It is not easy to pinpoint the exact moment when the extreme style of professional wrestling known as deathmatch wrestling began, though one of the earliest innovators of the style was undoubtedly Kendo Nagasaki.
Not to be confused with the British professional wrestler of the same name, this Kendo Nagasaki, whose real name was Kazuo Sakurada, made his professional wrestling debut in 1971 for the Japan Wrestling Association (JWA).
But he will be remembered as someone who established himself far from the comforts of the puroresu style that the JWA promoted.
Here, we look at how one of the lesser-known legends of the Japanese deathmatch scene became just that and why his career was so important in giving life to a style not looked kindly upon by conventional professional wrestling promotions and audiences in his prime.
Kazuo Sakurada –
Another Ring
It was not always Sakurada’s dream to be a professional wrestler. Sakurada originally pursued a career in sumo, whereby he joined and trained under the Tatsunami stable after leaving junior high school up until his retirement from sumo in 1971.
Interestingly enough, Sakurada wasn’t the only future professional wrestler training with the stable at the time as Genichiro Tenryu, a future legend of the business, also had aspirations of becoming a high-ranking sumo from the age of thirteen.
In his sumo career, he achieved the rank of Makushita 13 and blitzed his way through the September 1966 tournament with seven straight wins and zero losses.
Sakurada notably had three ring names whilst in the profession. The first was simply his surname, Sakurada; then he changed it to Hiroshi Abashiri and then again to Midorimine.
This would become a common theme for Sakurada throughout his professional wrestling career, too.
A Rookie Out Of Place
Sakurada’s professional wrestling debut would come in August 1971 against Mr. Hayashi at a JWA event in Nagoya.
Unlike other rookies, Sakurada won more frequently than most, which was perhaps due to a mixture of his background as a sumo and the JWA’s desperation to make new stars quickly.
He also did not get the chance to go on an excursion to another country, as the JWA folded merely two years into his career.
Sakurada was somewhat loyal to the promotion that gave him his start though, but perhaps too loyal.
During the final months of the JWA’s existence, it was rumored that the rookie Tsutomo Oshiro was planning to jump ship to Antonio Inoki’s New Japan Pro Wrestling with his mentor Seiji Sakaguchi and his good friend Kengo Kimura, which they all later did upon the JWA’s demise.
Sakurada was allegedly furious at Oshiro and legitimately beat him up during their match together, leaving him knocked out cold outside the ring.
This would have almost certainly caused a fight at ringside between Sakurada and Sakaguchi had Sakaguchi not been held back by his fellow wrestlers behind the curtain. For all we know, the fight did happen behind closed doors, but if it did, then no one is telling.
All Japan Pro Wrestling was the destination for Sakurada; he made his debut for the promotion in a winning effort against Mitsuo Hata before teaming with the same man for his first encounter with The Great Kojika and his partner for the match Muenori Higo.
The Great Kojika would get the better of Sakurada in their first encounter, but being the more established talent, it was expected.
This result would repeat itself in the three singles matches that the two had together in 1973, first during the Summer Action Series and twice more during the World Champion Series.
Sakurada’s first three-year run with All Japan was, for the most part, unremarkable. The quality may have been there in patches, but Giant Baba used Sakurada as an enhancement talent for other stars more often than not, and he didn’t challenge for a single championship.
Naturally, this was less than ideal for the former sumo, who made his way to the United States towards the end of 1976 in the hope that it would ignite his career the way the journey had for so many others.
In the NWA he would compete as Mr. Sakurada in Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas to little success.
Becoming Kendo Nagasaki
Stu Hart’s Stampede promotion in Canada would then take on Sakurada at the start of 1978 where, after wins over Salvatore Bellomo, Gama Singh, and a debuting Bret Hart, he earned an opportunity at the NWA North American Heavyweight Championship against champion Leo Burke.
Their first match would end with a disqualification victory for Burke, but the rematch a week later would result in a clean victory for Sakurada and, at last, a title around his waist.
A few defenses later and, Sakurada found himself in a match against Harley Race for the biggest prize in the NWA – the NWA World Heavyweight Championship.
Unsuccessful though he was, Sakurada had been in a bigger match than he likely ever would have if he had stayed in Japan, and the match would have made big news in many professional wrestling circles across Sakurada’s homeland.
Paddy Ryan would be the man to defeat Sakurada for the NWA North American Heavyweight Championship, having already beaten him in a singles match earlier in Sakurada’s reign.
The loss wouldn’t dent Sakurada’s title prospects much as he, along with Mr. Hito, later challenged Bret & Keith Hart for their Stampede International Tag Team Championships.
Victory over the Harts signaled the start of a lengthy feud between the two teams in which Sakurada & Mr. Hito would drop the belts back to the Harts and then reclaim them from Dory Funk Jr. & Larry Lane before dropping them to the Harts once again.
A third reign would come for Sakurada, now with Kasavubu instead of Mr. Hino, with another win over the Harts. The other main difference with the third reign was that Sakurada’s team dropped the belts to Hercules Ayala and Jim Neidhart instead of the Harts.
