NNew Japan Pro Wrestling

How big of a deal is Aaron Wolf?

  • October 16, 2025

Obviously he's an Olympic Gold medalist and is a big deal in the Judo world, but as someone who wasn't aware of who he was before he was signed to nooj, how popular is he in Japan?

https://preview.redd.it/ipehk3wu9ivf1.jpg?width=600&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=46b598f51e4e2fd04fbb7cc3dde8f38e1588f64b

by DekuGioGio

14 comments

  1. He’s a big deal. In a similar way to how Kurt Angle was known to Americans, he’s known to the Japanese populace.

  2. I think he needs to work on his visual presentation. He’s a legit guy, but he looks unpolished with the neckbeard.

  3. In my head I’m letting him be a modern koii katou (but without all the drama attitude issue and bullshit.)

  5. He was a guest commentator on at least one of the days of a Sumo Basho earlier this year for Abema’s coverage, and they usually like to have quite prominent athletes and celebrities for that. I think that was right before NJPW officially signed him.

  6. With the Olympic victory, Wolf was the 10th person in history to win the Triple Crown title of Judo, the title for who won all 3 big tournaments: World Championship, Olympic and All Japan. This, coupled with the fact that he is mixed-race and has a charming personality (and he speaks very well for an athlete, dude’s father is an American university lecturer), resulted in a lot of media appearances during the 2021-2022 period. Quiz show, variety show, radio programme, front-page magazine cover, commercials (beer, camera film, super glue), etc… you name it.

    I read someone compared him to Kurt Angle, but the truth is Angle was not that well-known after Atlanta 1996. Kurt’s transition to pro wrestling gained him the retrospective fame that we know of him today. Wolf became a celebrity quite quickly because he was all over the media after Tokyo 2021, I think even currently he is still doing radio talk show while training at NJ Dojo.

  7. Wolf won a gold in his home countries’ Olympics in a discipline that’s important to the country.

    Gold medal winners tend to be a big deal in their respective countries much more than they are in America

  8. He’s Japanese American an Olympic gold medalist brother is gonna draw in the casual viewers and it’ll be fun if he’s a good worker possibly going to suprass Naoya Ogawa the only other judoka Olympic medallist who had a pro wrestling run.

  9. I was in Japan for two weeks in August, also for G1 Climax Final, at the end of my trip I was in a bar and made a conversation with Japanese man, talk about my trip including coming to wrestling show, he said that he doesn’t watch wrestling but even he know that NJPW signed Wolf.

    You can take it from here.

  10. This will be the first 1/4 NJPW Tokyo Dome show that TV Asahi will be put on national television since 2004. That means TV Asahi is expecting big numbers. He has that mainstream appeal that will probably draw in a lot of casuals. I asked my cousin’s Japanese wife if she knew who Aaron Wolf was. She said “of course, even my mother knows who he is.”

  12. Compare the views from NJPW’s Twitter posts at the press conference on Tuesday:

    * Aaron Wolf: 1.3 Million views
    * Konosuke Takeshita: 266k views

  13. a fun thing to do is to look at his wikipedia page and then look at the japanese language version.

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