The Invisible Success of STARDOM's Taro Okada

What if I told you that someone who had never booked a single professional wrestling match was parachuted into being the booker of the second or third biggest wrestling company in Japan?

What if I told you that within a year he had effectively revamped the makeup of the roster and created a successful booking strategy?

What if I told you that in one year, the company went from having its worst-attended show ever to setting a variety of new attendance records?

Doesn’t that sound like something you would have heard people talk about on almost any wrestling podcast or read about in any wrestling newsletter?

Instead, this story hasn’t really been covered in detail anywhere in the English-speaking world, for reasons I can only speculate on.

Regardless of whether you heard about it or not, the first year of Taro Okada’s run as the booker of STARDOM has been a huge success.

Let’s break down all the reasons why.

Background

Bushiroad completed its purchase of STARDOM on December 1, 2019, keeping company founder Hiroshi “Rossy” Ogawa in place as booker and appointing Katsuhiko Harada as the President of the company.
Taro Okada was appointed President of World Wonder Ring Stardom (hereafter, STARDOM) on December 1, 2023, replacing the retiring Harada. Although this was badged as a retirement, many viewed this as a de-facto firing of Harada. Okada had previously worked in the theatre production business unit of Bushiroad.
Taro Okada was also appointed as a representative director of New Japan Pro Wrestling on December 23, 2023.
Ogawa was fired by Bushiroard on February 4, 2024, with Okada replacing him as booker. Ogawa made sure to tell the media he was already planning to quit as soon as his five-year non-compete expired, even if he hadn’t been fired.
Ogawa founded his new joshi puroresu company Dream Star Fighting Marigold (hereafter, Marigold) on April 15, 2024.
STARDOM was merged into the New Japan Pro Wrestling business unit within Bushiroad on June 28, 2024, having previously been in a separate business unit within Bushiroad called Bushiroad Fight.

What is the work of a booker?

Quickly, to act as context for why I personally believe Okada has been so successful, I need to outline my personal beliefs on the key areas that a wrestling booker needs to focus on:

Roster Management – who is on your team?; what is their role within the team?; what is their alignment? (heel/babyface); are they best suited to that alignment? Who can they be paired with or against for maximum artistic success and commercial value? Another key is pushing the people who are at their peak now while working to build the stars of tomorrow at the same time.
Booking Strategy – your roster management choices cover some key elements of the matches you make and who wins them, but you still have to identify stories to tell; build and execute booking plans against those stories by deciding who wins, when and how they win; execute angles to keep the stories moving; and generally keeping enough story elements in the air at any time to ensure that the matches on your shows exist in service of your overall creative goals and not in a vacuum.
Business Strategy – your booking has to serve your business goals, which should be long-term and not short-term. Your big title matches should take place on your biggest shows, and everything in between should build towards that, with selective use of lower card titles to bolster mid-tier shows. Your long-term business strategy should drive your booking strategy, not the reverse.

Roster Management

The first item for Okada and Bushiroad to address upon the departure of Ogawa was who would be on their roster. Regardless of whether or not Ogawa had been engaged in “poaching” (the stated reason for Ogawa’s dismissal) it was clear that some members of the roster would depart with Ogawa, no matter what Bushiroad did.

Understanding who would be on the roster long-term was presumably Okada’s immediate goal. Ogawa was dismissed on February 2, 2024 and reports from the Wrestling Observer Newsletter at that time stated that, with one known exception, the contracted wrestlers on the STARDOM roster all had twelve-month contracts that expired at the end of March 2024, leaving Okada and team less than eight weeks to confirm the makeup of their roster and move any titles off departing wrestlers.

In the end, only five contracted wrestlers left STARDOM for Marigold:

Two top stars – Utami Hayashashita and Giulia. (Giulia has already left Marigold for WWE and was likely doing so regardless of Ogawa’s departure from STARDOM.)
One upper-mid card wrestler – MIRAI.
One lower-mid card wrestler – Mai Sakurai.
One high-potential rookie – Victoria Yuzuki.
Additionally, veteran freelancer Nanae Takahasi also departed for Marigold.

I would assume that a loss of five full-time wrestlers was considered acceptable by Bushiroad, especially given the well-documented depth in their roster. It was far from the nightmare scenario of an almost total roster departure, similar to the formation of Pro Wrestling NOAH in 2000. Perhaps most importantly, their enduring top star and “Icon of STARDOM” Mayu Iwatani was, through pure circumstance, already committed to a longer contract due to the release and associated promotion of her biopic movie, gifting Bushiroad the chance to retain perhaps their most important asset for at least another year, and likely helping them maintain junior members of the roster who would follow Iwatani’s lead. (As Yugi Nagata astutely noted when discussing the Ogawa departure with Iwatani on his YouTube channel.)

