My Little Deep Dive
So, the other day, I was watching some wrestling, you know, just flipping through stuff. Saw Akira Tozawa doing his thing, the whole “AH! AH! AH!” deal. It’s kinda funny, gets stuck in your head. Got me thinking, though. What was this guy like before all the ninja stuff and the 24/7 title chases?
Decided I’d do a little digging. Like, a weekend project. Just wanted to see some of his earlier matches, maybe from Japan. Seemed simple enough, right? Wrong.
First Steps: The Usual Suspects
I started where everyone does: just punched his name into the usual video sites and search engines. Found tons of WWE stuff, obviously. Clips of him with Titus Worldwide, the ninja gimmick, chasing the title. But finding older stuff? Man, that was tougher than I thought.
Going Down the Rabbit Hole
Okay, so the easy way didn’t work. I figured I needed to look for his time in Dragon Gate. That’s where he spent a lot of time, people kept mentioning it. So, I started searching specifically for “Akira Tozawa Dragon Gate”.
- Found some match listings, like results pages.
- Found fan forums talking about great matches.
- Found a few grainy clips here and there. Really low quality, hard to see much.
It felt like looking for a needle in a haystack. A lot of the really good stuff people talked about? Behind paywalls for Japanese streaming services, or just totally gone. Links were dead everywhere. It’s like parts of wrestling history just vanish if someone doesn’t keep uploading it.
Language Barriers and Frustration
Then there was the language thing. A lot of the potentially good sources were all in Japanese. My Japanese is, well, non-existent. Used online translators, but you know how that goes. It gives you the gist, maybe, but finding specific videos or navigating some old forum from 2010? Forget about it.
It kinda reminded me of this one time I was trying to fix my old washing machine. Found the exact forum thread online with the solution, step-by-step photos and everything. Bookmarked it. Went back a month later when I finally had the parts? The whole site was gone. Just poof. All that knowledge, just vanished. Felt just like that trying to find old Tozawa matches.
What I Actually Found
After wasting, let’s be honest, way too much time, I did find a couple of decent-quality matches from his Dragon Gate days. It was pretty cool seeing him younger, different style, super energetic even back then. Less comedy, more intense wrestling. You could see the talent was always there.
But was it worth the hassle? Eh. It was interesting, sure. But the process? Super frustrating. Made me appreciate how WWE packages everything, even if they sometimes ignore the past. Everything’s easy to find on their network.
So yeah, that was my little project. Started with a simple chant, ended up down a rabbit hole of dead links and language barriers. Just wanted to share the process, you know. Sometimes finding stuff isn’t as easy as just searching.
