On May 16, 2026, in a ring in Tokyo, a 51-year-old man wearing three decades of scar tissue lost a match to a masked luchador half his age. It was his debut in New Japan Pro Wrestling’s Best of the Super Juniors, a round-robin gauntlet that exists, more or less by design, for wrestlers in their twenties and thirties chasing a title shot for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Title. Jun Kasai had no business being in it. He finished the tournament’s A Block tied for second place anyway, ten points, one spot short of the leaders. At the closing ceremony, NJPW president Hiroshi Tanahashi walked over and personally handed him the Outstanding Performance Award, an official nod, from the promotion that spent decades treating deathmatch wrestling as beneath serious consideration, to the man who’s spent decades making sure it couldn’t be ignored.
To understand how a 51-year-old ends up here, cheered by a company that used to look past people like him, still standing after a body that’s been told it belongs to someone 75, you have to go back to Obihiro, and to a kid watching wrestling on television with his father.
Obihiro
Kasai was born September 9, 1974, in Obihiro, a city on Hokkaido’s Tochigi plain, the second of two children in what he’s described, in his own words, as an unremarkable family of four. His father sat in front of the television watching professional wrestling broadcasts, beer in hand; his son sat beside him, transfixed, and attended his first live show in first grade when All Japan Pro Wrestling came through town. He shares the same memories with his grandfather, an avid pro wrestling fan. He also traces a more specific root for the extreme, no-selling style he’d eventually become known for: his father’s habit of scoffing that wrestling looked fake, that the holds looked weak. Kasai has said he decided, young, that if he ever got in the ring himself, his father would have nothing left to complain about. “I remember thinking to myself,” says Kasai, “that if it was me in the ring, I’d make sure my dad wouldn’t find anything to gripe about.”
Kasai describes his father as a fan who “took all the fun out of it (wrestling)” in the documentary, Kyo-En.
He describes himself as a shy, introverted kid who was shuffled between elementary schools twice and struggled to fit in each time. After high school, he took a security-guard job in Tokyo. This period was a blur to him, a young man, new in the city, who fell easily to its vices. He describes this time as a period where he had lost his way – job, training, blowjob bars, and repeat the next day. He had a genuine AIDS scare after he got sick and realized that his symptoms matched with those suffering from the deadly disease. He promised himself before he tested that if it turned out negative, he would quit his vices and genuinely pursue his dreams. The AIDS test came out negative and the rest is history.
He quit his job as a guard, went home to Hokkaido, then came back to the capital a second time, this time to train as a wrestler. He read about Big Japan having a show at Korakuen Hall on Weekly Pro Wrestling magazine. Sitting on a bench at Shinjuku Central Park, he rang up the promotion asking for a tryout one day before the show. This story describes Kasai in a nutshell, willing to defy convention in pursuit of his dreams. He debuted for Big Japan Pro Wrestling on August 23, 1998, at an outdoor show in Osaka, where he’d reportedly spent the afternoon before the show selling overpriced juice to fairgoers. He was 23, old for a rookie, and undersized at 173 cm for the era. What he had instead was a willingness to try absolutely anything. The reason he didn’t start out training to be a wrestler and instead trained in various martial arts like judo and kickboxing is because of his size. He describes feeling that he was ‘too small’ to be a wrestler, that is, until he saw wrestlers filing in and out of the Big Japan dojo and thought they were similar in size to him.
There’s a small, nearly lost story from right around this debut worth telling, because it’s the kind of detail that quietly explains a career: on the night of his first tour, a car belonging to his senior Tomoaki Honma was damaged in an accident, and a shaken, guilt-stricken Kasai reportedly told Honma he intended to quit wrestling to take responsibility for it. Honma talked him out of it. Had that conversation gone differently, one of Japanese wrestling’s defining careers would have ended before its first year was out. Honma has many interesting quotes that describe Kasai and their relationship. He describes Kasai as a “real perv” who would “watch porn whenever he was free, especially with Abdullah Kobayashi.”
BJW, and the Year He Chose No Money Over Less Money
Kasai has never not been described as a daredevil, even from his early years into the company. Eiji Tosaka, Head of Big Japan Pro Wrestling, saw deathmatches as a means for an end. He employed wrestlers who had done them, were good at them, but didn’t know anybody, until he met Kasai, who would do them willingly and would ask for them. BJW asked “Mr. Danger” Mitsuhiro Matsunaga to compete again, in a deathmatch, against Kasai. Matsunaga was an established name and didn’t understand why his comeback should be against Kasai, a novice.
