrigued by the business practices that make or break a company, this is a great book. I just pre-ordered Charlton's new book Eggshells because of how great this book is.

After having recently started following NJPW I was really interested in finding out some more of the history of the company that I might've missed. This book does a great great job of providing details for a lot of points in the NJPW history and getting an idea how the course that the company went through.Unexpectedly though, this book has become a terrific supplemental resource for the NJPW World streaming service. It has really helped me get the most out of the subscription and giving context to older wrestlers and matches that were a part of the history of NJPW that you might otherwise miss when you are only watching the most current events in NJPW.

I’m an American who has always loved wrestling. I discovered Japanese wrestling in the early 90s and was hook. US wrestling just seemed so lame afterwards. Unfortunately tape trading was often frustrating and expensive, so I never got to watch as much as I would like until NJPW World came along. This book fills in a lot of the gaps I had in my NJPW knowledge and points out so,e banger matches to watch. Definitely worth a buy.

i have gotten back into wrestling but seeing how wwe has more bad than good, i wanted to learn about other promotions. This is a great read and insight for one of Japan'a biggest promotion.

I started following NJPW this past January when I became hooked by Okada-Omega at Wrestle Kingdom. As my fandom has grown over the past year, I've found myself searching for old matches on NJPW World and reading Wiki pages for any and all wrestlers.Chris' book, which I discovered after stumbling upon his Twitter account, is an incredible summation of the history of the company. Anything you need to know about every aspect of the company, why and how it's constructed as you see in the present, is answered.If you're a NJPW fan looking to learn more about the company, I could not recommend it highly enough.

Considering the overall history of pro wrestling in the last 34 years, the WWE has the majority of the history, but if New Japan is 2nd, it isn't by much. It's a must read to understand not only the promotion itself, but the culture of pro wrestling and Japan.

Very fulfilling concise read on the history of NJPW. What really helps readers are the in-between chapters that take a break from the story to go over some of the promotion's greats or cultural aspects. I highly recommend this to anyone looking to learn more about NJPW, simply superb.

This was a very educational book. Talks about all of New Japan's history, with every other chapter in between talking about a different aspect of the Japanese business. I became a fan after watching the G1 in 2013 and it was great to get a background on the company. It covers from the starting of the company up to just before the 2015 G1, so it goes into good detail on the company's rise, fall and rise again.However the book has some problems. It tends to go off on tangents jumping forward years and then coming back. An example of this is when Naito's name is brought up in a chapter on the early 2000's, it then proceeds to detail Naito's career, his 2013 G1 win and heel turn, then goes back to the original subject. Then when the actual chapter on 2013 happens it talks about Naito's whole thing again. There's a lot of stuff like that in the book.I think the book needed more proofreading to get rid of the repetition, there are also quite a few typos and grammar mishaps, as well as a completely unneeded part talking about wrestling videogames for many pages.The book has some photos interspersed throughout. Reading this on kindle, midway through some of the photos obscure the text which is unfortunate, though I'm sure the physical copy does not have this formatting issue.Overall despite my complaints I loved this book! I'm so glad a book like this was able to be made, and I hope more like this will be written in the future!

For somebody who knows nothing about NJPW but knew about some of the characters such as Great Muta and Inoki as well as the American stars such as Vader, Brody and Hansen. Definitely fires the bullet to the current Bullet Club. Interesting Wrestling historical read.

After literally hundreds of books on the US wrestling scene there's finally a great history of New Japan. Bringing terrific insight as well as detailed history and what must have been exhaustive research, the author has captured perfectly the essence of what made NJPW so great in its first couple of decades before the slump in the early 2000s. With Japan again on the ascendant, let's hope the author can turn his hand and bring us equally good books on All Japan and the dominant women's era of the 90s. Terrific - highly recommended and a great purchase.

perfect read for fans interested in NJPW History

A great introduction to the history of NJPW. This book is ideal reading for western wrestling fans that are currently sinking their teeth into The new golden age of NJPW.