With Days Left in His Career, Tiger Mask IV Reveals the Secrets He’s Been Keeping for Years

By: Thom Fain

Tiger Mask IV secretly underwent emergency surgery for life-threatening diverticulitis in 2020, returned to the NJPW Dojo weeks later with a stoma bag, and told none of his colleagues anything had happened — a revelation he has now disclosed for the first time in a pre-retirement interview with NJPW1972.com ahead of his final matches on July 7.

The fourth man to wear the Tiger Mask, Yoshihiro Yamazaki has held the role since 1995. He is retiring this July after 30 years in professional wrestling, and the full story of what nearly ended his career six years ago is only now becoming clear.

“Completely out of the blue,” he said of the diagnosis. “The day before, I was with the family doing home workouts while we watched TV. That was during the pandemic. Huge shock learning that I had to get surgery. I had this unbearable stomach pain, went to the hospital and they said, ‘This is life-threatening. We have to get you into surgery,’ and then I had the operation the next day. The doctor told me I would need a stoma bag for a while and wouldn’t be able to wrestle, so jumping to conclusions, I thought, oh, that’s it, I’m finished.”
He told no one.

Photo c/o New Japan Pro-Wrestling

Only his immediate family knew. After three weeks of recovery, Tiger Mask returned to the Dojo — stoma bag still in place — and deflected all questions. “People asked why I was away, whether I had COVID, but I told them I just had some business to deal with.”

The physical toll of that surgery, he says, is what ultimately set his retirement in motion. “A major factor was the operation I had when I had diverticulitis in 2020. After that, I really struggled with my abdominal strength and I started to feel the end getting closer, and with all the young talent in NJPW, there were fewer and fewer matches for me, so it just felt like the time was right.”

He will need back surgery once he retires.

His doctor, he says, is consistently surprised he has been able to continue performing at all. “My body is a mess. You learn to work around and cover for one injury and that just damages something somewhere else. My neck isn’t great either, but for some reason when the bell rings, I can still go somewhat. I have pride in myself to be Tiger Mask to the very end.”

On the question of whether the Tiger Mask character should live on after him, he set a deliberately high bar. “If it’s just a case of a decent hand, good high flier, then I don’t think it should continue. If you look at all the other Tigers, even Sayama-san himself, you can see how hard it is to keep the Tiger Mask thing going. It would have to be someone that has Sayama’s accuracy, the weight to what he did, the attitude and the scariness.”

Tiger Mask IV’s retirement show is July 7. He will compete in two singles matches on the card — against Rocky Romero, who will appear as Black Tiger, and against AEW/ROH talent ‘Dynamite Kid’ Tommy Billington. The night before, he will also appear in a six-man tag at the NJPW Road to G1 Climax show.