Flupke's Matches of the Year 2021: Honourable Mentions
Action Ring Girl'z - AKINO Produce - Chinampaluchas Ice Ribbon - P's Party - SEAdLINNNG - Tokyo Joshi Pro - WAVE
2021 was a very good year for strong storylines which stretched out over several months and provided big, glorious payoffs in front of rapt crowds. Most of the matches in my top ten, of which I’ll publish the first installment tomorrow, are in this epic mode. But anybody who’s read my writing or listened to my podcasts before will know that I’m ultimately every bit as drawn to minor masterpieces, and matches that make me laugh. This, then, is a carefully-curated selection of ten reviews, pulled in their original form from my monthly newsletter, and describing matches which I can’t quite find room for on a true end-of-year list, but which brightened my day and stuck in my head and made me want to shout from the rooftops.
Yumi Ohka, Kaori Yoneyama & Rin Kadokura vs. Miyuki Takase, Mio Momono & Ayumi Hayashi
01.01 / WAVE / Shinkiba 1st Ring
Bigger, heavier things were to come later in the month but at time of first viewing I found it difficult to imagine there could be any match this year that I’d enjoy more…This was a match with big house show energy, in the best possible sense of that term - here were two fairly thrown-together teams, with nothing really at stake, and freedom to express themselves more or less as they saw fit. When you have those conditions, and six wrestlers who just get it and moreover have great chemistry off the back of having worked in close proximity so much, you end up with something that arguably cuts to the core of what makes pro wrestling an appealing medium of entertainment more than the vast majority of big main event title matches ever will.
03.02 / P’s Party / Warabi Wrestle Butokan
Tournaments are good for any number of things, but one thing I particularly enjoy about them is the way they necessitate gameplans. Mio Momono trying to win every match by countout in the 2018 Catch the WAVE; Natsuko Tora trying to shithouse her way to victory in the 2019 5 Star GP - both approaches made for a very memorable series of matches. As discussed in last month's newsletter, the tight ten-minute time limit of these P's League matches makes it especially important to have your wits about you, and to have a clear vision of how you're going to win, as Itsuki Aoki did elsewhere on this show, putting all her body weight into every cover in a bid to escape another draw.
This is good for everyone, but maybe especially for a wrestler like Madeline, who came to wrestling via a relatively unconventional route and brings with her a pretty unusual skillset, but who, as a rookie, is still clearly trying to develop a well-rounded style that encompasses other influences besides MMA. Here though, circumstances demanded that she play to her main strengths, and she got to lean fully into that MMA influence, with Banny keeping up very creditably. The whole match was worked around a series of keenly-fought ground submissions, with Madeline largely controlling things on the mat and Banny occasionally turning the momentum in her favour with a well-timed kick. This crystal-clear match structure really allowed Madeline's personality to shine through, never more so than when she managed to incorporate Tsukushi's signature "merrily trampling on your back" spot into an otherwise pretty legit looking grappling sequence. Like Aoki, Madeline came out of this first block match with only a draw, so I fully expect this sharpness and urgency and imagination to increase over the coming weeks.
As it happens, the rest of Madeline’s year, especially on P’s Party, was defined by a sense of imagination spinning out of control, with a new costume in seemingly every match and new gimmick ideas thrown in to boot. One of the later highlights of her 2021 was a match against Tsukushi Haruka in July which led me to compare her to German experimental artist Andreas Slominski. And speaking of Tsukushi…
23.02 / Ice Ribbon / Yokohama Radiant Hall
At another point in my fandom, the critical criteria “match that makes me feel like I'm ten years old watching WWF again” got usurped by, or at least made room at the front for, another criteria, “match that makes me feel like I'm checking out joshi for the first time”. There was a time after I’d first started watching joshi wrestling before I knew who everyone was or what the hierarchies were; it was a blessed time because it meant I could watch matches - however I was getting hold of them or being steered to them - and simply let the in-ring storytelling do its work; if a match really grabbed me it wasn't off the back of some prior investment but because the performers in the ring were simply doing a great job of communicating their characters and the stakes of the encounter to anyone that cared to watch. Anything that can put me back in contact with that mindset is a winner in my book.
I have no real way of telling, but I strongly suspect that this is a match that would work well for the kind of newbie that I was back then. Firstly, there's the strongly delineated visual identities at play - Tsukushi all sparkly and pink, Thekla all in black with the gothic face paint; a clear babyface/heel divide which fits with the fact that Tsukushi is the home talent and Thekla the rampaging foreigner. Then there's the action, which feels designed to be eye-catching from the off - the two work in some complex lucha-influenced exchanges early on, which feel choreographed without feeling unnatural, impressive in their intricacy in the way that a particularly good exchange in NXT or Lucha Underground (to spotlight the two promotions I was watching when I first got into joshi) might be.
