10 Hardcore Japanese Wrestling Stipulations You Won't Believe Are Real

By Adam Blampied /

10. Barbed Wire Death Matches

Let's start tame, shall we? And believe me, where we're going, this is tame. This is impossibly tame.

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The barbed wire stipulation is your basic foundation in a Japanese deathmatch, it's the biscuit base of your cheesecake; utterly necessary, and you'd notice if it were gone, but it's not exactly why we're in the bakery.

But let's not forget, even a barbed wire match is INSANE. Why would - why would anyone... ? WHY?

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So your three essential types of barbed wire match are as follows:

1. Normal (Normal? Bloody NORMAL??):

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Three cords of barbed wire are held taught between the ring ropes, wrapped around the entirety of the ring parameter. Irish whips into the ropes now have the capacity to tear flesh and the most common, reliable spot is the ol' 'antagonist drags the protagonist to the wire by their face and rakes their poor chops across the unforgiving steel until the blood flows like wine.'

That's was the original one. The normal stipulation.

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2. Spidernet:

In this variation the barbed wire is wrapped around the ropes vertically. The more astute readers amongst us will have noted that this results in a lot more wire per square feet of rope, a wall of pain if you that encircles the wrestlers like hedgehog skin with the spines on the inside.

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Here is an example of spider net rules: (LOOK, KIDS! IT'S MICK FOLEY!)

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3. The No Rope Barbed Wire Match

This is where it starts to lose us.

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For this stipulation you remove those pesky ropes, and the slight resistance they provide against falling against the barbed wire with the full weight of your body (because that's not SICK, DUDE) and instead have ropes *made* of barbed wire.

This is to insure that if you fall against the ropes, it hurts much MUCH more.

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But, let's not forget, barbed wire matches are boring by themselves. We can do better than that, can't we?

Oh, of course we can.

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