Following a brief return to All Japan for a string of matches in 1981, Sakurada would switch territories from Stampede in Canada to Big Time Wrestling in Texas.
Here, he would be renamed from Mr. Sakurada to Chang Chung and face the likes of Kevin Von Erich and Bruiser Brody each week.
He would even gain another semi-regular tag team partner in the form of The Great Kabuki, and though the team never wore tag team gold, they joined forces with Ten Gu to take on Bruiser Brody and the Von Erichs in a huge steel cage match to end a long-running feud between the six men.
Central States Wrestling in Kansas was the next stop on Sakurada’s tour of the NWA territories, but little changed.
He was still Chang Chung and still working the tag team division, albeit the Von Erichs had swapped out for the Briscoes, and Mike Sharpe had tagged in for Kabuki.
Eventually, Sakurada would get a singles title opportunity for the NWA Florida Heavyweight Championship against Mr. Wrestling II, and his loss to the champion would see another name change for Sakurada, now Kendo Nagasaki.
This name change would see Sakurada portray a martial artist and he would compete in a slew of matches that allowed for his martial arts style to flourish above the traditional grappling most of the Kansas wrestlers would use.
Sakurada would go on an undefeated run as Nagasaki, with his only losses coming via intentional disqualification; he even beat Mr. Wrestling II in a return singles match, showing how his character had grown beyond what he was as Chang Chung.
It took over thirty matches for anyone to get the better of Sakurada, with the honor falling to Dusty Rhodes.
Sakurada’s loss sparked a feud between the two that showcased an array of hardcore-style matches, including a kendo stick match, a number of lights-out matches (which are essentially unsanctioned matches), and, of course, Dusty Rhodes’ signature bull rope match, in which the two men would be tied together.
Another chance at the NWA Florida Heavyweight Championship would come against Mike Rotundo following a short return to All Japan in which Sakurada competed as Dream Machine.
By this point Sakurada was considered a top heel and it wasn’t too much of a surprise that he came out of the match as the victor.
His defenses of the title were less than stellar, with the majority coming through intentional disqualification after hitting his opponent with a kendo stick.
It was only when Sakurada couldn’t get his hands on a kendo stick inside of a cage that he finally lost the title to Billy Jack.
Back To Japan
After his return to the mid-card of various NWA territories, Sakurada made a shock move to New Japan Pro Wrestling in late 1985 to compete with Mr. Pogo in the IWGP Tag Team League.
In all fairness, All Japan hadn’t done much with Sakuraba during his short returns to the promotion throughout his run in the West, so his move to the rival promotion in Japan was somewhat understandable.
That being said, he and Mr. Pogo’s run in the tournament was dire, only picking up a single win.
Perhaps the most unexpected part of Sakurada’s New Japan run was his second pairing with Seiji Sakaguchi, who he had almost come to blows with at ringside in the JWA thirteen years earlier.
At one point, the pair picked up three straight wins, which was more than Sakurada and Mr. Pogo had managed overall.
For the few years after his return to New Japan, Sakurada would flit between Antonio Inoki’s promotion and the NWA territories in the West; he and Mr. Pogo even picked up tag team honors in Puerto Rico.
A clean break came for Sakurada towards the end of that period as the 1990s dawned, and he would debut in WCW to support The Great Muta against Sting as The Dragon Master, becoming a part of a heel stable (Gary Hart International, also known as the J-Tex Corporation) in the process.
WCW didn’t appear to be a true fit for Sakurada as he didn’t stay for long. Atsushi Onita’s FMW came calling, offering a platform to showcase the martial arts and dangerous match types that Sakurada excelled at while in the NWA territories.
He would continue to use the Dragon Master name in Onita’s promotion, making his debut in a March 1990 victory against Tarzan Goto.
Onita evidently wanted Sakurada to feel like a big deal in FMW as the majority of Sakurada’s matches for the promotion were against the face of the promotion himself, either in singles or tag matches that were always of the hardcore variety.
High on the card as Sakurada may have been, he only worked several matches for FMW before he departed to take up a spot in Japan’s newest promotion.
The promotion in question was Super World of Sports (SWS), who financially were backed heavily by Megane Super, a major eye-glass company in Japan who had no qualms about throwing money around to attract the biggest stars to their new wrestling promotion, including at Sakurada.
The SWS was built around Genichiro Tenryu, who had quit All Japan prior to the formation of the SWS due to a falling out with Giant Baba.
The promotion would bring in stars from across the globe to take on their Japanese stars, and they even worked closely with the WWF. This allowed for the likes of Hulk Hogan and Shawn Michaels to appear at their events in Japan.
Unfortunately there were a number of issues with the SWS that brought about its eventual collapse part way through 1992.
Most stars couldn’t advance up the card as the main event often revolved around Tenryu and whichever WWF stars were brought in, meaning they were trapped in the mid-card for as long as their contracts lasted.
Furthermore, the SWS’ tactics of poaching talent and berating the competition isolated them from other Japanese promotions and their audiences, meaning that they would only ever be the third most popular promotion in Japan.
