Last Thursday night at the NXT TakeOver: Fatal 4-Way show, the professional wrestler known as KENTA officially began his WWE career, announcing his name change to Hideo Itami and vanquishing the ring of The Ascension. Tomorrow night Itami will make his in-ring debut on the NXT show against Justin Gabriel. Ahead of that debut, it seems like a good time to delve deep into his professional wrestling career in Japan, where he spent 14 years competing in the Pro Wrestling NOAH promotion. KENTA was there from the very start, with his history and NOAH’s history being almost intrinsically entwined. He is a unique case in professional wrestling: an incredibly talented performer who eventually made it all the way to the top spot as World Champion. But unlike most, KENTA was clearly never supposed to make it to that point, and had it not been for the promotion’s own decline, almost certainly never would have.
All Japan Pro Debut
KENTA, real name Kenta Kobayashi, was born on March 12th, 1981, in the Saitama region of Japan. In his teenage years he was very athletic, competing in a variety of sports like baseball and kickboxing (which came in handy once he made his transition to pro wrestling, as he became well known for his wide array of stiff kicks). After spending some time in the All Japan Pro Wrestling dojo, he would debut for that promotion on May 24, 2000, competing against fellow young lion and future tag team partner/eternal rival Naomichi Marufuji. KENTA was immediately earmarked for the junior heavyweight division due to his small stature; billed at 5’9 and 179 pounds, he is almost certainly shorter than that.
To understand KENTA’s career and why it was so unique, it’s important to understand how important weight divisions are in traditional Japanese promotions. Junior heavyweight divisions feature smaller, lighter wrestlers competing in faster-paced matches when compared to those put on by the main heavyweight roster. The juniors have been extremely popular at different times in different Japanese wrestling companies, and they generally will have their own singles title, tag team title, and both singles and tag team tournaments (think of these as junior versions of the G1 Climax; many promotions have or have had them at some point in their history). The junior divisions in Japan receive a great deal more time and effort than even WCW’s Cruiserweight division at its peak, and juniors have even received their own dedicated shows. But despite all this, the junior divisions are still looked at as the “lesser” or undercard division when compared to the heavyweights. As such, many junior heavyweights do eventually go through a “bulking up” process and “graduate” to heavyweight after some time has passed (for instance, current New Japan top star Kazuchika Okada actually started out his NJPW career as a junior). But these wrestlers who move up to heavyweight have one key advantage over KENTA: height. Most of them are 5’10 or taller, giving them a bigger “base” to bulk up with. KENTA, due to his small stature, was viewed as more of a career junior (think Jushin Thunder Liger, for example) than a wrestler who would eventually advance to heavyweight. Simply put, the Japanese mentality would have said that KENTA was just too small to ever headline a heavyweight division as champion.
On the Ark
KENTA’s time in All Japan wouldn’t last long, as he and every other native Japanese wrestler with the exception of two (Toshiaki Kawada and Masanobu Fuchi) would withdraw from the historical promotion to form a new one, Pro Wrestling NOAH, under the guidance of longtime top star Mitsuharu Misawa. The mass exodus was announced just four days after KENTA’s in-ring debut (though the wrestlers did compete in All Japan for a few months afterwards), bringing an extremely early end to his AJPW career. All Japan’s junior heavyweight division was never a focus or highlight of All Japan, and when Misawa began planning his NOAH promotion he vowed it would have a much stronger junior division (Misawa himself spent five years as a junior heavyweight in AJPW), one that could stand up to New Japan’s own historically excellent one. He viewed both Marufuji & KENTA as major lynch pins in that plan right from the start.
KENTA continued competing in NOAH under his real name in a young lion position, but following a knee injury he would return in July of 2001 with a new name. Due to the extreme similarity between KENTA’s real name and that of legendary top star Kenta Kobashi, it was decided that KENTA would drop his last name and begin competing with his all-caps English name instead. After the name change and a change of look to go with it, it was clear that KENTA was no longer a young lion, and he began experiencing positive results for the first time in his young pro wrestling career. In May of 2002 he had his first real breakthrough, going all the way to the finals of a tournament to fill the vacant GHC Junior Heavyweight Title (Marufuji had been champion but suffered a knee injury of his own) before falling to Yoshinobu Kanemaru. Following that impressive showing, KENTA was allowed to join Kenta Kobashi’s BURNING stable, and the two quickly took on a mentor/protege dynamic.
