Bullet Club vs The New Style

Lore & Background

The Bullet Club was never just a tag team or a stable in the traditional sense. Its members spoke of it as a gathering—a place where the best wrestlers in the world could walk in, take a seat, and be equals regardless of nationality or tenure. Kenny Omega, the Canadian phenom, and Kazuchika Okada, the Japanese heavyweight main-eventer, anchored the group with their contrasting styles and shared ambition. Tetsuya Naito brought the in-ring artistry, and Yuji Nagata the high-flying spectacle. The club's dominance was felt in the weight of the belts they carried and the sheer volume of screen time their members commanded.

The New Style emerged as the natural antithesis. Where Bullet Club projected confidence, exclusivity, and a 'you're either in or you're out' energy, The New Style carried a message of renewal—of wrestlers who believed NJPW's next chapter belonged to a different generation, a different philosophy of storytelling. Their promos were sharper, their matches more desperate, and their victories over Bullet Club members carried the weight of a crowd that had grown hungry for change.

The cultural impact rippled beyond the ring. Merchandise, fan chants, and social-media discourse split along these lines. The rivalry gave NJPW a narrative clarity it had lacked in the years immediately preceding, and the matches that grew out of it—particularly the main-event clashes between the factions' leaders—became reference points for what a modern Japanese pro-wrestling main event could be.

In Their Own Story

The arena smells like rubber and sweat, the kind that soaks into the canvas and never fully leaves. A single spotlight cuts through the haze, finding a man in a black jacket standing at the top of the ramp, arms crossed, jaw set. The crowd is a low, rolling murmur—half anticipation, half defiance. He doesn't look at the ring. He looks at the seats, at the faces he knows are watching, waiting for him to say the one word that will make the other side flinch.

Then the music hits. Not a theme, exactly—more a declaration. The second man appears, and the murmur becomes a roar. The two lock eyes across the distance, and for a long moment neither moves. The referee raises his arms. The ropes sway. And the night belongs to the collision.

Reader's Guide

Bullet Club was formed in 2018 and quickly became the dominant faction in NJPW, built around the leadership of Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada, with Tetsuya Naito and Yuji Nagata as core pillars. Their philosophy was one of elite self-selection: the club was a collective of top-tier talent who operated as a unit, holding multiple championships simultaneously and controlling a large share of the promotion's narrative. The 'club' framing gave them a cultural identity beyond mere teaming—they were a place, a brand, a statement.

The New Style positioned itself as the answer to that dominance. Rather than mirroring Bullet Club's exclusivity, the counter-faction leaned on momentum, underdog energy, and a vision of NJPW evolving past the old guard. Their matches against Bullet Club members were framed as generational tests, and their victories carried outsized narrative weight because of that framing.

Culturally, the rivalry gave fans a clear axis to rally around. It structured the mid-card and main-card alike, turning what could have been a series of individual rivalries into a cohesive factional war. The legacy of this conflict is visible in how NJPW's booking evolved in the years that followed, with the promotion increasingly comfortable letting multiple factions coexist and challenge one another in sustained, multi-month storylines.

Did You Know?

• Bullet Club's name evokes the idea of an exclusive gathering place, and the faction's branding leaned heavily into that 'members-only' aesthetic in their ring entrances and merchandise.
• Kenny Omega and Kazuchika Okada had contrasting in-ring styles—Omega's high-flying, submission-heavy approach versus Okada's power-based, methodical wrestling—which made their tag-team matches a showcase of complementary
• The rivalry helped solidify NJPW's reputation in the mid-2010s and beyond as a promotion where factional storytelling could rival the long-running feuds of other major companies.
• Tetsuya Naito's presence in Bullet Club gave the faction a distinctly Japanese in-ring artistry that complemented the more international flavor of Omega and the group's broader roster.