Soon, Megane Super lost interest in the professional wrestling business, seeing their SWS endeavor as a failure. This led to them pulling all their funding from the promotion and dooming it to closure.
Sakurada appeared to have seen this coming, as no more than two months after his last SWS appearance, he used the money from his bumper contract to start up his own promotion – Network of Wrestling (NOW).
Japan’s Newest Promoter
NOW appeared to showcase an array of wrestlers known for their different in-ring styles, with former SWS talent like Apollo Sugawara mixing it up in the ring with Poison Sawada, who would go on to star in a barbed wire poison snake deathmatch.
Yes, the match featured both barbed wire and a supposedly poisonous snake, just two years later. The promotion didn’t have any championships, but as it had a semi-regular group of talent, it was clear that Sakurada and Sugawara were the top stars.
As 1995 got underway, Sakurada decided to close down NOW while the promotion was still fairly profitable, bringing in anywhere between 1,000-2,500 fans per show.
In retrospect the promotion looked as though it had hit a ceiling, with no real hope of attracting the bigger stars and no real identity to speak of.
It later became clear that Sakurada was ready to begin another new endeavour side by side with The Great Kojika.
The endeavor came in the form of a brand new promotion, Big Japan Pro Wrestling (BJW), which combined the puroresu advertised by the likes of New Japan Pro Wrestling and the Deathmatch style advertised by promotions like Atsushi Onita’s FMW.
This move gave Sakurada a chance to showcase the styles he excelled at, this time as a major star within a promotion.
While in a BJW ring, Sakurada still competed as Kendo Nagasaki and became known as a specialist in the barbed wire board deathmatch, which ran similarly to a street fight but the area was littered with barbed wire on large, table-sized, boards.
Winding Down
One thing that Big Japan Pro Wrestling had little of during Sakurada’s time as a member of the promotion was championships.
This meant that the best way to distinguish who was best in the promotion came by looking at who was towards the top of the card and, in this case, who had the craziest matches.
While Sakurada appeared frequently at the top of the card and in crazy matches, he was also in his very late forties by 1998 and hadn’t much time to accomplish everything he wanted to in his career before his battered body would inevitably give up on him.
This gave Sakurada the idea to reluctantly give up his position in Big Japan Pro Wrestling so that he could work with other stars across Japan.
His first stop on the road to retirement was at Genichiro Tenryu’s WaR promotion. The two had known each other for over thirty years and Sakurada again worked as Kendo Nagasaki in a number of tag team matches on WaR’s DNA tour and their Romance Road tour.
Sakurada then traveled to IWA Japan in 1999 with his trusted ally Yuichi Taniguchi to compete in their IWA World Tag Team Championship Tournament.
They made it to the semi-finals before being knocked out by the team of The Shooter and Yoshiya Yamashita. A year later, the pair challenged for the titles again but came up short to Jason The Terrible and Leatherface.
While in IWA Japan, Sakurada also competed in Atsushi Onita’s newest promotion Onita Pro, which was somewhat adjacent to FMW in terms of its style.
Near enough, every time Sakurada stepped foot in an Onita Pro ring as Kendo Nagasaki, he did so without the comfort of the ring ropes, which had been replaced by barbed wire.
Not long after, running the barbed wire ropes had finally taken its toll on Sakurada, and he said farewell to the world of professional wrestling in his final match in the Yoshiaki Yatsu 20th Anniversary Tag Tournament for the Super Professional Wrestling Federation (SPWF).
Arashi and Tachihikari defeated Kaizoku Majin Viking and Kendo Nagasaki in just over eight minutes.
The final match of his career was likely not one Sakurada would have wanted and he most certainly deserved a grander stage to go out on, but these are the risks that deathmatch wrestlers take on every occasion they step foot in the ring.
The Legacy of Kazuo Sakurada
Kazuo Sakurada passed away in January 2020 at the age of seventy-one due to an arrythmia.
He will be remembered by many for his character Kendo Nagasaki who brought a different style of professional wrestling with him from Japan to show to the audiences of the United States and found himself as a performer while in the NWA.
By the time that Sakurada returned to Japan, he had earned himself a reputation as a crazy, offbeat performer who wanted nothing more than to crack his opponents over the head with a kendo stick and bring those he faced well out of their comfort zone and into his.
In retrospect, Sakurada was the right man for professional wrestling at the wrong time. Both the United States and Japan had a rigid style of professional wrestling with little room for the more hardcore aspects, especially on the level that Sakurada excelled in.
By the time that Sakurada’s style boomed in the nineties, the man had already seen his best years pass him by.
That being said, many will look back at Sakurada and his character Kendo Nagasaki as one of the blueprints for deathmatch wrestling and what’s now considered a stereotypical, crazy Japanese foreigner in the US who picks apart their opponents and often sprays green mist in their faces.
Without Sakurada, we would not have many of the stars that we do today; even if they themselves do not reference Sakurada as one of their influences, the comparison is an easy one to make.
