Trapped in the Cagematch: Masato Tanaka vs. Hayabusa (August 3, 2025)

With Trapped in the Cagematch, Kim Wong combs through the highest-rated matches according to Cagematch’s voters in preparation for the annual FSM 50 and the year-end Match of the Year extravaganza.

Masato Tanaka vs. Hayabusa
Pro Wrestling ZERO1
August 3, 2025
Cagematch ranking as of 10/1/25: 192

In July, after NJPW announced the lackluster list of participants in the 2025 G1 Climax tournament, I looked high and low for alternatives for what would normally be the signature event in the pro wrestling calendar. The prospect of watching EVIL, Don Fale, and other members of the House of Torture gumming up what should be the highlight of the year made me despondent for an alternative. I could have landed with Marigold’s Dream Star Grand Prix, Stardom’s 5STAR Grand Prix, or Tokyo Joshi Pro-Wrestling’s Tokyo Princess Cup. However, one company’s annual summer tournament warmed the embers of nostalgia and fired up my imagination: Pro Wrestling ZERO1’s Fire Festival. 

All the stars were there! Masato Tanaka! Hayabusa! Junya Matsunaga! Chris Vice! The trophy sword that the winner receives! 

Unfortunately, little to no footage from the 2025 Fire Festival made its way out to ZERO1’s fan club app, ZERO1 base neo, so we’ll never know if Hayabusa and Chris Vice had a better match in the Fire Festival finals than Konosuke Takeshita and EVIL had in the 2025 G1 Climax finals. (This is a wild proposition, but would you really gamble that Vice and Hayabusa had a worse match than Takeshita than EVIL? Does this reflect well on ZERO1 or really poorly on NJPW?) 

It is undeniable that getting a sword for winning a tournament is much cooler than winning a gaudy trophy.

Still, seeking out footage of the Fire Festival reminded me that a new Hayabusa has taken up the standard from his predecessor and that Masato Tanaka, despite the hellacious punishment his body has taken over the past 32 years, is somehow still going strong. At 53 years old, Tanaka has withstood the ravages of time inconceivably well. One only need to see just his matches against Mike Awesome across the decades to understand why it’s bewildering that Tanaka is still active and performing at a decently high level.

On the other side, we have the new Hayabusa. They’re not calling him Hayabusa II, El Hijo de Hayabusa, Hayabusa Jr., Hayabusacito, or El clon de Hayabusa. With the blessing of the family of Eiji Ezaki, who was the original Hayabusa, this new Hayabusa is portrayed as the original reborn, a phoenix arisen from the ashes of the old. According to a translation of his interview with Tokyo Sports, this new Hayabusa pushed back on the idea that he’s reviving the Hayabusa identity: “People say I’m the second or third generation, or a new reincarnation, but I’m Hayabusa. I’m neither the second nor the third generation. I hope that the viewers will recognize me as such.”

More than ZERO1’s limited visibility and accessibility, more than ZERO1’s the company’s small roster creating fewer matches that would penetrate the discourse, the new Hayabusa has to battle not the original Hayabusa’s actual matches but our rosy memories of what he did. I certainly had the same issue when I watched this match: at first, my main takeaway was how slow the new Hayabusa seemed compared to how I had remembered the original Hayabusa. Only after rewatching the original Hayabusa in action did I reset my expectations for how fast the new Hayabusa should move. 

I had conflated the original Hayabusa’s speed and impact with the best of Dragongate and CMLL, forgetting that the artform’s envelope had been pushed by generations of male and female wrestlers across the continents in the past three decades. This gets at the fundamental tension of resurrecting the Hayabusa identity. Should a new Hayabusa wrestle like they’re the bleeding edge of junior heavyweight wrestling instead of performing like they’re a Hayabusa cover band? I had expected the former, but the new Hayabusa seems to have the safer mission statement to be the latter.