With a limited group of departing wrestlers, and with the key wrestlers on the roster already signed up, Okada was able to move on to reshaping the roster for the years to come. Perhaps fortunately, the STARDOM roster was filled with quick win opportunities.

There were some wrestlers who were ready to move up the card who hadn’t been able to find room in the previously packed top card. There were some wrestlers who were miscast and/or ready to be re-cast. Younger stars were ready to move on from their rookie seasons. Furthermore, fans had been talking about staleness in the units (factions) for well over a year. Over the course of the year, much of this low-hanging fruit was harvested.

Let’s highlight some of the most important roster management choices Okada made:

Starlight Kid

Perhaps the biggest indictment of the late Ogawa era was the failure to capitalize on the popularity of 23-year-old Starlight Kid (SLK), perhaps evidenced best by the allegedly massive merchandise sales she is responsible for. Since 2021, she had been a middle-of-the-pack member of STARDOM’s main heel unit (Oedo-Tai), despite being a highly charismatic underdog – in other words, a classic babyface wrestler. By April, SLK was moved out of Oedo-Tai and by June she was leading her own new unit, Neo Genesis – a group built in her image: bright, colorful, exciting, young wrestlers. By the end of the year she was the Wonder of Stardom Champion and the reception her win received in a sold-out Sumo Hall was a clear validation of the decision to give a real and sustained push to one of the most popular wrestlers on the roster.

Maika

Perhaps no wrestler in the world has benefited from space opening up in the upper card of their wrestling company in recent years more than 29 year old Maika, who kept pushing against the door with a strong crowd connection and impressive in-ring performances before finally breaking the door down and winning the World of Stardom Title at the 2023 year end show. (Notably, it reported in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter that this was one of the booking decisions forced on Ogawa by Bushiroad against his will, a further indictment of the end of his time at STARDOM.) Despite losing the belt mid-year in a “heavy heat angle” there has been no looking back for Maika since: she went on to win the 5StarGP without being defeated (a first in STARDOM history) and made it to the finals of Tag League (without taking any of her team’s falls) establishing her as a both a tournament specialist and perhaps the biggest pushed star in the entire company. Unsurprisingly, such a strong push has allowed her to become a beloved babyface. Furthermore, her months-long feud with Natsuko Tora culminated at the year end show with an incredibly bloody brawl, marking the first time in many years that a STARDOM match featured real, non-accidental blood – let alone a total bloodbath – further evidence of Okada expanding the play calling options he allows his roster to utilize.

Unit Realignments

As noted above, fans had been calling for changes to Stadom’s units for some time. Although there had been some movements – historically there has been unit upheaval in STARDOM roughly every 18 months or so – the status quo had become a little too static. Okada moved fast here too: by the middle of 2024, Queen’s Quest (dating back to 2016) was disbanded, Oedo-Tai (dating back to 2015) was rebranded as H.A.T.E. and NeoGenesis was formed. (ExV had also been formed in January of 2024, just prior to Ogawa’s departure.)

Unit changes, wrestler departures and the shuffling of the deck across the roster also offered the opportunity to re-cast and/orpush plenty of other wrestlers who were more than ready for it. These changes led to many popular and/or young wrestlers being pushed up the card, with the ages of many of them showing both long-term and short-term thinking (booking for both now and for the future) was baked into the booking process:

18-year-old Rina broke the record for most defenses of the Future Of Stardom title and became the featured act around which rookie-focused New Blood shows are built.
20-year-old Hanan won two tournaments in 2024: the Cinderella Tournament (a single elimination singles tournament akin to the New Japan Cup) and the Tag League.
22-year-old AZM (who celebrated her tenth year as a wrestler in 2024) was booked importantly through the back half of the year, including in a single match at the Tokyo Dome.
24 year old Momo Watanabe (a favorite of many of the longest-tenured STARDOM fans) was put back into main events again.
29-year-old Natsupoi was finally pushed to the upper card and won the Wonder of Stardom title, exactly at the time that she rounded out every aspect of her skillset and almost immediately after returning from serious injury.
33-year-old Natsuko Tora, long the nominal top heel in the company and much closer to the end of her career than the start, was finally made into an actual heel threat and won the World of Stardom title from Maika in a heavy heat angle to help establish the H.A.T.E. unit.
Ultimately, the biggest beneficiary of these changes was 28-year-old Saya Kamitani, who was able to move on from the departure of her tag-partner Utami and the dissolution of Queen’s Quest and vault herself to the role of top heel in the company by screwing Maika to facilitate Tora’s title win. Kamitani even used being harassed at a fan event as a worked-shoot aspect of her heel motivations. (What really happened here is up for debate. Kamitani was verbally harassed at a fan event, and it was publicly disclosed. Whether it was a work with a plant, or just taking something real and turning it into a story is unclear. Either way, it acted as additional fuel for her launch of this new character and acts as further evidence of the expansion of play calling options.) Kamitani’s transition to a heel role was bumpy at first, but by the end of the year, she stood tall in Sumo Hall as World of Stardom champion having beaten and humiliated Tam Nakano (the company’s other top babyface) and finally having broken through the tippy-top of the card.

