On May 26, 2021, in a converted live-house room seven floors above Kabukicho, Kiyoshi Tamura’s new promotion GLEAT held its debut event with Japan still cycling through COVID states of emergency. A year earlier, in that same room, DDT Pro-Wrestling had wrestled its biggest show of the year, Wrestle Peter Pan, normally a rowdy Saitama Super Arena spectacle, in front of no one at all, just essential crew and cameras, because Saitama wasn’t an option, and Shinjuku FACE was small enough, and available enough, to hold the line.
Elsewhere on that same stretch of calendar, a teenage Shota Umino and a scrappy amateur wrestler named Ren Narita took their first official bumps as New Japan pros in that room, in front of a few hundred people who had no idea they were watching future Ace-track talent.
That’s the range Shinjuku FACE covered: emergency broadcast studio, developmental proving ground, launchpad, and neighborhood clubhouse, sometimes all in the same month. On September 30, 2026, it closes for good.
The Announcement
Shinjuku FACE’s operators announced the closure on March 10, 2026, via the venue’s official X account, citing the expiration of its fixed-term building lease. Speaking to Tokyo Sports shortly afterward, Humax Entertainment representative Yuka Ogawa clarified that the underlying issue is the building’s age, the company would have kept the venue running if the structure allowed it, and said she’s personally lobbying Humax to open a same-sized successor (she’s floated a capacity around 500) somewhere similarly central, ideally still called Shinjuku FACE if it lands back in Shinjuku. That’s Ogawa’s stated hope, relayed through a single interview and picked up by outlets translating from Tokyo Sports — worth flagging as one executive’s aspiration rather than a confirmed plan, since Humax has made no public commitment to a specific location, timeline, or even a firm yes.
What is confirmed, as of a Humax press release issued July 26, 2026:
– September 23–30, 2026: An eight-day “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES,” with the promotions that built the venue’s history running send-off shows.
– September 30, 2026, final show: Meishin Rukotsu (銘心鏤骨) — a phrase meaning, “engraved on the heart, carved into the bone,” i.e., never to be forgotten. Produced by Shinjuku FACE and Humax Entertainment with CyberFight’s DDT division handling event planning. Doors 18:00, bell 19:00. Ringside seats run ¥12,000 advance / ¥13,000 day-of; reserved seats ¥7,000 / ¥8,000; plus the venue’s standing ¥600 drink charge.
– Advance tickets opened July 29, 2026, through e-plus; general sale follows August 15.
It is similar to last year’s 20th Anniversary event. It was basically a DDT lineup but with special guests sprinkled in from other companies & the expectation is for the series finale to be something along those lines.
SENDAI GIRLS “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES – SENJO 20TH ANNIVERSARY TOUR IN SHINJUKU FACE
~BURNING UP!~”, 23/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
BASARA “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES – BASARA 316 ~KOO~”, 23/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
WAVE “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES ~THANK YOU SHINJUKU FACE~”, 24/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
UP TOWN “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES ~SHINJUKU FACE LAST~”, 24/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
“SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES – HIKARU SATO INDEPENDENT BOX OFFICE “HENTAI” MID NIGHT”, 26/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
“SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES – SHIN SAKURA KATAUSHIKA HIROTA BOX OFFICE THANK YOU ~ GOODBYE SHINJUKU FACE ~ AND ALSO HIROTA’S 30TH ANNIVERSARY SHOW~”, 26/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
“SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES ~SAREEE-ISM CHAPTER XII~”, 26/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
TOKYO JOSHI PRO “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES – I WON’T CRY THERE’S NO WAY I WILL CRY”, 27/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
DDT “FACE FINAL ~GOODBYE SHINJUKU FACE! WITH GRATITUDE FOR 21 YEARS! THIS IS OUR SHINJUKU DRAMATIC DREAM!~”, 27/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
SUPER JAPAN “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES ~GOODBYE SHINJUKU FACE~”, 28/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
NISHIGUCHI PRO “SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES – NISHIGUCHI PRO WRESTLING SEPTEMBER BOX OFFICE”, 29/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
“SHINJUKU FACE COUNTDOWN SERIES ~MEISHIN ROKOTSU~”, 30/09/2026
Shinjuku FACE
As of this writing, no promotion has publicly announced a replacement home venue for its post-October Tokyo dates. That silence is arguably the more important story than the closure itself, and I’ll come back to it.