Honma describes Kasai as someone always willing to push the envelope, always thinking about “who could use the most dangerous weapon”. There were many instances during the crossover shows with CZW and during the “more extreme matches”, Honma said,”I’ll leave this to Kasai”.
“I feel alive in the ring,” Kasai declares. “Plodding through life, there aren’t many experiences that remind people that they are sentient beings. But standing in a deathmatch ring, cut, bleeding, and in pain, I know I exist. This is the appeal of the style for me. When I get home at the end of a match, I can say to myself that I’ve made it through another day. As long as my body will allow, I’ll keep wrestling.”
Kasai was never, even at the height of his run there, a fully contracted BJW employee, he worked as a de facto freelancer throughout, picking up bookings elsewhere while the promotion remained his primary home. That arrangement got tested early: when BJW nearly went under in the early 2000s, after its American partner Combat Zone Wrestling’s owner ran off with the company’s championship belts and burned the relationship, BJW reportedly asked several wrestlers to accept reduced pay to keep the lights on. Kasai declined and sat out the rest of 2002 with a knee injury instead. Given a choice between guaranteed less money and no money at all, he chose no money, a small moment, but a telling one, and one that would define the shape of his whole career.
The legend got built in these years regardless. He co-founded the American-influenced stable Big Dealz in 2001 with CZW figures like John Zandig, Nick Mondo, and Wifebeater, in whose Philadelphia home Kasai lodged during U.S. tours, he still jokingly lists “Philadelphia, America” as his hometown on his official site.
When he returned to Japan, he immediately went to Sapporo to wrestle for an affiliated group and then to his hometown of Obihiro to promote an upcoming event. Stopping to visit his parents, Kasai says he walked through the front door of his childhood home only to have his mother, shocked at her son’s battered condition, begin to cry. He fought a Fans Bring the Weapons match that tore his elbow open to the bone; the first of five career Razor Deathmatches, fought on boards fitted with actual razor blades, beginning in 2005 against Jaki Numazawa; a 2008 razor match against American deathmatch veteran MASADA; and, in 2009, a razor-and-cactus match against Ryuji Ito punctuated by a balcony dive at Korakuen Hall that won Tokyo Sports’ Match of the Year. In 2006, he won the inaugural IWA East Coast Masters of Pain tournament in the U.S. By any measure, he was one of the biggest deathmatch draws alive. He still didn’t have a contract.
In 2009, after veteran wrestler Takashi Sasaki’s previous promotion collapsed in a scandal, Sasaki launched a new outfit, Pro Wrestling Freedoms, built around the slogan “freedom is in our hands.” Kasai was one of its founding wrestlers, and his November 2009 razor-board classic against Ito effectively became the new promotion’s coming-out party, winning a national wrestling-press award in only its third month of existence. For years, he worked BJW and Freedoms at once, which is what makes his eventual split from BJW less a single dramatic exit than a slow fade, he simply stopped appearing there around May 2014, with the reasons never fully spelled out in public beyond vague, hedged references to “many public reasons and a lot of rumors.” He returned for a single one-off BJW match in November 2018 and hasn’t been back since. No retirement speech, no farewell tour, he just stopped, the way people sometimes just stop.
What the Ring Took
The injury ledger is long even by deathmatch standards: torn knee ligaments, internal organ damage, dozens of matches missed to smaller injuries, and, most seriously, a 2019 diagnosis of herniated discs in his neck and back. He’s said his doctor told him his hip and neck bones resembled those of a 75-year-old. His last match before an extended hiatus came on Christmas Day 2019 at Korakuen Hall. The documentary that later chronicled this stretch of his life, Kyo-en, opens right around here, an MRI, a doctor’s cautious clearance to keep wrestling, and, despite that clearance, a real crisis of will. He’s described the fear of a sudden flare-up leaving him helpless mid-match as having drained the fun entirely out of a sport he’d spent two decades inside. He’s also described, in plain terms, the specific mechanics of a wrestler’s dependence on his own body: outside a handful of major promotions, no appearance means no pay, family obligations notwithstanding.
He insists that the deathmatch style, when done right, looks far more dangerous than it actually is. “Wrestlers certainly put their bodies on the line,” he says, “but there are techniques at play. You really can’t call yourself a pro if you finish each match laid up in the hospital or end up dead.” Kasai maintains that the gore and chaos is all part of the spectacle. “I may act crazy when in character, but inside I remain cool, calm, and collected.”