There's also the way the match builds - if I'm a new fan, there's just enough near falls from the challenger here to make this feel like something worth paying attention to, but not so many as to test the patience of somebody who's watching without prior investment. Finally there's the post-match fallout, where Thekla thanks Tsukushi as a fan and gets rewarded for her efforts when Tsukushi deigns to wear one of Thekla's home-made Tsukushi t-shirts - a simple and funny character twist told in a way that doesn't require an extensive knowledge of either Japanese or prior storylines to raise a smile. This could so easily be somebody's Io Shirai vs Meiko Satomura, in other words, although I worry about the impact of Ice Ribbon's no-GIF policy on that front.
In Spring, before social lives had fully re-opened, the abundance of time for watching wrestling coincided with my discovery of a certain channel on a certain Russian social media platform where the latest shows from Japan are uploaded alongside tons of alluring-looking indie wrestling from Mexico. One night on a group watch I took a chance, and I didn’t regret it…
30.04 / Chinampaluchas / Lago de Xochimilco
I could be wildly misfiring in my read of these guys but one thing discussed in the chat while watching this match was how liberating it must feel not to have to think of a “bump clock” while you’re wrestling. You’re a guy who knows he’s never going to make it to superstar status in the wrestling industry, so you turn up to a makeshift arena in some remote fen on the southern outskirts of the Distrito Federal (the last remaining habitat of the Axolotl!), at a show with maybe a dozen fans in attendance, and you absolutely give it your all, to hell with the risks.
There were probably more death-defying high spots in this than any match I’ve watched in the last twelve months, and the ephemerality of it all - the fading light, the eerie sonic emptiness, the sense of a spectacle on the absolute fringes of officially sanctioned professional wrestling, all added to rather than taking away from the drama. The closing segment, with Kunay stealing both of his opponent’s masks and flinging them away casual as you like only to get his comeuppance in the post-match interview, felt like the kind of short, sharp shock you want when you’re checking out a promotion far from your comfort zone for the first time and have no idea who anybody is or if they’re important - this was a fuckit performance which I fortuitously chanced upon in very fuckit circumstances.
17.06 / Tokyo Joshi Pro / Korakuen Hall
Never a Mirai Maiumi match goes by without me having to take to Twitter to express my disbelief at how good she is. Her portfolio this year is remarkably consistent even by 2021 TJPW standards. This latest mini-masterpiece was a thing of such simple elements, with Yuki being dominated but still managing to find periodic openings for her impressive kicks, and the look of bitter reluctance when she had to tap out to the Miramare was the cherry on the top of a very convincing performance of focus and determination. Mirai herself is still raw enough, and Yuki’s offence dangerous-looking enough, that despite Mirai’s superiority there was never eally a feeling of inevitability to anything that happened here - never that feeling of "and now Mirai does her finishing sequence and wins because she's the senior". If she can keep that energy about her as she ascends the card she’ll be a shoe-in for Wrestler Of The Year-candidate status sooner rather than later.
Yuki Arai ended up winning the Tokyo Sports Rookie award for 2021 while Mirai’s career is still pending at time of writing (though she could well have washed up in Stardom by the time this goes out). That’s not necessarily the way round I expected things to be, but the experience of seeing these two clash at this embryonic stage in their respective careers was so thrilling that I remember exactly where I was when I watched this - sitting in a bush in one of the communal outdoor areas at work, trying to make sure nobody could see that I was watching women’s wrestling on my phone during my lunch break.
25.07 / Action Ring Girl’z / Shinkiba 1st Ring
It’s become a running joke in the circles I move in on Twitter that Action Ring Girl’z isn’t described as wrestling but as “stage performance”, given how, as I mentioned in a previous newsletter, the “Arisa Hoshiki” “match” they uploaded to their YouTube channel a few months back is basically indistinguishable from something that particular “actress” might have done on the midcard of a Stardom B-show back in the day. Further research reveals that there are cerainly elements of ARG’s presentation that are different from your average joshi show - it’s full of dramatic spotlit monologues for one thing - but in terms of not being “wrestling” this match slightly takes the biscuit, or at least has its cake and eats it.
Riz is Misa Matsui, one of AWG’s top prospects for the next few years, and she’s very smooth working as the senior partner here. Yatagarasu is Maya Fukuda, and we’ve already seen from her match in GLEAT how exciting her strikes can be; here she hits more of them and wins the match with them. The whole action is only a little over 5 minutes long, and once it clicks into gear it feels raw and real in the way that Hoshiki’s higher-level bouts were: the sequence at the end where Riz and Yatagarasu exchange running knees and head kick combos reminded me of a very condensed version of Hoshiki’s white belt defence against Konami at Year End Climax 2019.
