When we last left our story, Vince McMahon signed Japanese high-flyer Taka Michinoku to be the inaugural WWF Light Heavyweight champion. The company instantly had no idea what to do with him from there.
After rematches with Brian Christopher and being confined to the C-shows like “Sunday Night Heat” and “Shotgun Saturday Night” against up-and-coming projects like Essa Rios, the logical solution finally presented itself: the rest of the talent from Taka’s home promotion, Michinoku Pro, were brought in to have matches with him.
Back in Japan, Taka was part of a team called Kaientai DX, along with fellow light heavyweights Dick Togo, Men’s Teoih and Shoichi Funaki. To be more accurate, they were alternately partners or teammates depending what the storyline called for, since they could be mixed-and-matched into a variety of great matches as needed. In this case, the logical pairing was to have Taka defending against each of the invading Kaientai members one after another, which would sustain storylines for months. So that started out well enough, with the three invaders hitting the ring to attack Taka a few times on “RAW."
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However, much like “205 Live,” McMahon quickly tired of smaller guys having great matches, and soon they needed “personality." So manager Wally Yamaguchi (aka “Yamaguchi-San”) was added to the heel group, along with his “wife” to fill the random hot girl quota. The Kaientai members were styled with edgy jeans and t-shirts instead of their normal wrestling gear, and it was all pretty lame and clearly trying too hard to be something it wasn’t.
How else could it be established that these guys were too small to compete with anyone else in the WWF? Well, how about adding 6-foot tall Val Venis and Bradshaw to the feud for reasons never adequately explored?
Taka had been in a storyline where he was teaming up with Bradshaw to learn to be “American” — sure, take lessons in racial harmony from a guy once photographed doing the goosestep at a house show in Germany — at which point it turned into a tag-team feud against the three members of Kaientai. Fun fact: The original name for the group on “RAW” had been “Klub Kamikaze" before someone in the chain of command decided that maybe “Kaientai” might be a bit less insensitive.
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Anyway, when that shockingly flopped and everyone involved (not named Bradshaw) ended up looking like complete goofs, things proceeded to the next phase. Val Venis, playing a porn-star character because Vince Russo, was brought into the feud and started making his move on Mrs. Yamaguchi, which led to tag matches with Taka and Venis against Kaientai, before — shocking swerve spoiler alert — it was revealed that Mrs. Yamaguchi was in fact Taka’s younger sister. So he turned on Val and joined his Japanese compatriots.
Because, you know, they’re all Japanese, so throw them all in the same group, right?
Which all led to one of the most infamously ridiculous moments in the history of “RAW," which is saying something.
Kaientai kidnapped Venis the next week and tortured him — with cameras present, of course — leading to manager Wally Yamaguchi famously promising to “choppy choppy [his] pee-pee," because that’s how the Japanese talk, apparently. The cliffhanger saw them actually doing so, with a samurai sword, before the camera cut to black. We all wondered if Val Venis would escape this stupid, stupid predicament.
(Spoiler alert: Venis was actually fine because of sudden “shrinkage." I guess you could say he escaped by the skin of his … well, you get the idea.)
From there, the entire light heavyweight division continued to circle the drain, the belt ending up on literal joke champion Gillberg and then getting forgotten about for months before mercifully being unified into the WCW Cruiserweight title in 2001.
Oddly enough, the one with the best career longevity in WWE has ended up being Funaki, thanks to a weird gimmick with overdubbed English dialogue and a transition from wrestling into being “SmackDown’s No. 1 announcer." Today, he's half of the Japanese commentary.
Taka is still hanging around New Japan to this day and doing well for himself, and would probably be awesome and get over again if brought back as a part of “205 Live.”
For his sake, though, hopefully that doesn’t happen. Once was enough.
