Kawasaki Strong 2021

Usually, DDT holds two major events each year, often in venues such as the Ryōgoku Kokugikan, the Nippon Budokan or the Ota City General Gymnasium. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in Japan and the rescheduled 2020 Summer Olympics, DDT had to consider new venues for their 2021 events and picked the Culttz Kawasaki arena located in Kawasaki, Kanagawa.

The show will feature professional wrestling matches that result from scripted storylines, where wrestlers portray villains, heroes, or less distinguishable characters in the scripted events that build tension and culminate in a wrestling match or series of matches.[2]

On December 27, 2020, Jun Akiyama defeated Konosuke Takeshita in the final of the D-Oh Grand Prix 2021 tournament, earning himself first contendership to the KO-D Openweight Championship held by Tetsuya Endo. The match was then officially signed the next day at a press conference.[1]

On November 3, 2020, at Ultimate Party 2020, Yuki Ueno became the 4th DDT Universal Champion by defeating Chris Brookes. After successfully defending it for the second time on January 9, 2021, he asked for his next challenger to be Yukio Sakaguchi, from whom he said he learned a lot in the past year. Sakaguchi accepted the match, then, in the backstage interview that followed, snuck up behind Ueno and applied a sleeper hold to choke him out.[3]

On December 21, 2020, the KO-D 10-Man Tag Team Championship was vacated and renamed "KO-D 8-Man Tag Team Championship" due to the difficulty of scheduling a proper title defense during the pandemic.[4] A title match was immediately announced for the Kawasaki Strong 2021 event in which a team led by Sanshiro Takagi would face a team led by Shinya Aoki.[5] The remaining participants were later announced one after another. Takagi and Aoki had previously been fighting over the DDT Extreme Division Championship with Takagi finally winning the title and ending Aoki's 237 days reign (the third longest in the title history) at Ultimate Party 2020.

On January 3, 2021, at the New Year's Day special show, Yuki Iino, a member of the All Out stable who was scheduled to return from an injury at the Kawasaki event, angrily confronted Yuji Hino who had returned to DDT on December 23 and aligned himself with the rival Damnation stable. A singles match between the two was scheduled for the February 23 event and Iino return match would be an eight-man tag team match pitting All Out against Damnation.[6]