KENNY OMEGA

Really, Tanahashi belongs in the WWE. He can be the next Roman Reigns.

Why use your natural abilities to make someone feel bad? I just want to be the guy who uses his power to be positive.

I actually work better within restrictions. When you leave everything wide open, things tend to get a little convoluted. So when you give me those restrictions and I start to use my brain creatively to work around those, that's when things get interesting.

In WWE, a gay person is usually portrayed like some sort of comedy act to be mocked and laughed at. The world's not like that anymore.

I only ever get to work with Naito once a year. I'd love to wrestle him again. Yeah, he's good, for sure. The person I've never worked before in a New Japan ring - and I'd be happy to get the chance and show the difference of styles - is Zack Sabre, Jr., so that'd be another one. Yeah, he's one of my favorites.

As naturally athletic as I'm gifted to be, where certain things came easily, I always rely on my brain first.

Back in the day, when I was getting into the business, you could watch Pro Wrestling Noah. You could watch Ring Of Honor Wrestling, and a lot of people would say, 'the best wrestling in the world is actually at Ring Of Honor.'

When I was growing up, I thought there was only WWE. That's it. One promotion in the world. And then, as I grew up, I found that there's local wrestling. There's WCW, there's ECW. In Mexico, there are the luchadores. And then, finally, I realized there's wrestling in Japan.

A lot of people, especially performers in wrestling, feel that winning the title is the only statistic that matters, but it's always about the journey. If you don't have the people behind you, believing in you, and the start of a new chapter after winning the title, then you don't have anything.

When I see Big E, I clearly see someone who could be world champion. The guy is on another level.

A finishing move is an important part of one's character - and sometimes success.

All I know is what I have been given and what opportunities lie before me. Try to make the best of them, and I'm not going to give up until I make it to the top.

The WWE belt means nothing; it means absolutely nothing. They pass around that belt like a hot potato. I probably have a neighbor on my block who held that belt at one point. There is no prestige to that belt whatsoever.

I main-evented a sold-out Budokan Arena show; I participated in the first-ever ladder match in NJPW, made the transition from junior to heavyweight, and earned a G1 win with a series full of performances that I'm personally very proud of.

It's no secret that I love the country, and Japan has always felt like a second home to me.

Winning the title is an important detail to the story, but how you get there is much more important.

In high school, despite my involvement on four different sports teams, I threw my duties of being a jock out the window and spent my spare time in wrestling training or on the PS2.

I sort of took the literal term of 'The Cleaner,' and I started bringing janitorial items to the ring with me, so I took garbage bags and brooms and mops.

I can be multi-cultural, multi-lingual, work a physical style, push forward entertaining storylines, and be the more worldly entertainment that the company needs.

John Cena is one of the great WWE talents that I respect most. If I were to end up there, working with someone of his caliber would certainly be a goal and jive with my mission of changing wrestling.

I really want to be an integral part of the New Japan brand in the United States - and other countries, for that matter, too. I feel that I have a certain versatility that other wrestlers do not.

It's easy to make rude comments simply for the sake of being rude, but I'd much rather go a more psychological route.

I don't want people to look back at my matches and say, 'When you did that move, it was good, and I liked it because it was cool.' I want people to sort of remember a rush of images and the emotion that they felt when they saw it. That's when I think you have a real masterpiece in your hands.

A lot of people think that comedy is sort of a cop out to not wrestling seriously, but I actually would argue that comedy is much more difficult than wrestling seriously because you have to be creative in almost everything that you do if you want the comedy to make sense within the realms of pro wrestling.

Of course I'm not stupid enough to think that we could take on WWE head-on and win, because they're too big of a monster.