i wonder when someone is gonna come along and say that LA Akira must be another “japanese dickrider”, lol.
regarding tachigawa, i put the question to a japanese guy i chat with over email who was involved in organising the earlier hyper mania tournaments and other events before those:
“About tachikawa, he’s champ from CE using gray ryu. I have not seen him for long time now, think he is retired(not sure). He wasn’t that good at all SF series since he did not play all SF so hard in his late career iirc, also due to appearances of other strong ryu players made him fade out, I think. His play style was very basic but strong, fireball then sweep or shoryuken, basically. Ryu was enough strong just doing that on CE too, but really was famous at that time, and saw him few times at some local tournys on ST too, but wasn’t that strong anymore then(although far stronger than many), so he faded away,maybe. Those were good old days for me. He really was one of the top players on east then. Things and players has changed now, but there was another strong top ryu player of west named hameken(almost same as retired now). I personally like his ryu, also higaki-san (shooting d) is top ryu player of all time.”
opinions vary, but the general consensus in japan is that shin-dhalsim (during his prime) was the greatest japanese SF2 player ever (during the first few years of ST).
shooting D, komoda, and the maekawa brothers (otochun and aniken) are 1st generation players (ie guys who started back during the WW days), then you’ve got people like daigo who are kinda 1.5 generation (started playing t.hawk at age 12, so i’m told). and guys like taira are kinda the second generation
of course there will be many great players from different parts of the world, but unless these guys ever played each other, or any match footage is ever dug up from somewhere … somehow … then there’s not much point in saying any particular player is the best. especially as some of these “OG’s” can’t even agree on what actually happened in some cases.
tomo is a legend though, no doubt. we need mike watson to make some posts and then this thread will be complete :lovin: