All Elite Wrestling has had a diverse group of talents not only from the United States, but also from all over the world including Mexico, Puerto Rico, India and Japan. Some of the talents that have made appearances and competed for All Elite Wrestling from The Land Of The Rising Sun include Riho, Hikaru Shida, Konosuke Takeshita, Maki Itoh and Yuka Sakazaki aside from the stars of NJPW. Former AEW World Champion and AEW EVP Kenny Omega recently appeared on the CEOGaming Twitch channel to discuss how the international talent that compete in AEW come to the United States not knowing how American fans will treat them and that catches them off guard and surprises them.
Omega also said those fans don’t represent everyone else’s feelings and the Japanese wrestlers are so much more refined than other wrestlers because they train seven days a week and they are so much more smooth and professional and they have never once had any sort of backstage political issue with them.
This is what Kenny Omega said:
“A lot of our international talent, they came to this country not really expecting everyone to be as relentless and ruthless, and have a shred of humanity.” “It’s unfortunate that that’s not the case, it’s not the world that they came into. You know, it catches them off guard and it surprises them to feel so hated so suddenly, and they need to understand that, that doesn’t represent everyone’s feelings, that people literally have nothing else better to do than to go out of their way and create an account to tell them that, ‘this, that, or the other’, something negative anyway, probably not just about wrestling, probably about the way that they look, or the way that they sound, or not being able to speak English — all of that. It’s really sad.”
“… Cases with Shida, Maki Itoh, Riho, [Yuka] Sakazaki, when I hear about what some of these pathetic motherf*ckers would say because they think somebody else that has a podcast or platform to say something negative, they think that makes it okay … The Joshi wrestlers are so much more refined. They train seven days a f*cking week and are so much more smooth and professional, and we have never once had any sort of backstage political issue with Joshi wrestlers. They do whatever they can, whatever is asked for them.”
Kenny Omega also talked about how Japanese wrestling fans treat you like their own and how he gave up everything in his personal life to be there and to live a dream.
This is what Kenny Omega said:
“When I went to Japan and I did my thing and I was Kenny Omega and I was in character, I was just being a wrestler living a dream and trying to leave it all in the ring. I had given up everything in my personal life to be there.” “I would hear maybe one person, one troll, every now and then say something stupid on a Japanese forum, but then when you go to America where, if you’re not in America, you’re a nobody, right? That’s what they’d have you believe.”
Kenny Omega competed in Japan from 2008 to 2019 for DDT Pro Wrestling and for NJPW, becoming the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion, the IWGP Intercontinental Champion, the IWGP United States Champion, the NEVER Openweight 6-Man Tag Team Champion and the IWGP Heavyweight Champion. Omega has not wrestled in Japan since January 4th, 2019, when he lost the IWGP Heavyweight Championship to Hiroshi Tanahashi in the main event of WrestleKingdom 13.
You can check out Kenny Omega’s comments at this link. H/T to Wrestling Inc. for transcribing the quotes.
