The story
On July 4, 2004, Último Dragón departed from the Toryumon Gym and seized ownership of the "Toryumon" trademarks. The Toryumon Japan promotion subsequently restructured and changed its name to Dragon Gate. Dragon Gate declared Cima (the last one to hold the Último Dragón Gym Championship) to be the inaugural Open the Dream Gate Champion, thus making him the first champion in the promotion's history.
Dragon Gate would make a TV deal to air on Gaora TV, who was also a shareholder of All Japan Pro Wrestling after Motoko Baba sold the rights to the company and gave her power to Keiji Muto. Dragon Gate TV's first episode aired live on July 16, 2004. AJPW TV episodes would also air commercials advertising Dragon Gate's TV debut and would frequently promote future Dragon Gate shows during AJPW commercials, despite there being little interpromotional crossover of AJPW and Dragon Gate in their events. Dragon Gate TV would use an anime intro depicting their wrestlers, the intro's art style being a blend of mainstream anime with Fujiko Fujio-esque animation.
Since its founding, Dragon Gate wrestlers have also made appearances on the United States independent wrestling circuit, including Ring of Honor which held a Dragon Gate Invasion show on August 27, 2005, in Buffalo, New York, Dragon Gate Challenge on March 30, 2006, in Detroit, Michigan and Supercard of Honor and Better Than Our Best in Chicago, Illinois on March 31 and April 1, 2006, respectively. A six-man match pitting Cima, Naruki Doi and Masato Yoshino against Dragon Kid, Ryo Saito and Genki Horiguchi at Supercard of Honor is one of only a handful of North American matches that wrestling journalist Dave Meltzer has given a five-star rating. Both Ring of Honor's All Star Extravaganza III on March 30 and Supercard of Honor II on March 31, 2007, in Detroit, Michigan featured Dragon Gate in the main events.
On October 12, 2007 Baseball Magazine Sha, the publisher of Weekly Pro-Wrestling released Dragon Gate trading cards.
In 2008, Dragon Gate promoted their first set of shows in the United States. The first show took place in Los Angeles on September 5 and featured El Generico, Necro Butcher, and Kendo. Their second show was in Hawaii on September 8.
Japan's Dragon Gate promotion announced its expansion into the United States with Dragon Gate USA on April 14, 2009, at the Korakuen Hall event in Tokyo.
Also in 2009 it was announced that they created another branch promotion Dragon Gate UK. Their first show was held on November 1, 2009, in Oxford, England.
On March 21, 2018, Dragon Gate announced the creation of Dragon Gate Network, an on-demand service similar to WWE Network and New Japan Pro-Wrestling World. The service officially launched on April 1, 2018. On May 7, 2018, Okamura left his job as president. Toru Kido became the new president and Cima became the President of Dragon Gate Inc., the international department with the headquarter in Shanghai, China. In 2019, the promotion celebrated its 20th anniversary. As part of the celebration Último Dragón returned to the promotion in July as a senior advisor. Afterwards, the promotion changed its logo and its parent company Dragon Entertainment would be known as Dragongate Inc. Within the time of all the changes of the promotion, they started to use the combined Dragongate moniker as its official romaji name.
Read the full text
On February 1, 2020, Dragongate announced a working relationship with American promotion Major League Wrestling (MLW), which would include a talent-exchange between the two promotions.
On December 15, 2023, Dragongate was announced as one of the founding members of the United Japan Pro-Wrestling alliance, a joint effort to further develop professional wrestling in Japan through promotion and organization, with Seiji Sakaguchi being named as the chairman of the project.
From Wikipedia’s article on Dragongate, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.4