4. Japanese Wrestlers Change Weight Class And Psychology
In WWE, most guys stay in a certain weight class for their entire careers, and therefore their entire move-sets and careers are based on how they trained. Japan is once again different. In both All Japan and New Japan, up-and-coming wrestlers spend their first few years as junior heavyweights, before graduating to the heavyweight class. The reason for this system is so that they can gain more of a reaction from the crowd by doing more aerial maneuvers, before moving towards a more physical, strategy-oriented style found in heavyweights. Two names stand out regarding this approach. The first is Mitsuharu Misawa, who spent five years as Tiger Mask II. Under that moniker, he performed similar high-flying maneuvers and followed an almost identical psychology as the original Tiger Mask. it was only after All Japan determined that he was good enough of a draw that he could take the mask off and become an even bigger star as a heavyweight. The second wrestler is Kazuchika Okada. Before becoming the Rainmaker in 2011, he was a junior heavyweight, performing dives, flips, and so forth. It was only after graduating to the rank of heavyweight that his career took off. The reason for this might be because Japanese wrestlers, and Japanese people as an ethnicity are far more homogeneous in terms of physical attributes, so many of them fall in the same weight range, and can therefore do much more than the highly-diverse wrestlers of the WWE. This is something that the WWE can really learn from. While obviously wrestlers slow down with age, many of them fail to change and adapt to keep fans interested (a few names in particular stand out). If WWE started a policy where a young wrestler started off as a light heavyweight and then moved on to the heavyweight class, they would be able so show more of what they can do.