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Hiromu Takahashi (2018)

155 Pts.



Hiromu Takahashi’s 2018 started off with him coming up short for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Title at Wrestle Kingdom 12, as he took part in a four-way match with KUSHIDA, Will Ospreay, and champion Marty Scurll that saw Ospreay pin Scurll to win the title for the second time. Hiromu received the very first shot at the new champion at the New Beginning in Osaka show, but once again couldn’t get the job done as Ospreay retained.

Following this Hiromu turned his attention to the IWGP Jr. Tag Team Titles alongside his LIJ stablemate BUSHI, and you can read that quest in great detail in BUSHI’s profile. Though he was ultimately unsuccessful in winning the titles in three tries, perhaps even more importantly this served to reignite Hiromu’s longstanding feud with his former young lion contemporary, El Desperado. Desperado, then Kyosuke Mikami, debuted in March of 2010, with Hiromu debuting five months later, and the two quickly became rivals. Mikami defeated Hiromu 12 straight times before Hiromu was finally able to snap the streak on 5/26/11, but Hiromu ultimately ended up with a record of just 2-16-1 against him before he left for Mexico on excursion. The two ended up taking vastly similar career paths, both cutting their teeth in CMLL before returning home, and so it was no surprise their paths crossed in New Japan once again this year. Everything came to a head in the Best of the Super Junior, where Desperado defeated him yet again in their first singles match in six-and-a-half years on May 22nd in a wild brawl widely lauded as excellent.

But this loss to an old rival was one of Hiromu’s very few blemishes on an outstanding BOSJ record, as he went 5-2 to reach the final. His only other loss came to another old rival, CMLL’s Dragon Lee, but wins over everyone else in the B block (including the man he had lost the junior title to last year, KUSHIDA) sent him into a finals matchup with A block champion and NJPW newcomer Taiji Ishimori. Hiromu and Ishimori ended up going to war in a crazy match that even saw Hiromu take a horrifying hurricarana from Ishimori down the steps in the crowd at Korakuen, as Hiromu actually went tumbling all the way down. But at the end of an unforgettable 28+ minutes, it was Takahashi who came out on top, using the Time Bomb to get the winning pinfall. Hiromu had debuted a new maneuver that had helped him win many of his BOSJ league matches, a triangle choke he called the D, but it was his old standby that ended up getting him the win over Taiji to take the BOSJ trophy for the first time.

This introduced us to a new character in the Hiromu Takahashi Extended Universe, as Trophy-san joined Belt-san in wowing us with its surprising linguistic skills. Sadly for Trophy-san he ran into the Destroyer Of Inanimate Wrestling Objects, Tetsuya Naito, who accidentally damaged it during the post-match (leading to an amusing moment on the following Kizuna Road tour where Hiromu asked Naito to apologize to Trophy-san only for Naito to kick the trophy away instead).

At Kizuna Road, Hiromu would be forced to face his old nemesis Desperado yet again, this time with his newly won junior title on the line. Finally, after months and months of falling prey to Desperado and Suzukigun’s cheating tactics in both singles and tag matches, Hiromu managed to defeat his longtime rival and successfully retain his championship.

Hiromu then turned to his other loss from the BOSJ tournament, as he defended his belt against Dragon Lee on the G1 Special in San Francisco show. Unfortunately, you probably don’t need me to tell you what happened next, but I will anyway: when taking a Phoenix Plex from Lee, a move the two had done numerous times before, Hiromu landed wrong on his neck and ended up suffering a fracture. Amazingly he finished the match and was able to retain his title, but that would end up being his final wrestling contest of 2018.

The rest of Hiromu’s year would come via updates on Twitter and his personal online diary. We learned through his Twitter feed that he was visited in the hospital by new President & CEO Harold Meij, who brought him a television to watch the G1 Climax on. We also got to keep up with his many percentage-based health updates and his drawings, including a rather infamous one with his head detached from his body. Sadly all of this meant he had to vacate his IWGP Jr. Heavyweight Title, but even for this we got a video message involving “Belt-san” meeting with NJPW Chairman Naoki Sugabayashi. Mr. Sugabayashi informed the talking title that they were stripping Hiromu, and that Hiromu would need to reach “1000%” health before he would be allowed to return to the ring, as even 100% would not be enough.

So let me leave you with a little bit of hope. On December 16th, Hiromu posted a diary with an image of his head reattached to his body for the first time. Furthermore, Hiromu gave a new percentage update- the last one about six weeks earlier said he was at 93%- that stated he was now at “732%”. Seems like we’re suddenly close to that magic 1000% number, huh? Fans worried that Hiromu may never be able to return to the ring again: don’t be. The Ticking Timebomb will return to us soon.