ChocoPro Roundup: #317, #318 & #319
Shin Is Tested, A Whole Show Delivers & Emi Meets The New Rookie
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Chon Shiryu & Shin Suzuki vs Tokyo Heartbreak Academy (Minoru Fujita & Antonio Honda), ChocoPro #317 (24/6/23), Gatoh Move
Winning a title thanks to injury is never ideal, but it’s worse when people are already questioning if you’re good enough to do so. You’ve achieved your goal, but in a way that’s proved no one wrong. That’s the situation Shin Suzuki finds himself in. He’s a good wrestler and seemingly a decent human being, but there’s a sense that no one thinks he’s ready for those belts. Minoru Fujita certainly doesn’t, repeatedly attacking him after they teamed up at ChocoPro #316 in a way that suggested he doesn’t have much respect for the new champ. Everyone knows Chon deserves to be there, he’s been in similar spots before, but Shin still has something to prove.
And this was the perfect place for him to start proving it. In Fujita and Anton, you have two old warhorses who, yes, are inclined to mess around a bit (well, a lot in Honda’s case) but also know their way around a fight. Tokyo Heartbreak Academy felt like a test to see how the champs responded when met with a barrage of nonsense and violence. By the final act, even Anton was going all out, throwing fists and tapping into his serious side. With Shin and Chon having seemingly ended up with the belts by accident (although we don’t know whether they were booked to beat CDK or not), the idea of them losing on their first defence didn’t feel ridiculous, which gave every Heartbreak Academy near fall a sense of danger that might have been missing otherwise.
As for Shin, while he answered some of the questions thrown his way, they also smartly kept a few resolutions back. He stood up to Fujita and Honda, hanging with them for most of the match, but it was Shiryu who got them over the line, as Suzuki most of the final minutes battling with Fujita on the outside. He played his part, but he wasn’t the main character, and whether he’s capable of being so feels like it will be the story of their title reign. It’s one that I’m intrigued to see play out.
ChocoPro #318 (29/6/23), Gatoh Move
If I were to construct my platonic ideal of a ChocoPro show, it would be awfully close to this one. We had Sayaka Obihiro teaming with a bear (OSO11) in the opener to take on Masa Takanashi and Kaori Yoneyama, Sayaka laying down some hammer blows on Balliyan Akki and, finally, the return of Emi Sakura in a wild main event between Killer Queens and the first-time pairing of Miya Yotsuba and Shinno Hagane. It hit on all my favourite things: nonsense, good wrestling and chaos.
What’s most impressive about a ChocoPro show of this nature, though, is how everything knows what it needs to be. That bear-centric opener went less than seven minutes, a decent portion of which focused on the bear being so distracted by the fish Obi had used to tempt him into tagging out that he wasn’t even paying attention to the wrestling. There was no wandering around looking for ideas or filling time with pointless forearm exchanges. It was four pros who knew what beats to hit (which included Masa and Yone playing dead) and when to get out of there. That’s not always been a guarantee in ChocoPro, some of those pandemic main events were slogs, but when they nail it, few do it better.
It was also a reminder of how brilliant Emi Sakura is. That’s not something we should need to be reminded of, but with her vanishing off to AEW (which I rarely, if ever, watch) for long periods, it is always nice to be brought back up to speed. The main event was a preview of her vs Hagane, and she was brilliant, walking a perfect line between her arrogant queen persona and being shit scared of Shinno kicking the crap out of her. It’s something she’s always excelled at, but it gets highlighted even more by the breaks in watching her do her thing. I think I say it every time she comes back, but while I don’t blame her for wanting to give breaking into America a shot, it does make me sad that we don’t get to see her flex her muscles every week.
Nonoka Seto vs Emi Sakura, ChocoPro #319 (1/7/23), Gatoh Move
For her final exhibition before making her debut, Nonoka Seto got to test herself against the boss. She and Miya are the first Gatoh Move rookies who have not only been trained entirely by Mei Suruga but have come through at a time when Emi Sakura isn’t a constant presence. She hasn’t watched their development from the sidelines, so if you’ve only got a few minutes to show her what you can do, you better deliver.
And I loved the way this unfolded. On a purely narrative level, it was relatively simple, Emi playing with the rookie at the beginning, only for Nonoka to fire up and do enough to give her a scare. However, the performances from both of them were fantastic. It’s no surprise that Emi can bully with the best of them, but she was particularly brilliant here, forcing Nonoka to fight for every inch. There was a real sense of struggle throughout, aided by the rookie seemingly gaining confidence as it went along, finding it in her to throw everything she could at Sakura. When one of her forearms took Emi off her feet, you could almost see the belief flow into her, the feeling that she could do this pushing her forward.
Of course, you never really believed Sakura was in trouble, as there was a sense that, if she needed to, she could turn it on and put this rookie to bed. However, that’s how it should be. A rookie who hasn’t even debuted should not test Emi Sakura. What’s more important is the sense that Nonoka thinks she can do. At the start of this, I didn’t believe that she did, but by the end, she’d bought into the idea that she had the boss on the ropes, and when Mei convinced her to roll Emi up after the bell, dashing forward to count the three, Nonoka proved that, at least in theory, she did. Sure, you could also argue that bloodying the nose of the boss before you’ve even started is never a great idea, but Seto hopefully has a long career ahead of her in which she can learn that lesson, and if her exhibitions have been any indication, she’ll pick it up it quickly.