Kenny Omega is one of the finest and most entertaining AEW stars. However, his skill set comes from his time in the indie circuits as well as being one of the biggest former NJPW stars as well. Even though he’s out of the ring recovering, he is still interacting with his fans through Twitch.

AEW has also helped NJPW proliferate on the global landscape, having multiple crossover events and bringing talent like Riho, Hikaru Shida, and Konosuke Takeshita on board. Having spent many years in Japan, Kenny Omega revealed how Japanese talent gets treated in America. 

Omega said on Twitch with CEOGaming that many Japanese superstars don’t expect harsh, inhuman criticism when they come here. He added that they should understand the kind of criticism they get is usually motivated by something extremely trivial. Sometimes people just think they have nothing better to do. 

A lot of our international talent, they came to this country not really expecting everyone to be as relentless and ruthless, and have a shred of humanity. It’s unfortunate that that’s not the case, it’s not the world that they came into. You know, it catches them off guard and it surprises them to feel so hated so suddenly, and they need to understand that, that doesn’t represent everyone’s feelings, that people literally have nothing else better to do than to go out of their way and create an account to tell them that, ‘this, that, or the other’, something negative anyway, probably not just about wrestling, probably about the way that they look, or the way that they sound, or not being able to speak English — all of that. It’s really sad. 

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Kenny took the case of Shida, Maki Itoh, and Sakazaki. He said that whenever he hears online criticism about them from people, it’s usually negative. The star gave a lot of praise to The Joshi wrestlers, saying that they train 7 days a week. He even said that they have never created a problem backstage as well.

… Cases with Shida, Maki Itoh, Riho, [Yuka] Sakazaki, when I hear about what some of these pathetic motherf*ckers would say because they think somebody else that has a podcast or platform to say something negative, they think that makes it okay … The Joshi wrestlers are so much more refined. They train seven days a f*cking week and are so much more smooth and professional, and we have never once had any sort of backstage political issue with Joshi wrestlers. They do whatever they can, whatever is asked for them.

AEW has been a good platform for a lot of Japanese talent. Riho, for example, became the inaugural AEW Women’s World Champion after she defeated Nyla Rose. Even after defeating Riho, she lost the belt to Hikaru Shida, yet another Japanese talent.

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Tags: Kenny Omega
Nitish Vashishtha

Nitish Vashishtha is a freelance writer/contributor from India. He’s written content for companies like ScoopWhoop and Sportskeeda. He’s been writing about pop-culture, current affairs and pro-wrestling since 2017.

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