Wrestle Kingdom 12 in Tokyo Dome
The January 4 Tokyo Dome Show is a major professional wrestling show, held by Japanese professional wrestling promotion New Japan Pro-Wrestling (NJPW), held annually on January 4 in the Tokyo Dome. It has become an annual event that starts the new year in NJPW since its inception in 1992. NJPW have held shows at the Tokyo Dome as far back as April 24, 1989, but their January 4 show has become the most anticipated show on NJPW calendar. It is Japan's biggest wrestling event and NJPW's premier show, similar to what WrestleMania is for WWE.
NJPW often invites other promotions, Japanese and international, to participate in their January 4 Tokyo Dome Shows as well, including several companies that have been involved in scripted inter-promotional rivalries such as All Japan Pro Wrestling (AJPW), Big Japan Pro Wrestling (BJW), Pro Wrestling Zero1, Pro Wrestling Noah, and UWF International (UWFi) as well as representatives from the Mexican Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre (CMLL) promotion. The shows have regularly featured wrestlers from American promotions such as Ring of Honor (ROH), Total Nonstop Action Wrestling (TNA, currently known as Global Force Wrestling), and World Championship Wrestling (WCW) and have on these occasions been shown either partially or in full in the American market.
The first two January 4 Tokyo Dome Shows were also the last two WCW/New Japan Supershows. Since 2007, when the event was renamed "Wrestle Kingdom in Tokyo Dome", the Dome shows have been broadcast on pay-per-view (PPV). As of 2017 all the Dome shows have featured championship matches, including several titles not owned by NJPW. On three occasions (1998, 2006 and 2013), no titles changed hands during the show. Some of the earlier January 4 show attendance numbers have been disputed. Officially, the 1993 Tokyo Dome show set the attendance record with 63,500 fans packing the Tokyo Dome, while according to Dave Meltzer, the 1998 show holds the record with an attendance of 55,000. Unofficially, the 2007 and 2011 Dome shows drew the lowest gates with only 18,000 in attendance. As of 2017, the January 4 shows have hosted 282 matches (not including dark or pre-show matches), 94 of which were title matches leading to 44 title changes in total. The 2005 Tokyo Dome show had a 16-match card, the largest of any of the shows, while 2001, 2002, 2007, 2013, and 2016 featured 9 matches, the lowest number of matches on a show.
...
Wikipedia