Booking Strategy

Okada’s booking in 2024 focused on fundamentals, which is the right thing to do in any rebuilding year, but especially when you lost the booker/founder and three of your most pushed acts. As noted above, a lot of that focus was on identifying stars/potential stars and pushing them.In short, he focused on the big-picture strategic moves. It was not just the act of moving pieces around on the playing field, it was also a whole scale re-evaluation of the playing field itself, moving pieces to new starting points and then moving the pieces around as needed – without dropping any pieces or knocking any over.

The elevation of some of the wrestlers was, in some cases, clearly foretold in the booking and by both showing and telling the fans these elevations were happening, the buy-in from the fans continued to increase as the year unfolded, which seems to have been a driver of business growth as the year went on.

Without recapping every story that was told over the course of a year in a promotion that can run heavy on stories, there were very few misses. Each championship was booked in an ultimately satisfying manner (ok, maybe not the trios titles), and the long-term feuds that were set in motion were all paid off (or remain in progress.)

The majority of booking issues that occurred over the last year were primarily related to the small picture stuff, primarily some early wonky execution of turns / angles leading to initial confusion or skepticism and a heightened sense of story speed compared to the previous booking style. While there were reasonable complaints, most complaints that surfaced were primarily due to those changes in booking style. Some people don’t like change and/or prefer the Ogawa-era booking style, which is perfectly reasonable and no one should be faulted for that. However, the slow burn booking approach taken in the growth years of 2021-2023 no longer made sense in a rebuilding year where the goal needed to be to win back fans who may have been turned off by the scattershot booking approach in late 2023 and early 2024 and to retain fans who may be wooed by Marigold.

When it came to the “Booker of the Year” award in the Wrestling Observer Newsletter Awards this year I asked myself a couple of questions in the form of an imperfect metaphor:

Is it harder to get the surfboard out past the waves and be patient in waiting for the right wave to come? (Is it harder to reset and rebuild?)
Is it harder to ride a wave once it comes? (Is it easier to keep going once you have momentum?)

I was trying to determine if I wanted to vote for Okada for this rebuilding year or vote for the CMLL booking team (for the second year in a row).

In the end, I voted for Okada because I was so impressed by the scope of the vision and the execution of it, especially for a first-time booker in such a relatively short amount of time.

People Management – an oft-overlooked aspect of booking and roster management and booking is the ability to relate to your roster. Any effective manager in any field needs to understand the human beings and their motivations within each of their employees. The difficulty of this varies depending on how many things the people have in common. Often in wrestling a key differentiator between the bookers and the wrestlers is age. It is not uncommon for bookers to be 20-30 years older (or more) than the wrestlers they are working with. In the 2020s, it feels increasingly less and less likely that a sixty or seventy year old person can relate easily to someone in their late teens or twenties in a professional setting. An advantage Okada has over many other bookers in wrestling (and his predecessor) is that he is closer in age to many of the wrestlers he works with. Taro Okada and his top draw Tam Nakano are the same age. As I have highlighted below, that ability to relate to your wrestlers – as a fan of wrestling, as a boss and as a peer – is likely a key aspect in Okada’s approach.

“Shadow bookers” and booking teams: Who is truly the booker – or perhaps head of a booking committee – can still be opaque in many wrestling companies. To the best of the knowledge of the wrestling media in the United States, Okada is the head booker but takes input from others. When the news of Ogawa’s departure from STARDOM was covered in the February 12, 2024 edition of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, it was reported that:

Okada and Bushiroad Fight merchandise manager Oyama will take over as the bookers for STARDOM effective immediately. The two don’t have any background as bookers although Okada was part of a pro wrestling club while in college that staged matches.

That same issue also included a quote that Okada gave to Tokyo Sports:

Within our group, we have people who understand and have experience in the wrestling industry, so with their guidance and cooperation, we will build a solid organization and strengthen the company’s structure.