He’s said, in the same period, that he genuinely entertained retirement, and told people he’d have no regrets if it came to that, a line that reads very differently depending on whether you take it as peace or as resignation. It took the entire wrestling world grinding to a halt for the itch to come back. His old CZW friend, Nick Gage reportedly suggested Kasai stage a comeback match stateside, and Kasai, sitting at home, neck and back finally stable , started getting excited about it. Then COVID-19 arrived and that changed everything, especially the wrestling landscape in Japan.
Freedoms became the first Japanese promotion to run a show during the pandemic, in June 2020; Kasai’s actual return came a bit later, on July 28, 2020, at Korakuen Hall, against a newcomer named Toshiyuki Sakuda, under infection protocols that meant masked fans could only clap, never shout. For a performer whose in-ring rhythm depends on feeding off a crowd that screams his name when a match turns against him, wrestling in near-silence was, by his own account, deeply unsettling, arguably the emotional center of Kyo-en, a man who nearly quit, forcing himself back into a ring that could no longer make any noise for him. (Something was clearly still weighing on him that month: a social media account run for Kasai and his young daughter went abruptly dark that August, with only a brief, vague apology about unspecified “things I’ve been thinking about.” It quietly came back months later under a new handle, and what actually prompted the deletion has never been explained.)
He came out of the period with real hardware regardless, on January 3, 2021, at AJPW’s New Year Wars, he won the promotion’s Gaora TV Championship in a Tables, Ladders and Chairs match against Yoshitatsu, holding it 74 days before losing it to Shuji Ishikawa in, fittingly, a deathmatch.
Family, and the Shop That Isn’t Wrestling
Kasai is married to his wife, Michiyo, with whom he has a daughter, born in 2017 and nicknamed “Gypsy Lady,” who serves as the nominal mascot and, in the family’s own marketing, the toddler “CEO” of an online merchandise shop called Crazy Factory. He also has a son, Hinata, born in 2004, from an earlier relationship. Hinata grew up mostly outside the spotlight, was quietly training in MMA through middle and high school while focusing on academics, and was admitted to Rikkyo University without his father ever pushing him toward the sport. He joined DDT Pro-Wrestling’s dojo in 2024, debuted at DDT’s marquee Wrestle Peter Pan show in August 2025, and graduated from college the following spring. Kasai didn’t train his own son; father and son have run largely parallel tracks, Freedoms and the independent deathmatch circuit for one, DDT’s more theatrical, comedic style for the other.
Crazy Factory is the more surprising family story, mostly because it’s sitting in plain sight in Kasai’s own Instagram bio, which lists him as the shop’s chairman alongside “deathmatch fighter.” It grew, by his own account in a 2020 trade-press interview, out of years of blogging and selling merchandise at live events after fans kept asking why he wasn’t online yet. He handles product design and vendor relationships; Michiyo handles packing, shipping, and customer messages. By his account, it kept running near full strength through the pandemic even as live-event income evaporated entirely, a kind of financial diversification most of his peers on the independent deathmatch circuit simply don’t have, and one that looks less like a hobby than a hedge against exactly the risk his own body has already made real: that one bad month, or one bad match, can zero out his income overnight.
Legitimacy, at Last
For most of Kasai’s career, “deathmatch” and “serious puroresu” were treated as separate worlds, Giant Baba famously dismissed the genre outright as “garbage wrestling,” and outside of one high-profile 1999 crossover match, NJPW simply didn’t touch it. That started changing in 2022, when Kasai wrestled NJPW’s El Desperado in a match widely regarded as one of the best and most brutal deathmatches in years, drawing a rare perfect score from independent critic Nate Feinberg. On July 4, 2023, Kasai stepped into an NJPW ring for the first time, teaming with Desperado against Jon Moxley and Homicide, a moment fans and press treated as symbolically enormous, deathmatch’s outsider walking into the sport’s most prestigious company to a full ovation. By 2025, the two had shared the ring twice more, capped by a Death Pain Invitational match for the IWGP Junior Heavyweight Championship, which may be one of the finest deathmatches ever executed. Kasai lost the title match but delivered, afterward, what’s been called the most resonant promo of his career, telling Desperado, and by extension anyone listening, that death should be welcomed by no man, a line aimed less at his opponent than at anyone watching who might feel like giving up.
Video game designer Hideo Kojima, who’d watched Kyo-en, and posted a public tribute calling Kasai an entertainment artist who uses his own body as a medium, showed up in person to that 2025 Korakuen Hall show. Which brings the story back to the spring of 2026, and a 51-year-old man finishing second in a tournament built for wrestlers a third his age, and a company president crossing the ring to hand him an award. Three decades in, an acknowledgment from the side of the sport that used to look away.