The braintrust at ARG may never feel the need to extend these contests to “feature length", perhaps seeing them more as fight scenes in an ongoing dialogue-driven narrative than wrestling matches traditionally conceived, but if you know anything about my views on wrestling by now you’ll know that in my eyes shortness is no bad thing. If ARG commits long-term to character narratives over titles and championships then the look and feel and overall meaning of these matches is always going to be a little different from those of the other companies on the scene, but the longer this roster trains the more capable they’re going to get at pressing all the right buttons for whatever length of time the fighting is allowed to fill the frame. That’s certainly the sense I got from this “fight scene”, which would be a shoo-in for a 2021 Best Matches Under 10 Minutes list, if only it were eligible.
I thought long and hard about it and decided to include it in my MOTY round-up regardless. And there’s nothing you can do about it!
Yuuki Mashiro, Thekla & Cherry vs. Rina Yamashita, Ram Kaicho & Maika Ozaki
28.08 / Ice Ribbon / Korakuen Hall
The main story here was the relationship between Yuuki Mashiro and Rina Yamashita, who first crossed paths last October, and whose relationship has become a recurring midcard storyline and a delightfully odd thing in the intervening 11 months. You know you’re in for a good time here from the moment Rina makes her entrance and you see she’s brought along the Osaka Gacha King belt that Mashiro crafted for her out of cardboard, wearing it even more proudly than her actual FantastICE Championship belt. The icing on this particular cake comes after the match is over, when Thekla enters the ring to challenge Rina to a match for her belt and Rina immediately assumes she must be referring to the cardboard one.
Why Rina - the Deathmatch Amazoness who has held titles across joshi and who regularly fights against and alongside some of the leading names in Japanese men’s indie wrestling - has so taken this little weirdo to heart is a properly mysterious character trait, but it’s one that works magnificently. Here the two were given lots of time and space to explore the ins and outs of that dynamic, with very galaxy-brained resuls. Rina is excellent at conveying reluctance to do certain things in the ring, as if the problem with the “broken dump truck” (her previous nickname) is that it doesn’t have working brakes. Nowhere in this match is that better reflected than in Rina’s reaction to the two attempts Mashiro makes to hit her signature top rope crossbody. Despite clearly wanting to do anything but, Rina reverses the first into a Splash Mountain attempt with tragic ease. When Mashiro survives and attempts a second a little later in the match, Rina lets her get away with it this time…There’s some classic rookie stuff later on with Mashiro hitting a flurry of roll-ups and almost having Rina beat with one of them, but it’s all in a distinctly weird key.
It’s difficult to put into words what the overall effect is here, because it’s quite an uncommon one to encounter in a pro wrestling friendship/rivalry storyline. You get the sense of two women who have gravitated together without either of them really understanding how or why. Rina’s clear affection for Mashiro is at odds with her hard-ass persona (which most longer-term Rina Yamashita fans will recognise is kind of a superficial veneer anyway; she’s always had a goofy streak a mile long), and their alliance isn’t likely to take Rina anywhere besides deeper and deeper into the mind-chasms of a guileless eccentric. That guileless eccentric, meanwhile, finds herself weilding clout far beyond her actual status, just like when she managed to get her own theme picked over Tsukka’s when the two teamed together at a dojo show late last year.
You can’t really explain the power that Mashiro wields over her Gacha Kingdom subjects and over the Ice Ribbon roster at large, you just have to enjoy it. There’s hints of other storytelling arcs that I’ve really enjoyed in this - a bit of American Alpha in the odd couple dynamics, and notes of Lulu Pencil in both wrestlers’ ability to take unorthodox character beats and thread them into a smooth match. The idea of a small, timid-looking person controlling a much bigger, tougher-looking person isn’t a radically original storytelling trope, but when you add up all the wrinkles and nuances they’ve thrown into this storyline so far it really feels like a thing of its own, and it’s testament to the ability of both Yamashita and Mashiro (and Akane Fujita, who also has her part to play in this) that they’re able to make it float in a genre that recycles narratives more often than it creates new ones.
Las Fresa de Egoistas (Rico Kaiju & Ayame Sasamura) vs. Yumiko Hotta & Riko Kawahata
22.09 / SEAdLINNNG / Shinkiba 1st Ring
The relationship between Yumiko Hotta and Riko Kawahata is a funny one. They recently made storyline hay out of it over in DDT, with Riko directly petitioning Sanshiro Takagi for a match and Hotta responding with outrage: “what is wrong with joshi wrestlers recently?…I didn’t think you were like the others!” This seems par for the course, really; the idea of Hotta being anything other than grumpy and scolding with her trainees just doesn’t seem right. But however it’s presented, the fact remains that when Hotta left ActWres girl’Z and the sizeable roster she’d helped to build up there, only one member of that roster left with her. That student is now constantly by her side either as a second or a tag partner, and this match rather dramatically revealed the extent to which that presumably fairly intense relationship is helping Kawahata’s career to advance.
