Say Goodbye to Osamu Kido With A Look At One of His Masterworks

Osamu Kido vs. Yoshiaki Fujiwara (2/18/85)

Osamu Kido, an original member of the New Japan Pro Wrestling roster dating back to 1972, passed away December 11. He was 73 years old.

Professional wrestling is most commonly associated with bombast and artifice, over-the-top pseudo-violence loosely structured into morality tales for an audience that abandoned nuance long ago. And, look, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. Wrestling is one of the great American cultural exports and there’s not much we do better than excess.

But it’s the lack of this kind of lavish deceit that makes the February 18, 1985 match between Osamu Kido and Yoshiaki Fujiwara such a revelation. One of the great lost matches of the original UWF revolution (a repudiation of the increasingly Americanized wrestling that no longer resembled a contest) the bout was both a throwback to a simpler time and a portal into the future, wrestling stripped bare to its essence, two men scraping and crawling on the mat for mastery.

If you have the patience for it, this is a great match from two technical savants who studied their craft under the demanding eye of Karl Gotch himself. You’ll see the pacing and matwork of a bout from the 1950s combined with cutting edge grappling like Americanas and triangle chokes that might look familiar to today’s MMA fans—all delivered with that extra oomph that would become shootstyle’s calling card.

I love this match and hope you will too. At the very least, it’s a snapshot of a very particular era, when the men in the ring were fighting for competing visions of what wrestling would look like going forward. While Kido and Fujiwara might not have won the war, it was a battle worth fighting.