In an interview published on October 24, 2024 via Puroresu Today (and machine translated by me using DeepL), Okada made multiple statements that could be construed as him outlining how he gives the roster their own booking space:

“I listen to what they [the wrestlers] have to say, but I think the most important thing is that I trust the players [wrestlers]. I cannot control the trust that they have in me, but I thought that I could trust them. … I believe that professional wrestlers are not only athletes but also creators. I think Bushiroad’s strength is to support and sometimes lead creators so that they can work in the best condition possible. I believe that such a company attitude was conveyed to the audience [the wrestlers]. …I think we absolutely have to be conscious of the need to nurture players [wrestlers], front office staff and employees who come from player [wrestler] backgrounds and who can look one step, three months, six months, one year, and five years ahead.”

Based on all of the above statements, it seems highly likely that there is a booking committee of some kind in play, beyond just Okada and Oyama. It seems reasonable to assume veteran referee Daichi Murayama could be another. Diachi has long been known (and literally heard) to help wrestlers with match layout and spot calling. Many keen observers of STARDOM content, myself included, have come to believe Tam Nakano is a member of that group. Nakano was reported as re-signing with STARDOM within days of the Ogawa news breaking and was the first person reported to have re-signed. Many of her subsequent public statements can be easily construed as those that could be made by someone working in “the office”. Okada’s comment about employees who come from wrestler backgrounds is particularly interesting in this context.

Business Strategy

Since being acquired by Bushiroad in December 2019, STARDOM has been one of the few companies in Japan to grow their business every year thereafter, including during the worst of Japanese COVID-19 restrictions. By the end of 2023, sales were 7.5x where they were in 2019:

Notes from the Stardom x NJPW Joint Strategy Presentation
Stardom sales
2019 – 200 million
2021 – 460 million yen
2022 – 1 Billion yen
2023 – 1.5 Billion yen (about 10 million US dollars)
— STARDOM Global (@we_are_stardom) October 10, 2023

Part of – if not all of – that growth was built quite literally on the backs of the wrestlers. The removal of Harada as President may well have been related to wrestler feedback, as with each passing year, the schedule grew increasingly grueling, and wrestler injuries piled up, culminating in the withdrawal of multiple wrestlers from the 2023 5StarGP and a more scattershot approach to booking as a result. By late 2023, business had begun to drop from the peaks of 2022. In December 2023, the month Okada replaced Harada, STARDOM held the worst-attended show in its 14-year history, drawing a truly dismal crowd of just 114 people in Osaka.

Thus, in addition to overhauling the roster and the booking approach and the threat of new competitor Marigold taking some market share away from STARDOM, the overall business strategy also needed a fresh perspective and long-term plan.

There was really no choice but to rebuild.

Comments from Okada in his Puroresu Today interview highlight issues he identified with the previous business strategy:

Q: What is the direction that the group is looking at in terms of future management policy, as far as you can say at this time?
A: Immediately after taking office, we made a statement that we would secure profits without losing sales as much as possible. However, after trying this for more than six months, I found that although operating income and ordinary income had increased under the old system, we were actually behind in upgrading systems in areas that were not visible, such as the website and video distribution site. Rather than continuing to prioritize performance and manage to make a profit, I think the more necessary policy for the company now is to properly update the system to the extent that it does not result in a loss, and to firmly establish a system that can withstand future increases in sales. We will keep unnecessary expenses low now and try not to lower sales, while at the same time making solid investments. The ideal plan is to evolve in such a way that both sales and profits will increase when these investments bear fruit. The current management policy is on the cusp of that goal, and has changed slightly from the policy that I laid out when I first took office.

This strategy is being seen more with each passing month. The STARDOM World interface was recently updated and one presumes further improvements to this ‘video distribution site’ are planned. It has already, during Okada’s tenure, changed to a service where the majority of shows are streamed live instead of majority video-on-demand, addressing another common fan complaint. The number of PPV shows has also reduced to approx one (or less) per month, compared to 2 (or more) in 2022 and 2023.

Okada noted he is keen to work on house show attendance across the county, in addition to bigger shows in Tokyo, understanding that growing the audience everywhere is important. (A goal he shares with his fellow President, Hiroshi Tanahashi.) Okada, in a quote to Tokyo Sports reprinted in the February 12, 24 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, said:

“I believe that by revitalizing the local shows, we will be able to increase the turnout for the big matches in major cities, so we will formulate a solid strategy.”

Okada has made multiple references to the need for a five year business plan in his interviews. That plan seems to be built around something else he mentions with some regularity: being the first women’s company to run a show at the Tokyo Dome since 1994, as shown in this quote from his Puroresu Today interview:

Q: What are your major goals for the future?
A: I would like to have a Tokyo Dome STARDOM’s women’s wrestling event as soon as possible in the future.

