All of the major wrestling companies in the United States at one point in time have incorporated international stars into their products. The WCW cruiserweight division was built on the back of stars from Mexico and Japan, WWE have outright bought AAA in 2025, and New Japan Pro Wrestling have had relationships with WCW, TNA, and AEW over the years. For ECW, their main partners in the east were FMW, founded by Atsushi Onita, who carved out their own unique audience in the 1990s for being one of the most insane promotions in the world where everything was rigged with explosives. 

Of the stars who made their names in FMW, two that made the trip to ECW in 1998 were Mike Awesome, then known as The Gladiator in Japan, and Masato Tanaka, a man with one of the hardest heads in all of wrestling. After being introduced in July 1998, the two men were booked for a singles match at ECW Heatwave on August 2, a show that has since gone down as perhaps the greatest pay-per-view in ECW history, and this match is huge reason for that. The two men put on a 12 minute showcase of what they had been doing to each other in FMW and the fans in Dayton, Ohio couldn't get enough of it. Some of the sickest chair shots you've ever seen, tables galore, and Awesome flying through the air as if he was a cruiserweight, it was genuinely a ground-breaking match that landed both men jobs in ECW immediately after.

They would pick up their feud a year later as Awesome spent the first half of 1999 rehabbing injuries, this time over the ECW World Heavyweight Championship, with their November To Remember 1999 match definitely deserving a mention. However, they would part ways in 2000 when they left the company at separate times.

However, Awesome and Tanaka would have one final match at ECW One Night Stand in 2005, one that would steal the show on a night full of memorable moments. It was so good that the anti-ECW crusaders legitimately couldn't hide how much they were enjoying the match. It was wince-inducing but you couldn't look away, and while some are put off by the unprotected shots to the head, seeing Awesome grow more and more fearful of a man who simply will not go down makes the over the top finish even sweeter. The match in 2005 would ultimately be Awesome's last as he tragically passed away in 2007, but as far as final matches go, they don't get much better than this.