The new Hayabusa also provides another data point in our exploration of the tension between the old guard and the new upstarts that has defined 2025 in Japanese wrestling. ZERO1 operates with fewer resources than Stardom, so they needed faster return on investment to any gambit they might take; ZERO1 might not have been able to have the patience to develop their own Saya Kamitani or OZAWA. They certainly would have had the time to follow NJPW’s approach of evoking the legacies of Keiji Mutoh, Masahiro Chono, and Shinya Hashimoto to raise the profiles of the new Three Musketeers, Ren Narita, Shota Umino, and Yota Tsuji. Instead, ZERO1 approached it more directly by giving a wrestler the name, mask, and moves of one of their own legendary wrestlers. Even in lucha libre, when a successor luchador makes his debut, companies don’t invite fans to make such a 1 to 1 comparison because it’s a risky proposition.  

The new Hayabusa made his debut in April 2025 against Tanaka, which made sense given the number of times that the original Hayabusa and Tanaka crossed paths in FMW in the late 1990s. Also, a feud with the company’s most famous veteran would serve as the highest potential launching point that the new Hayabusa could have. Hayabusa beat Tanaka in his debut, and Hayabusa’s side defeated Tanaka’s in various six-man and normal tag team matches in May and June. ZERO1 continued its efforts to boost Hayabusa to stardom by scheduling Hayabusa to win the 2025 Fire Festival in July and holding this rematch against Tanaka, even raising the ante by putting Hayabusa’s mask and Tanaka’s career in ZERO1 on the line. 

At first blush, the stipulations seemed like an outrageously ill-considered decision that tipped the company’s hand at the match’s outcome. It was inconceivable that ZERO1 would unmask Hayabusa within 4 months of his debut, but it seemed just as inconceivable that Tanaka, who is joined at the hip with ZERO1, would leave the company. Then again, Daisuke Sekimoto, who was practically the heart of Big Japan Pro Wrestling’s Strong division, announced in June 2025 that he would leave BJW and become a freelancer, so anything might be conceivable for these struggling second and third tier wrestling companies.

Attendance is pretty far down in my list of things that affect how I experience pro wrestling. Nonetheless, since appointing a wrestler as the new Hayabusa is more a financially driven decision than a creative one, it’s worth checking to see if Hayabusa has had an impact on ZERO1’s attendance. To keep the comparisons simple, I’m limiting this check to just shows held at Shin-Kiba 1st RING before and after this show that had reported attendance on Cagematch.

ZERO1 didn’t even announce its attendance for the last two shows that it held at Shin-Kiba 1st RING. At an attendance of 284 fans, this ZERO1 show was the 4th most attended show at Shin-Kiba 1st RING between July and August 2025. This seems to indicate that this match between Tanaka and Hayabusa drew some interest from ticket-buying wrestling fans. Maybe the attendees were intrigued by the possibility of Tanaka’s departure from ZERO1; they certainly seemed more invested in Tanaka than Hayabusa throughout most of the match. 

Given the match’s high stakes stipulations, I was caught off guard by how much Tanaka and Hayabusa grappled at the start. With a career and a mask on the line, I can understand why both would want to play it cautiously. Still, I wish the match started off more violently. 

We got a little more excitement when Tanaka knocked Hayabusa down with an elbow strike. Hayabusa bounced back to his feet just like the original would. 

Hayabusa chased Tanaka outside the ring with a sliding dropkick, but he missed a moonsault off the middle rope. Tanaka then showed Hayabusa around Shin-Kiba 1st RING personally. After battling back, Hayabusa retaliated by attacking Tanaka’s arm to weaken his elbow strikes. Watching Hayabusa try to grind Tanaka’s elbow into dust with submission holds left me feeling a sense of listlessness about the new Hayabusa that is…off-putting is probably too strong a term, but it’s not far off. Given the stakes, I wanted more intensity. 

Hayabusa kicked off the fireworks in the match with a tope con hilo and a series of dives. The dives feel slow because I’ve been spoiled by fast, state of the art junior heavyweight wrestling and by contemporary heavyweight wrestlers who emulate junior heavyweights. 

From there, we got more meat-headed goodness as they traded their best offense: suplexes, brainbusters, Falcon Arrows, Sliding D elbow strikes, lariats, and Tiger Drivers, all the things that I had anticipated in a match between Tanaka and Hayabusa. The sequence clearly worked for the crowd, though they’re still on Tanaka’s side.