The stock of both KENTA and the NOAH promotion as a whole were on the rise in 2003. Kobashi defeated Misawa to claim the GHC Heavyweight Title in front of a sold-out Budokan Hall on March 1st, kicking off a 735-day reign that was the centerpiece of NOAH’s glory period. For a few years, NOAH was unquestionably the hottest promotion in Tokyo (though their overall reach in popularity country-wide still paled to a then-struggling New Japan), and Kobashi was regarded by many as the greatest World Champion in all of wrestling at the time. KENTA became an important part in his own right of a string of incredible shows, as he teamed with Marufuji to be crowned the first-ever GHC Junior Tag Team Champions, defeating Liger & Takehiro Murahama in a tournament final on July 16th. From then on KENTA & Marufuji defended their new belts against an incredibly wide array of challengers, putting on matches that often rivaled Kobashi’s own title defenses for best on the show. Just some of the teams they defeated in their 690-day title reign included: El Samurai and Ryusuke Taguchi, Yoshinari Ogawa and Kotaro Suzuki, Suzuki and Ricky Marvin, Marvin and SUWA, and Kendo Kashin and Takashi Sugiura (that last one coming as part of NOAH’S first-ever Tokyo Dome show in 2004).
But even during this period, KENTA wasn’t just defending his tag title. The win over Ogawa & Suzuki came at the same time Ogawa was one-half of the heavyweight GHC Tag Team Champions, and as a result KENTA & Marufuji were granted a shot at Ogawa and his tag team partner, the legendary Mitsuharu Misawa. Though their title challenge was unsuccessful, the match was fantastic and both KENTA & Marufuji made a strong statement that they could look credible in the ring with two top heavyweight stars. And KENTA hadn’t forgotten about his singles career either: he made another unsuccessful title challenge for the GHC Junior singles title, losing to Takashi Sugiura on November 30th, 2003. He also competed in a singles match “trial series” in 2004 (a common phenomenon in Japan, where a young wrestler looking to move up and prove himself competes in a series of matches against wrestlers he’s usually not expected to defeat). KENTA’s trial series was rare in that it actually began with a win (over former WCW Cruiserweight veteran Juventud Guerrera) before he would go on to lose all of his remaining matches. He thus spent most of his 2004 competing against top heavyweight stars like Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Jun Akiyama, and Yoshihiro Takayama, while at the same time continuing his junior tag team title reign. The trial series finally came to an end at Korakuen Hall on November 13th, 2004, where KENTA actually faced off with his current championship tag team partner Marufuji in an extremely memorable match. In the end, it was Marufuji who got the win, debuting what was basically a one-man Spanish Fly (referred to as an “avalanche-style Shiranui”) to polish off his partner.
Black Sun Rises
KENTA had clearly made an impression as a singles wrestler through his trial series, and by 2005 it was obviously time to elevate him to the top (of the junior division, that is). As a result, KENTA & Marufuji finally lost their GHC Junior Tag Titles to Kanemaru & Sugiura on June 5th in Sapporo. Earlier in the year KENTA began his first real singles feud, competing in a series of incredibly stiff matches with Toryumon refugee SUWA (the two would remain bitter rivals basically until SUWA’s retirement several years later). On July 18th of 2005, NOAH would enter the Tokyo Dome for the second straight year, and in front of this enormous crowd KENTA would finally capture that elusive GHC Junior Heavyweight singles title from Kanemaru (memorably, he came out to the song “The Champ is Here” before the match had even begun). For the rest of 2005 he would split his time between defending his singles title and forming another tag team with Katsuyori Shibata (who had just left New Japan to become a freelancer); the two were known as “The Takeover” and competed for the GHC heavyweight tag titles, but were never able to capture the belts.
2006 saw KENTA step into the ring with his mentor Kenta Kobashi for the first time since his trial series in 2004. The two had an extremely good match, perhaps the best singles match of KENTA’s career. Of course, KENTA lost again, but this time Kobashi had to use his “Burning Hammer” finisher to do it. It was a major deal for Kobashi to have to bust out the rare move against a junior heavyweight (Kobashi only used the move in extreme situations- he didn’t even need to use it to beat Samoa Joe in their memorable ROH match in New York, for instance), another sign of how highly KENTA was viewed at the time.
Going 2 Sleep
But while his stock was still on the rise, NOAH’s had clearly begun to decline. Kobashi’s GHC Heavyweight Title reign had been ended at the hands of former sumo Takeshi Rikio in March of 2005, a stunning development at the time that ultimately proved to be a huge mistake. While NOAH had hoped ending Kobashi’s historic title reign would provide Rikio with the launch pad he needed to be their next top star, instead Rikio crashed and burned. The belt would be taken off of Rikio and put onto veteran Akira Taue by November 2005, but the damage had already been done. NOAH fans, most of them holdovers from the All Japan glory days of the 90s, wanted to see no one but Kobashi on top, but Kobashi’s physical state was already breaking down by that time due to more than two decades of extremely physical matches. NOAH tried desperately to get a new top heavyweight star over, trying Takeshi Morishima and Go Shiozaki after Rikio, and though neither was quite the failure Rikio was they weren’t able to stem the downward tide of the promotion either.
