(NOAH) Becoming President of Noah: There Were Plenty of "Bad Guys" Among the Inner Circle Handling Management (Akira Taue)

Tokyo Sports

16th September 2026

"Mitsuharu Misawa passed away following an in-ring accident at the Hiroshima event in June 2009. While I was naturally in deep shock, Misawa’s wife asked me to take over as Representative Director and President of Pro Wrestling Noah that July. Ideally, Kenta Kobashi could have done it, but he didn't seem to care for the business management side of things—even though he loved training.

Was becoming president a good choice?

It was a terrible idea! I wish I’d ​​never done it (laughs). But then guys like Marufuji and Sugiura—the younger wrestlers—came up to me and said, "We're counting on you!" When the wrestlers put it like that, I felt like I had no choice. Damn that Misawa... (laughs).

Once I actually became president (and this might sound strange), I found a lot of bad guys among the people running the business side of things. They were embezzling company funds, yet they’d actually written up IOUs to keep it from becoming a criminal matter. 

When I asked, "Did Misawa allow this?" they said, "Yes."

Well, Misawa had passed away, I couldn't ask him directly. 

I let them pay it back in monthly instalments because demanding a lump sum wasn't really an option, but there were so many of them doing it—it was hopeless. The financial situation was a total wreck.

I won't name names, but even the accounting manager was doing things like that. Those guys never paid the money back, and now they’ve all passed away. When one employee who owed money died, his family told me, "We have some land in the mountains of Fukushima." 

What good is that to me?

I think that sort of thing had been going on since Misawa's time. Misawa was a lot like me, an amateur when it came to business, so he just didn't notice it.

I took over when the when the business was already in shambles; simply put, I got stuck with the short end of the stick. 

That was a time when New Japan was really gaining momentum; I racked my brain trying to figure out how to improve our company, but it was no use—we just couldn't catch up. I wasn't involved in the matchmaking side of things; Ryu Nakada handled almost all of that.

At the absolute worst point, there were times when my own salary was zero yen. When we had to cut the pay of the staff and wrestlers, I decided to lead by example and forgo my own salary. Fortunately, my wife Kiyomi was running a restaurant—the steak izakaya "Champ" that exists today—so we managed to put food on the table somehow.

In 2012, it was decided that five wrestlers—Jun Akiyama, Go Shiozaki, Yoshinobu Kanemaru, Kotaro Suzuki, and Atsushi Aoki—would leave the promotion by the end of the year. I don't know the full details, but I suspect they clashed with Ryu Nakada. If they were saying they wanted to quit, well, there wasn't much that could be done. 

A truly ill wind was blowing back then."

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Picture credits: Tokyo Sports