From Liquid Room to “Second Sacred Ground”
The space has a layered history. From 1994 to 2004 it operated as Liquid Room, a respected live-music venue. Jeff Mills recorded a well-known live album there, namely, “Live at Liquid Room – Tokyo, 1996”, before that operation relocated to Ebisu. The vacated seventh floor of the Humax Pavilion in Kabukicho was pitched for a combat-sports conversion by Taichi Sakaiya, a former Minister of Economic Planning who was also an ex-amateur boxer and, by most accounts, a serious wrestling fan. It reopened on July 29, 2005, as Shinjuku FACE, with a capacity generally cited between 500 and 600 depending on configuration.
The opening card was “W-FACE,” a women’s combat-sports bill, and fittingly, given what came later, joshi wrestling legend Mayumi Ozaki competed in the venue’s first-ever pro wrestling match. Twenty years on, she was brought back to headline the 20th-anniversary show, closing a loop that most retrospectives on this venue will lean on.
In Japanese combat-sports media, the venue earned the nickname “second sacred ground” (第二の聖地), explicitly positioned as the room that comes after Korakuen Hall in the sport’s informal hierarchy. This framing is important as it captures both the compliment and its ceiling: respected enough to matter, but understood by everyone in the business as a rung below Tokyo’s actual cathedral. The nickname also reflects geography as much as prestige, FACE sits a five-minute walk from JR Shinjuku Station, through Kabukicho past the Toho Building’s Godzilla head, which is about as central as a combat-sports venue gets anywhere in the world. It kept a “one-drink” ticketing system straight out of its live-house days, and regulars will tell you there isn’t a genuinely bad seat in the building, a small room where proximity is the actual selling point.
If you strip away the individual promotion stories, you’ll notice that one pattern repeats constantly, which is, whenever a Japanese wrestling entity needed somewhere to either launch, rebuild, or prove itself without arena-level financial risk, FACE was usually the answer. The women’s MMA promotion Jewels effectively launched there in 2008. Tokyo Joshi Pro-Wrestling’s first show without an accompanying idol performance, arguably the moment TJPW became a real promotion rather than an entertainment side project, happened at FACE in February 2015.
New Japan’s Lion’s Gate developmental brand has run almost exclusively out of the room since 2016.
GLEAT debuted there in 2021, mid-pandemic, when nowhere else was a realistic option. Sareee launched her self-produced Sareee-ISM series there after returning from WWE.
Stardom used it as a fallback venue during the worst of COVID capacity restrictions.
Marigold, the newest promotion on this list, folded it into a regular rotation within months of forming in 2024.
Shinjuku FACE’s combination of low rental cost, central access, and forgiving capacity made it the default answer to “where do we run this if we’re not sure anyone’s coming yet.” What’s more interesting than the pattern itself is what each promotion did with the room once it had it, which is where the individual stories diverge.
I’ll list some distinct stories of various promotions and how they’ve used FACE to cater to their audience.
OZ Academy‘s twenty-year residency.
Mayumi Ozaki’s promotion, founded in 1998 and headquartered in Shinjuku, has treated FACE as close to a permanent home rather than a venue it occasionally rents, a relationship that reportedly traces back to Sakaiya’s personal fandom of Ozaki when the space was first conceived. That’s a different relationship than “we ran a few shows here”; it’s the one promotion for which FACE’s closure functions almost like losing a company headquarters.
New Japan Lion’s Gate.
New Japan’s developmental shows at FACE have produced official in-ring debuts for Shota Umino, Ren Narita, Tetsuhiro Yagi, and Takumi Honjo, plus unofficial first appearances from Katsuya Kitamura and Tomoyuki Oka. Umino and Narita in particular are now established main-roster names, which means a meaningful chunk of NJPW’s present-day roster took its first official bumps in a 500-seat room above a red-light district, not in front of the company’s usual Korakuen or Sumo Hall cameras.
COVID-19 Relocations.
