AEW star Kenny Omega appeared on Crunchyroll’s The Anime Effect to discuss various topics, including his motivation for pursuing a wrestling career in Japan.
Omega said, “I sort of started to feel like when I really sat down, and I weighed all my options, and I would look at the pros and the cons. Okay, let’s see if I try to make a career out of wrestling in America. What are the pros and cons? Okay, so the pros are I’m closer to home. I can get home in a jiffy if something goes wrong, you know, whether it be my pets or my parents, whatever. I have a fast track home. I can get there and take care of things if I need to. And then I started to think like, okay, w what else do I got? You know, I’ve got a couple friends that I met in Deep South Wrestling, which is, you know, that was sort of the territory or the entity that existed before NXT. So now it’s just called NXT, yeah. And based out of Florida rather than where we were in McDonough, Georgia. Once I started to weigh all the options, I just started to see very little pros to trying to, I guess, hone my craft in America over the idea of going to Japan because once starting to put, ‘Okay, I like, you know, the food, I like the anime, I like the live-action dramas. Boom. I love their video games. Boom.’”
He continued, And just this list grew and grew and grew and grew and grew. And I thought, man, even when I’m studying tapes, I’m always studying mostly like Japanese stuff. Stuff that’s happening in All Japan, New Japan, NOAH, Dragon Gate, DDT. And I thought, like, it’s very rare that we even put in, like, World of Sport, lucha libre, or even, like, WWE stuff. So I thought, I mean, to me it just seems like my heart is there. So I do believe that just the person that I became when it was time to make the big decision, I was so invested already, not just from a wrestling standpoint, but just from a cultural standpoint in Japanese culture. So I just figured that made it the easy answer if there ever was an opportunity, and an opportunity ended up seeking me out, which is incredible. So yeah. That was the other thing too, is is I really wanted to promise myself, I said, I know that I’m good enough. I know that I deserve to be there. I will go there without, like, paying myself to go there. Because that’s another option. A lot of people just kind of flatten themselves out and say, Hey, I’m in town. Can you use me? And that’s before people were really scared about the, you know, the visa issues and all that that could occur if you go work illegally. So it’s always felt like an option because it seemed like, to me, Winnipeg, where I lived and right where I locally wrestled, was a dead end. And I was ready to pull that trigger, but then I got lucky, and by being a fixture in a Jersey promotion, Jersey All-Pro Wrestling, there was actually an opportunity that arose from that that allowed me to go to DDT in Japan and start my journey.”
On how his favorite Anime Hajime no Ippo captures the psychology of being an athlete:
“In fact, it’s funny you asked that question. I’d recently watched over Hajime no Ippo, by watching the whole thing over again, by being sort of in a position where I’ve experienced more as an athlete, more injuries, more heartbreak, more suffering. Yeah, it’s absolutely hard around, especially if you know where it goes in the manga as well, where Ippo has essentially become punch-drunk because of his fighting style and taking too many hits, and the writer, [George] Morikawa-san,’ for him to write such a real story — especially if you’ve seen it, if you’ve lived it, if you’ve experienced it, he has a way of capturing that human element of it. And it does really ring true for someone like me and for other sports anime too. I mean a lot there’s a lot of other sports anime that have captured the severity of injuries and how quick it is to where the smallest of things can cost you an entire tournament, season, championship, whatever.”
On why it resonates so strongly for him:
“And but has been Hajime no Ippo for sure was the one that I could more closely tied to wrestling because it’s a really physical sport and you know for a lot of your most impossibly seeming challenges you’re out there alone and you have yeah you really have to You have to find what it is on the inside that you can show to the world that, you know, what makes this match special, what makes this story special, what makes you special. And you have to be sure that you exude that when you’re out there in the ring and do it in the biggest of ways. Because if people forget you and they don’t remember you, you know, then why did you sacrifice your body in that way? You know, you should always find a way to instill a memory, whether it be a good one, bad one. As long as people remember you, you’re always one step ahead of the game.”
You can check out the complete podcast in the video below.