I finished watching it late last night. He truly is an entertainment artist who uses his body as his medium. My father belonged to the post-war professional wrestling generation, dating back to Rikidōzan’s era. As a child, I grew up watching wrestling broadcasts with my father… https://t.co/Jswjat7Lfn
— HIDEO_KOJIMA (@HIDEO_KOJIMA_EN) April 2, 2025
Closing
There’s a version of Kasai’s story that plays as tragedy, a man ground down by a body with no safety net under it, and a version that plays as pure hustle-culture triumph, someone who made it work through sheer will. Neither one is quite true on its own, and both have been true at once for going on thirty years. He’s built something close to a small, resilient life entirely because no institution was ever going to build it for him: a fanbase that screams his name back at him, a merchandise business his wife co-runs, a credibility across promotional lines that no signed wrestler could easily buy. The same absence of a safety net that nearly ended things quietly in 2020 is the reason he had to build one himself, and the reason that when he came back, there was nothing standing between him and the ring except his own decision to walk into it again.
I’ll leave you with his words to El Desperado:
“Before we fought, you said you didn’t care if you lived or died in this ring. Don’t be a fool! Death should be welcomed by no man. There are countless who yearn to live but are doomed to an early death. Here you are, surrounded by friends, cheered on by this massive audience, (…) So don’t tell me that you’d gladly risk it all, you fool! We pro wrestlers may not fear death or pain. We may accept that every time we step into this ring. But, we should be fighting so that we can walk out of the ring with our lives! There is no need to put your life on the line. There is no need to welcome death! Once you understand that, you’ll be even stronger.”
If you’re new to Kasai — where to start:
- “Kyo-En” The Documentary of a Man Who Shines in Blood – Buy
- Jun Kasai vs. Ryuji Ito, Freedoms, November 2009 — the razor-and-cactus match, balcony dive included, that put the promotion on the map in its third month of existence. The clearest entry point into what “deathmatch as art form” actually looks like.
- Jun Kasai & Mitsuhiro Matsunaga vs. Nick Gage & Zandig, August 6, 2000 — Perhaps the craziest match you’ll ever see. You will see people attempting things and executing batshit crazy moves in this fire deathmatch. Nobody knows what’s happening next; there are life-threatening botches, mistimings, and uncontrolled flames. Almost half way through the madness, it’ll hit you that this is 2 out of 3 falls. Insane, must-see, at least once in your lifetime.
- Jun Kasai vs. Toshiyuki Sakuda, Freedoms, July 28, 2020 — less brutal than most of his career highlights, but the emotional weight of the moment — a man forcing himself back into a ring that literally couldn’t make noise for him — makes it worth watching with context rather than skipping to it cold.
- Jun Kasai & El Desperado vs. Jon Moxley & Homicide, NJPW Strong, July 4, 2023 — the crossover moment itself: deathmatch’s most famous outsider getting a full ovation in the ring of the company that spent decades pretending his genre didn’t exist.
- Jun Kasai vs. El Desperado, Death Pain Invitational, 2025 — the IWGP Junior Heavyweight title match, ranked among the best deathmatches ever, and the one with the postmatch promo that’s become the closest thing Kasai has to a personal thesis statement. #9 in Voices of Wrestling’s 2025 Match of the Year.
- Jun Kasai vs. Jaki Numazawa, BJW, 1 March 2013 — This match had a personal animosity and rivalry stemming from a friendship. Kasai and Jaki are contemporaries, but Kasai has surpassed Numazawa, and thinks he can’t hang with him anymore. That respect, or lack thereof, is evident between them in this match and carries this match and it’s emotions to another level. This is their last match with each other which heightens emotions with each brutal move they pull on each other.
- Jun Kasai vs. Masashi Takeda, Freedoms, August 28, 2018 — Would you believe me if I told you, after watching this match, that Takeda is a Tamura trainee? When I read that, I had to double- and triple-check whether it was the same Takeda committing bloody murder on Kasai. Many a times, I felt Takeda was crazier than Kasai in what he was willing to put his body through. The destruction of the ring and everything around them as they destroy their bodies in an absolute bloodbath to one up each other, will make you squeam, hit pause, take a deep breath, and contemplate life before you hit play again to watch this match. #38 in Voices of Wrestling’s 2018 Match of the Year.
