Tetsuya Naito Responds To OZAWA, Claims He Expected Something Different

By: Ian McCord

GHC Tag Team Champions, Tetsuya Naito and BUSHI, are set to defend their titles against TEAM 2000X’s OZAWA and Jun Masaoka on April 12th at Pro Wrestling NOAH’s APEX CONQUEST 2026 in NAGOYA.

TEAM 2000X would emerge as the next challengers for the titles after Los Tranquilos de Japon defeated Manabu Soya and Shuji Kondo back on March 20th in Kobe Sambo Hall. However this challenge did not come as a surprise.

On March 17th in Hodogaya, OZAWA began mocking Naito, hitting his signature pose in the middle of the ring after his match and continued in his post-match comments, claiming Naito’s performances in NOAH thus far have been disappointing.

After defeating Los Tranquilos de Japon In 6-man tag team action on March 25th at Shinagawa Stella Ball, OZAWA would take to social media to insult Naito once again posting:

“Naito’s knee still looked pretty bad. If he can’t move, I’ll do everything for him.”

Tetsuya Naito, who’s been known to play mind games with his opponents throughout his career, sat down for an interview with Tokyo Sports to discuss his thoughts on OZAWA’s comments towards him stating:

“I understand how Tenzan felt back then, and I understand why the young OZAWA would want to attack him on that point. But that’s a path I walked more than 10 years ago. O-Khan said something similar to me, so I thought, ‘Here we go again.’ I guess it was too much expectation that OZAWA would see something different.”

Naito would continue on, giving his opinion of OZAWA’s taunts and imitations of him as of late, claiming the former GHC Heavyweight Champion may be lacking originality:

 “I guess he can only provoke by imitating others. In short, I felt that he hasn’t yet established his own originality and said, ‘This is who I am.’ I can see that he has great physical ability, but is it about the difficulty of the moves or something like that? If so, then Kamiya, who stopped using the Phoenix Splash that you’re doing now, won the MVP last year… If you really want to imitate someone, wouldn’t it be better to imitate Kamiya? That way you’d be closer to winning the MVP you’ve been wanting so much.”

(English Translation via Google Translate)

Naito will have the opportunity to silence OZAWA on April 12th, when Los Tranquilos de Japon defend the GHC Tag Team Championships against TEAM 2000X at NOAH’S APEX CONQUEST 2026 in NAGOYA.