KUSHIDA left NJPW at the end of January 2019, moving to the United States and signing with WWE to be part of the NXT brand. His contract with WWE ended in April, paving the way for his NJPW return, where he confronted IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion Taiji Ishimori at the June 21 New Japan Road event.
KUSHIDA officially returned to action in NJPW on July 3.
Speaking to the official NJPW website, KUSHIDA discussed his decision to leave WWE and return to NJPW.
KUSHIDA noted in the interview that he didn't want to discuss his WWE departure too much or create comparisons, but was open to discussing his experiences in WWE.
He said about WWE, "Well, to set the scene a bit, the turnover in WWE is really relentless. In August of 2021, there was a really sudden change in thinking there. Essentially they wanted to train young wrestlers, under 30, that didn’t have pro-wrestling experience and had come from other athletic backgrounds. When it comes to me, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that left me redundant, effectively. You have to remember I was 36 when I got an offer from WWE. It still really seems kinda hard to believe that HHH would reach out with an offer…So with this youth push on over there, it wasn’t like I had a shoot time machine of my own, so it became ‘OK, what can I do here?’. Everyone was asking the same questions, I think, actually. And NJPW immediately popped in my head. I felt really strongly right away that LA would be the best place to base myself. Even when I was in WWE, I had wanted to move from Orlando to LA, but the company wouldn’t let me; that hurt my motivation a little, heh. I think there’s a little bit of magic around LA that made it somewhere I always wanted to live."
KUSHIDA said he wanted to be based in LA because there are direct flights to Japan and even before he left NJPW in 2019, he planned to move to LA when the NJPW Dojo opened.
When asked if other promotions contacted him once his WWE contract expired, KUSHIDA said, "Right…. right. To be honest as soon as the news broke my phone kept ringing and ringing, so I turned it off. I’m really grateful for that, but turning my phone off was more a thing of not wanting other people’s voices to influence me. I figured that this is one of those crossroads in life, somewhere where I had to really think about what I wanted to do next. If I couldn’t be true to myself, I couldn’t be a pro-wrestler anymore. "
KUSHIDA is one of the most accomplished junior heavyweights in NJPW history as a six-time IWGP Junior Heavyweight Champion and two-time Best of the Super Juniors champion.
Upon returning to NJPW, fans wondered in KUSHIDA would move to the heavyweight division to freshen things up for him.
"Not at all. Never," KUSHIDA replied when asked if there was thought to moving to the heavyweight division. "HHH and Shawn Michaels would always say this when I was in WWE- ‘make it organic’. Me coming back to an NJPW ring having died my hair blonde and with new gear, entering the G1 and then challenging a heavyweight champion. That might be the organic path for a wrestler that came through the Dojo system. But I didn’t. It wouldn’t be the organic path for KUSHIDA. In the end, KUSHIDA is KUSHIDA. It’s me, it’s organic. My whole life story is me being a short, small guy who took himself to Mexico and got on this road of being a professional wrestler. I didn’t come through the NJPW system, and I have pride in that too. All of that is how I’ve managed to survive in the business. I’m not going to deny all of that."
Along with wrestling for NJPW, KUSHIDA competed on Thursday's IMPACT where he took on Rich Swann. Fans can find results from Thursday's IMPACT by clicking here.
KUSHIDA will face Alex Shelley at NJPW Music City Mayhem on July 30. Fans can find results from past NJPW events at Fightful's results section.