Tanaka took the match back outside and set Hayabusa on a table. I still can’t believe that we got an “ECW” chant at a ZERO1 show in 2025.

And Tanaka gave the people (namely, me) what they wanted by smashing Hayabusa’s leg with a fragment of the destroyed table.

Tanaka, now armed with an attack vector, targeted his offense at Hayabusa’s leg. I appreciated the thought behind this approach; Hayabusa could garner sympathy, and Tanaka frustrated the viewers who wanted to see Hayabusa fly, thereby creating the permission structure for fans to cheer Hayabusa and boo Tanaka. It’s a solid proposition for fan engagement for the last third of this match. Unfortunately, judging by the crowd’s continued chanting for Tanaka, it wasn’t wholly effective.

Tanaka and Hayabusa faced an uphill battle to get the fans to cheer for Hayabusa. Tanaka has years and years of equity with the types of fans who would make the trip to Shin-Kiba 1st RING to see him perform. This Hayabusa has only had four months of history with these fans. Despite the fact that there was a fan in attendance in a Hayabusa mask, it’s unclear how many of these fans even remember the old Hayabusa well enough to transfer their affection to the new one. So, the lack of sympathetic groaning when Hayabusa missed his 450 splash made sense; they don’t know him well enough to care about him when the much more familiar Tanaka is right there. 

By contrast, when Tanaka went up for his frog splash, the crowd started clapping, and when he crashed into upraised Hayabusa’s knees, they moaned in agony along with Tanaka.

I also think that if Hayabusa had exploded from the match’s start, he could have jolted the fans into cheering for him from the start. Both men deserved credit, however, because they were ultimately able to get the crowd invested in what Hayabusa did in the match. Hayabusa survived a flurry of Tanaka’s offense and blocked a Sliding D, rolled Tanaka to his feet, and plopped him down with a uranage slam. Then, Hayabusa chained together a couple of dives, including a successful 450 splash, and while the crowd was still chanting for Tanaka, they seemed bummed when Hayabusa crashed on his Phoenix Splash.

From there, Tanaka tried again with the Sliding D, and Hayabusa tried the H Thunder driver, but the match reached its time limit as the two started trading pinning attempts.

I understand the limitations that ZERO1 had to contend with and the urgency they feel to make Hayabusa someone who can help grow their business. Nevertheless, I don’t think weighing this match with such serious stakes helped this match accomplish that goal. The crowd was firmly behind Tanaka because Hayabusa simply hasn’t had the time to build the equity that he needs to make fans sympathetic to him. For his part, Hayabusa just seemed slow, lacking the athletic pop that made the original so memorable. Doing something as simple as jumping right to the top turnbuckle would greatly help the new Hayabusa, but all I could think of was how plodding his dives seemed compared to what state of the art aerial offense in professional wrestling is. The new Hayabusa seems like a great cover band, but it’s not breaking any new ground. That’s the danger of resurrecting a persona from the past; you’re obliged to pay homage, but you have to at least meet the memory of the original’s execution, if not exceed it. Tanaka, bless him, did his best. It barely feels like he’s slowed down after all these years, which would be an unbelievable contention if I hadn’t just seen it for myself.

Meanwhile, ZERO1 will continue to use the new Hayabusa as the tip of its spear. In November, Hayabusa will face Kaito Kiyomiya in a show jointly produced by ZERO1 and Pro Wrestling NOAH. This will be ZERO1’s first show in Korakuen Hall since July 2024. I’m interested in seeing how Hayabusa has progressed in the months since his match against Tanaka, but I also hope that Tanaka gets a high profile match on this show too. 

One might be able to watch this match on ZERO1’s fan club app, ZERO1 Base neo. It can also be watched on ZERO1’s YouTube page, which is probably a slightly easier option.

Next time: To borrow a phrase from the greatly missed Idle Thumbs podcast: 

We’ll look in on two other grumpy old men, KENTA and Kenoh, as we check out their match for the GHC Heavyweight Championship and see how NOAH has navigated the tension between the old guard and the young upstarts.