ChocoPro Roundup: #329, #330 & #331
Big Lads In Ichigaya, Mei's A Bully & A Heartwarming Janken Victory
Front Matter
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Masahiro Takanashi, Sayaka & Tokiko Kirhara vs Hoshitango, Sayaka Obihiro & Nonoka Seto, ChocoPro #329 (10/9/23), Gatoh Move
Hoshitango is not a great wrestler. I don’t want to be mean, but I’m working on the assumption that the ex-sumo can take it. He’s slow, plodding and, to put it lightly, limited in the ring. To be fair, I can’t claim to have seen his early work, so perhaps he was transcendent before time caught up with him. However, he’s not someone I particularly want to watch in 2023.
Except, that is, in Ichigaya Chocolate Square. Because in that tiny wee room, with the camera on top of him, Hoshitango makes sense. Compared to everyone else in this match, he looked like a monster, capable of grabbing hold of them and never letting go. It’s an aura that the roster has become adept at playing with, their attacks bouncing off him as they do everything they can to try and chip away at this mountain of a man. He doesn’t have to work hard to make his stuff look like it hurts, as all it takes is a few basic strikes and some throwing his weight around to make him feel like a threat.
It turns every Hoshitango match in Ichigaya into a puzzle, one where they have to figure out how to take him out or inevitably lose. In this, Sayaka and Otoki reverted to basics, crouching behind him for Masa to deliver a shove. It was pure schoolyard, but in the best possible way, as the biggest lad in the room was cut down by people half his size. I’m still not planning on checking out the best of Hoshitango, but now and then, in this particular place, you’ll get a touch of magic from him, and that’s more than enough for me.
Mei Suruga & Sayaka vs Mochi Miyagi & Miya Yotsuba, ChocoPro #330 (15/9/23), Gatoh Move
Mei Suruga has a lot of people fooled. Those who don’t pay attention are under the illusion that she is some beloved babyface, singing songs about apples and bringing joy to the world. The truth is much darker. She’s an evil menace, happy to bully and torment anyone who gets in her way. It’s a side of her that, much like her trainer, Emi Sakura, gets particularly bad when she’s in the ring with rookies she brought into this world. It’s something poor Miya Yotsuba has discovered many times over, but it must have been particularly galling to spend the 1st anniversary of her debut getting tormented by the person who prepared her for it.
To be fair to Mei, she’s done an impressive job with Miya. She’s only a year into her career, but Yotsuba doesn’t feel like a rookie. Sure, there haven’t been many wins in that time, but how she holds herself and Gatoh Move’s faith in her ability speaks to someone who is strides ahead of where you might expect. Miya’s perhaps not quite the prodigy her trainer was, but that’s a high bar to clear. Plus, as this match proved, she’s already capable of anchoring a main event, weathering a beat-down from Sayaka and Mei before defiantly coming back into the action. Mochi was always there to step in, but this was the Miya show.
That made it all the more fitting that she added a win to the column, pinning Sayaka after a Miya Hammer for what has to go down as a massive upset. It’s further proof of what I was saying, though. While she might have a wee shit for a trainer, she’s on the right path, proving not only to be talented but to have an innate likeability that means if she ever does follow in Suruga’s footsteps, people will probably think she’s a babyface too. Maybe then, she’ll get to train the next Miya and be a prick to them. However, in the here and now, Yotsuba has to take her licks, binding her time and waiting for the moment when the tables will turn. The way things are going, it might be sooner rather than later.
Nonoka Seto vs Masahiro Takanashi, ChocoPro #331 (17/9/23), Gatoh Move
I don’t know how it’s taken this long for a janken game to make its way onto one of these lists, but it was always going to happen eventually. What a place to start, too! With the Setup 24/7 title on the line, Nonoka Seto, who, as Mei pointed out earlier in the show, is 0.2 wrestling years old and hasn’t pinned anyone yet, won her first title.
What made this special was that it was a genuine shock. Sure, wrestlers will always sell winning a belt, but 99% of the time, they know what’s coming. Here, with the title changing hands on a shoot janken tournament, Nonoka looked as shocked as anyone that she was somehow ending the night as a champion. Even more endearingly, she spent the rest of the show practically cuddling her new title, clearly delighted to have won it.
And what could be better than that? A young wrestler who has followed her sister into this world was handed a moment of pure joy because she won an inherently silly title. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t mean a whole lot, and I’m sure she’ll drop it to someone sooner rather than later, but it left Nonoka grinning from ear to ear, and that’s so much more important than all the other nonsense. It was a moment of pure joy in a dark, cynical world, and while I wasn’t smiling quite as much as her, it was pretty close.