YMMV / Koji Kitao

• Mis-blamed:
  • Everybody (well, everybody who knows him) knows the misdeeds which got Kitao expelled from sumo. Nobody remembers his former master confessing that he actually made most of them up to bury him for money issues.
  • While Riki Choshu's criticisms of Kitao were right, Choshu himself was known for being a troublemaker backstage and using his connections to screw coworkers he didn't like, and that Kitao was neither the first nor the last to have such kind of problems with Choshu is telling. Furthermore, Kitao might have been in the wrong by calling him a racial slur, but it is certain he got screwed more than he should because his opponent happened to be well-connected - NJPW wrestlers from the same era used to be pardoned even after physically attacking people and provoking literal brawls.
  • Dave Meltzer would state in the May 20, 1991 edition of Wrestling Observer Newsletter that he believed it was John Tenta the one who shot on Kitao (or at least started the miscommunication with him) on their infamous match and not vice versa. He also reported The Great Kabuki convinced Tenta to do so in order to "teach Kitao a lesson" and that SWS fired him from his booker job when they found out.
• Never Live It Down: While Kitao is unambiguously guilty of ugly things (calling Choshu racial slurs, deliberately breaking kayfabe after the Tenta affair), the ones who most people remembers about his career (being kicked out of sumo for brutalizing his master and his wife) are the ones that have more or less proven to be false.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: After his return as a honorable wrestler, he finally started to receive cheers from the fans again, and eventually could even have his own promotion.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Despite his attitude backstage and problems with other wrestlers, everybody involved was unanimous in that Kitao was a big lost chance for NJPW. Seiji Sakaguchi went to say that part of the problem was that Kitao got the wrong people to give him the wrong advice for his career, while Keiji Mutoh stated that NJPW committed a mistake too by giving him special treatment instead of trying to instigate discipline on him like every other rookie. Their booking of him was another point, as being pushed as babyface despite being one of the least likable celebrities in Japan was too much of a stretch; both Mutoh and Bam Bam Bigelow believed that Kitao could have brought a mountain of gold to the company only if the execs had booked him as a heel.
• X-Pac Heat: Kitao was possibly the first example in NJPW history not counting Takeshi Kitano. Trying to make a hero out of a man who had been kicked out of sumo for allegedly striking an elderly master and his wife was Crazy Enough to Work at first, but when it was clear Kitao was not interested in giving good matches (which he may got away with as heel, but clearly not as a face), people started booing him nonstop and just demanding him to go away.