The COVID-19 pandemic presented a problem that many promotions were not equipped to deal with, especially in Japan. DDT’s relocation of Wrestle Peter Pan 2020 to FACE remains the single most vivid image connected to the venue’s history: the promotion’s biggest annual show, normally staged for a full Saitama Super Arena crowd, wrestled in an empty room for a skeleton crew, streamed out on the newly-rebranded Wrestle Universe platform. It’s a useful corrective to any temptation to write this closure as purely nostalgic, FACE’s real value, at least once, was as a room small enough and cheap enough to survive an existential threat in.
TJPW’s turning point.
The February 2015 show is in my opinion and those who have followed the promotions’ journey one of those pivotal shows where TJPW stopped being packaged alongside idol performances and started being presented as a standalone wrestling promotion. Within a year, that shift led directly to the group’s first Korakuen Hall date, meaning FACE functioned as the actual proving-ground step in TJPW’s climb, not just an early tour stop.
Sareee-ISM.
Sareee-ISM built a reputation for delivering dream matches inside FACE’s compact box specifically because the room’s ~600 capacity made regular sellouts achievable and newsworthy in a way a half-full Korakuen date wouldn’t be.
Marigold.
Marigold, formed in 2024 by veteran promoter Rossy Ogawa, uses FACE as its dependable mid-sized venue between bigger Ryogoku Kokugikan dates.
Game Changer Wrestling.
Game Changer Wrestling’s “GCW Japan” shows in 2024 and 2025 turned the room into a genuine meeting point between the American independent scene and Japan’s, streaming worldwide and mixing wrestlers like Matt Tremont and Shotzi Blackheart with local talent like MAO.
The 20th-anniversary show, held July 31, 2025, pulled talent from six promotions — DDT, New Japan, All Japan, OZ Academy, Pro Wrestling Uptown, and West Gate Wrestling Federation, with Ozaki again in the ring, deliberately closing the loop back to opening night twenty years earlier.
MMA and Combat Sports: The Other Half of the Story
Shinjuku FACE’s identity as a wrestling room tends to overshadow the fact that it was, for its first several years especially, just as important to Japanese MMA, and the two histories actually mirror each other.
Shooto, one of Japan’s oldest MMA organizations, ran events there within months of the venue opening, using the intimate room as an alternative when its usual larger venue wasn’t available.
Jewels, the women’s MMA promotion that effectively launched at FACE with “Jewels 1st Ring” on November 16, 2008, ran the bulk of its early “Ring” series there through 2009 and 2010, and then, notably, outgrew it, shifting much of its schedule to the larger Shin-Kiba 1st Ring as the promotion matured. That’s the same graduation pattern TJPW would follow years later on the wrestling side (FACE to Korakuen), just compressed into MMA’s smaller commercial scale. When Jewels was absorbed into Deep in 2013, the resulting Deep Jewels brand’s first two cards (August and November 2013) went right back to FACE, extending an unbroken lineage of women’s MMA at the venue across roughly fifteen years.
Krush, the major kickboxing promotion, was headquartered on the very same floor as FACE until 2013, and continued running undercard and secondary shows there for years afterward even after its offices relocated. Boxing cards have also run regularly through the room, which is why Japanese coverage of the closure routinely describes FACE as a genuine multi-discipline combat-sports hall rather than a pro-wrestling venue that occasionally hosted fights.
Cultural Significance
A recent Japan Today Feature built almost entirely around FACE as a setting is worth engaging with directly, because it’s the clearest outside-press articulation of what the room represents culturally, and because some of its framing has been getting repeated as flat fact rather than one journalist’s read. The piece described FACE as grittier and more physically immediate than Korakuen Hall’s polish with black walls close in, the air carries the weight of years of sweat, and the room’s small size means the crowd’s noise and the wrestlers’ impact both land at a different intensity than a bigger hall allows.
Shinjuku FACE has been the natural staging ground to joshi puroresu’s rebuild since its early-2000s commercial collapse. Stardom, Marigold, TJPW, Sendai Girls, and OZ Academy have all treated FACE as genuine home turf rather than an occasional rental, and that concentration of women’s wrestling specifically is arguably the single biggest gap the closure leaves.
The Wrestlers’ Goodbyes
The reactions since the March announcement have mostly clustered around the same sentiment of shock, gratitude, a lot of “I made my debut there”, so rather than stack every quote, I am talking about two that are worth isolating for what they add beyond nostalgia.
