Concussion Awareness in Japan

Hi Scott,

Great stuff on the BoD lately, I really love the Observer flashbacks.

With all the talk about Bryan’s retirement and concussion awareness, and WWE limiting the headshots guys are taking, I was wondering – what’s the situation with concussion awareness over in Japan? Admittedly my knowledge of wrestling in Japan is pretty sparse, limited mostly to the Dynamite Kid-Tiger Mask matches, along with seeing Stevie Richards win the Super J Cup, and a few other isolated matches, but my impression is that they would drop guys on their heads a whole lot more than we were ever used to from North American wrestling.

Is that still the case in Japan? Are they still dropping guys on their heads, or has the increased awareness we’re seeing over here happening there too?

On a related note, overall, how have the crew of 80s-90s Japanese wrestling stars fared health-wise compared to their North American wrestling counterparts, who have died by the dozen? (Besides Misawa…)

​Others here can answer this better than me, but the Japanese have this whole weird ​
​"fighting spirit" attitude about the thing, where even if you get dropped on your head and suffer a broken neck and concussion you don’t complain about it because it shows weakness. So yeah, you have guys like Kobashi and Taue and all the other head-dropping lunatics from the 90s who were probably doing serious damage to themselves and who stick around long past they probably should, too. However, for whatever reason someone like Misawa has proven to be the exception and there doesn’t appear to be much in the way of long-term damage to those guys. Maybe it’s just because they don’t talk about it or maybe because they’re actually doing it safer?