MISAWA/KAWADA RELATIONSHIP

When comes to his personal relationship with Toshiaki Kawada, as far the mid 1990s onward go, was it a sort of "frenemies" situation? How real or not was their dislike for each other? It's hard for me to tell when kayfabe ends and reality begins.

In the 1990s, Mitsuharu Misawa and Toshiaki Kawada appeared at an All Japan show with heavy bruising to their faces. All Japan announced that Mitsuharu Misawa's eye injury was due to a match (he later needed surgery), but fans heard rumors that he and Toshiaki Kawada got into a bar brawl. Genichiro Tenryu years later said that truth was that he and Kawada had gotten into a fight with each other. Kenta Kobashi in an interview in 2023 revealed, "now that the statute of limitations has passed, I guess" that they got drunk at Karaoke, “the reason is trivial…to sing or not to sing”. Tsuyoshi Kikuchi and he turned pale as they screamed at each other. Kobashi held Misawa back begging him to calm down, and then Kawada broke free of Kikuchi, and threw the first punch. Baba took no action on it, seeing it as "a fight between brothers", which he saw as being triggered by Kawada's jealousy of Misawa. Theirs was a volatile and complex relationship, in the ring Misawa used to provoke Kawada into losing his notoriously short temper, but outside of it, they would go drinking together in later years. After the walk out to Noah, Kawada chose to stay with All Japan, not due to any grudge against Misawa, (he said that it wasn't as if the two of them had a falling out, and "time will solve that problem" as to whether he would ever face Misawa again), but because if he had left then the name of "All Japan" would truly be gone. After Misawa died, Kawada said his heart was no longer in wrestling without Misawa. The irony was that Kawada (although his final match to date was in New Japan), like all of the Four Pillars, would spend the majority of his final career in Noah.