Setting a five year strategy is one thing, but you also have to execute every month, every quarter, every year during that time. So, it’s reasonable now to ask: has this roster and booking overhaul led to any business success in the short term that will allow those long term goals to stay on the roadmap?

The Spring and Summer were solid if unspectacular, with the cornerstone of the summer, the 5StarGP coming in slightly ahead on average attendance than 2023, but below the peak of 2022, while running half as many shows as those years (addressing the wrestlers issues with the schedule.) A bright spot in the summer were the two July shows in Sapporo’s Chateraise Gateaux Kingdom arena, which were the two biggest STARDOM crowds ever in Sapporo.

Fall and Winter continued the momentum and provided some of the best crowds in company history:

The October show in Dolphins Arena was the biggest STARDOM crowd ever in Nagoya.
The December Tag League finals show in Hamamatsu was the biggest crowd for any STARDOM Tag League final and the second biggest STARDOM crowd ever in Hamamatsu.
The Sumo Hall show on December 29 was the biggest STARDOM crowd ever in Sumo Hall.
December 2024 had the highest total attendance of any December in STARDOM history.
December 2024 had the fourth-highest total attendance of any month in STARDOM history (including beating a month that featured two Sumo Hall shows)
13 months on from that all-time low attendance, they drew almost five times as many people (555) to a show in the same city (Osaka.)
January 2025 is on track to achieve the highest total attendance of any January in STARDOM history.
STARDOM currently is on a streak of 8 out of their last 9 shows at Korakuen Hall drawing a crowd of 1,000+ fans, which ties the best stretch in company history. One more show will break that record. The next show is in February.

Overall, the 2024 August to December period, which every year encompasses the 5StarGP tournament shows and the year end Sumo Hall show, was down only 2.6% in attendance from the same period in 2022 – which is the most consistently popular period in STARDOM history.

In 2024, that period featured six fewer weekends of tournament action and three fewer PPV shows – shows which were replaced primarily by house shows. So, they remained within touching distance of their most successful period ever, while also staying true to Okada’s plan to “revitalize local shows…[and] increase turnout for big shows.”

Summation

After a year, Taro Okada has achieved many notable things:

A roster and unit overhaul.
The elevation of new top stars, particularly top babyfaces (often referred to as the hardest thing to do in wrestling.)
Some extremely encouraging business results, including the biggest crowd in company history at Sumo Hall.
Fan experience improvements.
Wrestler quality of life improvements (not discussed here but mentioned by multiple wrestlers in interviews) most notably very few significant injuries compared to previous years, especially 2023

All of this was achieved while a new competitor was added to the marketplace featuring some of his company’s previous stars.

Although STARDOM (and all joshi puroresu) continues to exist on a significantly smaller scale than American major league wrestling and their owner New Japan Pro Wrestling, the success story outlined here is no less valid than any other wrestling companies success, of which there were not many in 2024 outside of WWE and CMLL who are, not coincidentally, the two oldest companies in wrestling.

In a year in which very few wrestling companies grew their business or elevated new stars, STARDOM was a rare success story by achieving both and the architect was someone who had only worked in wrestling for 3 months when he was given the job and who did it in the simplest way possible. His success should be a larger part of the conversation in wrestling media.

Which leads to two final thoughts I have:

Who can – or should – be a booker? A familiar question that almost always is answered with a list of bookers with a string of failures on their resume and/or a list of tenured wrestlers that may have worked in some well received programs during their careers. We now have two people in the last five years – Okada and Tony Khan – that have shown us that you can very likely find a person outside of wrestling who loves and has studied wrestling to do the job better than many industry lifers. Not coincidentally, both of these men were in their mid-30s when they took on this job. Other companies might be wise to follow this example.

Who can – or should – be a promotion’s top stars? A familiar question that almost always ends with a list of people with a certain “look” or “promo ability” or “are well known to the general public.” Okada took that question and answered it in the most logical and simple way: by identifying the most popular people on his roster and pushing those people to the top of the card. Business metrics improved. Other companies might be wise to follow this example.

“Wrestling doesn’t have to be hard” – Rich Kraetsch

References

November 27, 2023 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter
February 12, 2024 issue of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter
Proresu-Today interview with Taro Okada, October 24th 2024.
Yugi Nagata YouTube interview with Mayu Iwatani and Saya Iida
Cagematch.net – attendance figures, show dates, etc

Attendance data and analysis, crucial advice, smart suggestions and good ideas were provided by Velkej Bracha and @ArmaniShoe, my sincere thanks to both of them for the help as I would not have been able to do this without their input.