Lonely at the Top
KENTA would spend the next five years competing in both the junior division and heavyweight tag team division of the declining promotion, continuing to put on entertaining and physical matches even as the eyeballs watching him became fewer and fewer. He won the GHC Junior singles title two more times, in October of 2008 and March of 2009. In addition, he had another reign as GHC Junior Tag Team Champion, this time with Taiji Ishimori, in March of 2008. But following almost a decade as one of NOAH’s top junior stars (many of those years unquestionably their top junior star, especially once the taller Marufuji began to spend more and more time in the heavyweight division), KENTA was getting more than a bit stale. Things were finally shook up in January of 2011, when KENTA made his first real heel turn. At first he did it by joining Mohammed Yone’s Disobey stable, but KENTA would soon eject Yone from the unit and take it over himself. A longtime fan of American rap music, KENTA changed the name to No Mercy in reference to T.I.’s album of the same name. No Mercy and KENTA were both dominating forces in the changing NOAH landscape over the course of his last several years with the promotion. KENTA would have his third and final reign as Junior tag team champions with former rival and now stablemate Kanemaru in 2011, and he’d finally win the GHC heavyweight tag team titles with partner Maybach Taniguchi (named MAYBACH during this time and positioned as KENTA’s protégé just as he had been Kobashi’s) in 2012.
Though their reign as champions was short-lived, KENTA used this moment as his springboard to finally competing with the heavyweights. In November of 2012, KENTA won the Global League (NOAH’s equivalent of the G1), defeating the much larger Morishima in the finals. However, the biggest victory of KENTA’s career up until that point came in the 2100-seat Korakuen Hall, showing just how far the promotion had fallen. Previously the promotion would have had such a major show at the much larger Budokan, but the company could no longer draw nearly enough fans to even come close to filling it. KENTA was now the unquestioned top star of a promotion in a deep decline; the company had tried heavyweight after heavyweight on top, but were finally forced to turn the spotlight onto the small junior heavyweight who was easily their most popular performer left. With Misawa’s untimely death and Kobashi’s retirement, KENTA was essentially the last man standing. Despite the traditional Japanese concern that he was too small to be taken seriously as a headliner, the promotion couldn’t afford to fight it any longer.
A Second Trip on the Ark
In January of 2013 KENTA’s ascension would be complete, as he defeated Morishima again in Osaka, this time to become the GHC Heavyweight Champion. His reign would last for almost a full year before he was beaten by Morishima for the title on January 5th, 2014 in an outstanding match at Korakuen Hall. KENTA did his best as champion of a promotion that had become a mere shell of its former self, putting on some outstanding title defenses along the way, but it was nowhere close to enough to reverse years of downward momentum. Following his title loss, rumors began circulating that KENTA was looking to leave NOAH entirely to try out for a spot in the WWE. KENTA went to the WWE’s Performance Center in Orlando, Florida on January 27th, but quickly put out a press release that he was merely taking part in a workout to “fulfill a dream” and would remain with NOAH. But KENTA’s dream wasn’t just to workout with the WWE, it was to compete in the WWE. Ultimately he would have to leave NOAH to pursue that dream (it almost certainly helped that he could see the writing on the wall in regards to NOAH’s future; in somewhat of an irony, NOAH saw an exodus of many top wrestlers back to All Japan in late 2012, following a controversial decision to eliminate Kenta Kobashi’s contract in a cost-cutting maneuver, which was an enormous blow to a promotion that was already reeling).
KENTA officially announced his resignation from NOAH on April 30th of 2014, and the news that he had signed with WWE was broken several months later by Tokyo Sports. A new chapter had clearly begun for him, his time with Pro Wrestling NOAH having drawn to a close.
The story of KENTA in NOAH is a complicated one, as you can clearly see. He was an undeniably talented and popular performer who nonetheless was never supposed to be elevated to the position he eventually reached. Had any of NOAH’s choices for successor to Kobashi as top heavyweight star worked out, KENTA likely would have continued on as their top junior heavyweight until his retirement. But none of the NOAH-grown heavyweights worked out and the company found themselves in a tail spin. KENTA made it to the top not just on the basis of his own work- which, again, was almost always incredibly good- but on the failure of his heavyweight contemporaries.
Now, KENTA finds himself in a new situation with a new challenge: reach the top of the WWE despite still being extremely undersized (not to mention the barriers of language, culture, and wrestling style). While the odds are almost undoubtedly against him once again, KENTA (or rather, Hideo Itami) will keep doing what he’s done all along: work hard, excite crowds, and put on excellent matches to the best of his ability. Whether or not that will again be enough for him to ascend to the top of his promotion remains to be seen. But should WWE’s hand-picked successors like Roman Reigns falter, one would have to imagine that KENTA will be there, ready to repeat history and become the wrestler who makes it to the top despite the fact that he was never supposed to.
Photo by WWE.com and George Tahinos
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