Trivia / Masahito Kakihara

• Flip-Flop of God: His departure from NOAH. He claimed it was temporal, a hiatus he was taking from pro wrestling in order to compete in Mixed Martial Arts, but he did nothing of this and quickly returned to pro wrestling as a freelancer for other companies.
• Harpo Does Something Funny: He had a shoot match with Kiyoshi Tamura in UWFI. The story behind the match was that they were checking out what Pancrase was doing at the time and decided to find out how they would fair against each other for real. The match only lasted a little over 2 minutes with Tamura choking out Kakihara for real.
• Role-Ending Misdemeanor: Given that Kakihara abandoned NOAH after stiffing Takao Omori up on the inaugural show, it was believed he left because the incident had made it fall out of favor with the execs. It was later deconfirmed, probably on the basis that Omori wasn't exactly a popular member, although Kakihara might have considered that it was safer to simply move to greener pastures.
• What Could Have Been:
  • Kakihara could have been sent to challenge Rickson Gracie in his dojo in Los Angeles instead of Yoji Anjo. Even before that, the original plan was sending him or Kiyoshi Tamura to learn the style of Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu under Rickson and then challenging him.
  • In AJPW, Mitsuharu Misawa wanted to push Kakihara as his second-in-command in the Untouchables stable, but Giant Baba vetoed it because he thought Kakihara was too small and hadn't paid his dues with the promotion yet. He later followed Misawa to the latter's Pro Wrestling NOAH, where it was expected he was finally pushed.
  • Betwee leaving AJPW and arriving to NOAH, Kiyoshi Tamura apparently invited Kakihara to join RINGS instead since they were close stablemates in UWF-i, but Kakihara declined down, probably because he knew he was too injury-prone to keep up in shoots.
  • As mentioned above, Kakihara had originally meant to have a career in NOAH, but he left after a single event due to a mid-match fight with his long time enemy Takao Omori. Kakihara claimed he was temporally leaving to do mixed martial arts in PRIDE, but instead he simply became a freelancer and returned to AJPW, where the NOAH exodus had left new chances for him, moving later to NJPW. It was speculated Kakihara had been blacklisted from NOAH, as he didn't participate in NJPW-NOAH subsequent co-promotional bookings, but he later denied it, and it was further proved wrong when Misawa and Satoru Asako greeted him in his retirement.