Sanshiro Takagi, DDT’s president, framed the closing months in an interview with Tokyo Sports, less as mourning and more as a mandate: build a space fans genuinely enjoy right through the final bell, a promoter’s answer rather than a performer’s one. And Mayumi Ozaki’s connection, which carries real emotional weight, as she wrestled in FACE’s literal first match in 2005 and was brought back for the 20th anniversary in 2025, meaning her career at the venue functions as its own timeline of the building’s entire run. Everyone else’s memories are real, but hers are the bookends for this historic venue.
What Happens Now? The Venue Question
This is the most consequential question for anyone tracking the actual business of Japanese wrestling: where does all of this go?
The honest answer is that nothing on the market replicates FACE’s specific combination of a five-minute walk from a mega-station, a permanent ring, roughly 500–600 capacity, and rock-bottom rental economics. Promotions are going to have to split the difference across several imperfect options, and the likely result is fragmentation rather than a single clean successor.
Comparable capacity, less central:
– Shin-Kiba 1st Ring (Koto Ward, capacity roughly 290–300) is the closest thing to a spiritual sibling, it’s already Stardom’s most-used small hall, and it’s the same room Jewels graduated to once it outgrew FACE back in 2010–2011. But it’s roughly half FACE’s capacity, and it’s a genuinely longer, less convenient trip from central Tokyo than FACE’s Shinjuku-station doorstep.
– Itabashi Green Hall (capacity 250–300 depending on which floor is booked) already hosts TJPW, Ice Ribbon, and a rotating cast of indies. Same capacity ceiling problem as Shin-Kiba, and further off the Yamanote Line loop.
A tier up in size, and cost:
– Korakuen Hall (1,400–2,000 capacity) is already the default “graduation” venue for anything that outgrows a room like FACE, and it will likely absorb the handful of anniversary-tier shows that would previously have sold out FACE on their own. It cannot absorb the volume, the routine mid-week produce shows and one-off cards FACE ran almost nightly without either flooding Korakuen’s calendar or forcing smaller promotions to pay arena-scale rental for half-empty rooms.
– Tokyo Dome City Hall (capacity up to roughly 3,100, though configurable smaller) has already hosted bigger CyberFight-brand shows like Wrestle Princess III. Plausible for the highest tier of the shows currently slotted into FACE, but too large and too expensive for the everyday indie and produce-show traffic that made up most of FACE’s actual calendar.
The cautionary precedent is that of Differ Ariake, historically Pro Wrestling NOAH’s Tokyo home at a comparable ~1,200 capacity, closed in 2018 to make way for the Olympic-built Ariake Arena. NOAH never got a like-for-like replacement, the promotion scattered across Korakuen Hall, regional gymnasiums, and one-off halls instead, and its Tokyo presence has arguably never fully recentralized since. That is the realistic worst-case template for what happens to FACE’s tenants if Humax’s hoped-for successor venue doesn’t materialize on a reasonable timeline.
Everything else is overflow capacity, not a solution. Tokyo Ryogoku KFC Hall (already used by TJPW for bigger Sumida-area dates), Kiranah Garden Toyosu (an occasional DDT alternate), and Kinshicho Marui Building 8F which Marigold frequently runs, can each absorb a handful of dates without meaningfully replacing what’s being lost.
The likely near-term outcome is that CyberFight’s brands lean harder on Korakuen and Tokyo Dome City Hall for their higher-profile dates, while pushing more routine cards to Shin-Kiba and Itabashi; smaller independents and produce shows like Sareee-ISM, GLEAT’s lower-stakes dates, the constant churn of one-off produce cards, scatter across whichever of those rooms has open calendar space, at real cost to the specific convenience FACE offered: everyone in Tokyo’s wrestling scene always knew where to find a Tuesday-night show, and after September, that will no longer be true by default. That fragmentation will be tricky to navigate especially for smaller promotions and it remains to be seen what impact it has on their business going forward.
Ogawa’s hope for a direct successor venue is genuine, but as of this writing it’s an aspiration, not a plan with a location, a timeline, or a company commitment behind it despite Kota Ibushi’s comical attempts at funding a new venue in Tokyo similar to FACE. Until that changes, Shinjuku FACE’s closing week, the Countdown Series running September 23 through 30, ending with Meishin Rukotsu is the last confirmed date on the calendar for the one room that, for over two decades, functioned as Tokyo wrestling’s shared home address.
