All Japan Pro Wrestling
Japanese professional wrestling promotion established in 1972
All Japan Pro-Wrestling (全日本プロレス, Zen Nihon Puroresu; operating as All Japan Pro-Wrestling Co., Ltd. (オールジャパン・プロレスリング株式会社, Ōru Japan puroresuringu Kabushiki-gaisha) and usually abbreviated as AJPW or All Japan) is a Japanese professional wrestling promotion.
A promotion bult on the Ōdō (王道; "King's Road" or "Royal Road") style of wrestling, All Japan was founded on October 21, 1972 by Shohei "Giant" Baba after he and Antonio Inoki left the Japanese Wrestling Association to establish new promotions. Many wrestlers had left with Baba, with many more joining the following year when the JWA folded. From the mid-1970s, All Japan was firmly established as a contender for the largest wrestling promotion in Japan along with its rival New Japan Pro-Wrestling (founded by Inoki). Their roster had increased to include several wrestlers associated with the National Wrestling Alliance, such as Stan Hansen, Ric Flair, Terry Funk and Dory Funk Jr., and Harley Race among others. Their native talent consisted of Baba, as well as the Baba-heralded ace Jumbo Tsuruta, Genichiro Tenryu, junior wrestler Masanobu Fuchi and the defected NJPW wrestler Riki Choshu.
As the 1990s began and Tenryu had split away from All Japan to form the Super World of Sports (SWS) promotion, aging stars like Tsuruta and Fuchi gave way to a younger generation; the most famous of those were the Four Heavenly Kings (プロレスの四天王, Puroresu no shiten'nō; also called the Four Pillars of Heaven): Mitsuharu Misawa, Kenta Kobashi, Toshiaki Kawada and Akira Taue. Others included Jun Akiyama, Tsuyoshi Kikuchi, and gaijin wrestler Steve Williams. These wrestlers, including others, led to perhaps All Japan's most profitable period in the 1990s.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “All Japan Pro Wrestling” is japanese professional wrestling promotion established in 1972. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Japan, Wrestling and Japanese, not as a finished interpretation.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 12, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1359107. VIAF identifies the subject as 255506361. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “All Japan Pro Wrestling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.