She was excellent here: Kawahata has long had a solid grasp of the fundamentals but this felt like a marked step up even from previous career higlights like her singles match with Mei Hoshizuki last February. Her kicks, especially the running high kicks into the corner, had a breathtaking snap and grace to them, and felt like an answer to anything that Maya Fukuda might be in the process of cooking up back at Riko’s old haunt. Her moonsault was always great but the fluency with which she now incorporates it into the rest of her moveset feels like real progress too. She still feels like a rookie nearly three years in, because time moves a little slower under Hotta’s uber-old school training philosophy than it does elsewhere, but Kawahata so dominated her younger namesake in this match that it felt like a point was being made when Kaiju ended up pinning her with a flukey roll-up following some Malfunction At The Junction between teacher and student: here was Beast Kid proving that she can stay the course and take advantage of momentary advantages, even against much stronger opponents. I find it very difficult to predict what Kawahata’s future might hold, but based on the evidence of this match it would be a real shame if we didn’t get to see her spread her wings a bit more from now on.
The difficulty of predicting where Riko might end up blossoming into the star she’s clearly poised to become means that, in a time of never-ending upheaval for the joshi industry, she’s one of the few young stars on the scene that I don’t think I’ve made any wrong predictions about yet. Speaking of which, who would have guessed that shortly after writing the next review, I’d wake up to find that Mei Suruga had upped sticks and moved to America? (in retrospect this match makes perfect sense as a send-off, but still..)
13.10 / SEAdLINNNG / Korakuen Hall
At the first level of the wrestling rabbit hole you reach, you find wrestlers fighting one another over mutual hatred, over the desire to wreak vengeance or humiliation, or, in other contexts, over the simple lure of championship gold. You go down a little further, where the boundaries between a wrestler’s in-ring and IRL personae become more porous, and you find wrestlers fighting each other quite openly in the name of having a good match. That already seems fairly abstract (although it’s true to pro wrestling’s origin in carnival sideshows - why script this shit in the first place if not to guarantee an entertaining spectacle?), but then you go down even further, to the tier where promotions like SEAdLINNNG are found, and you encounter these matches where the competitors aren’t fighting each other over some long-standing personal beef, or in the service of creating a five-star classic, but simply in order to have a nice time.
Baliyan Akki remarked recently that whenever he speaks to Mei Suruga about topics of interest outside of wrestling, he can see her energy levels visibly fading through lack of interest. If Mei is a genius wrestler, it evidently owes a great deal to her obsession with the medium, her full-blooded commitment to training and studying. Here Mei got to stand in the ring alongside one of her idols, in the form of special guest referee Momoe Nakanishi, and it was their mutual love for wrestling in general, and High Speed wrestling in particular, that provided the fuel for this spectacle. Referees getting involved in the match is a common trope in SEAdLINNNG High Speed matches, but whereas the relationship between, say, Taiyo and Tsukushi tends towards mischief and mayhem, there was a slightly different inflection to Mei and Momoe’s interactions here, one of love overspilling its bounds.
There’s nothing nefarious about Mei and Momoe teaming up to hit Mei’s opponents with a Transformer - it just feels like two kindred spirits getting a bit over-excited at this rare chance for in-ring contact. At one point, Mei dances round the ring with Momoe in a moment of pure exuberance, a display of just being happy to be there, not in the sense of being there to make up the numbers, but in a more elemental sense - joy unbounded by any practical or strategic considerations. As the two pose at the end of their little jig, AKARI flies in for a dropkick on Mei and the cameras catch the pratfall perfectly - we wouldn’t have gleaned such a strong feeling for the excess of Mei and Momoe’s in-ring energy without a countervailing reminder of what everyone is ostensibly actually here for.
The Pure-J contingent aren’t fully committed to this spoiling role, though - there’s a moment where LEON gets laid out for an Ice Train, only for Momoe to slip and fall flat on her face, whereupon Mei and AKARI simply shift their attention and keep the Ice Train rolling with Momoe as their new victim. LEON joins in, as you would. Like the best High Speed matches, this was a match about how fun it is to do wild physical feats in the ring, how infectious and all-encompassing that energy can be. It goes without saying that it was intensely enjoyable to watch.
A month or two ago I did a survey of my newsletters this year and found that, if you include her Mei Saint-Michel alter ego in the count, I’ve written about Mei Suruga more than any other wrestler this year. So it feels fitting to throw her another match in this list, and it feels even more fitting to include a match where she teams up with my undisputed new favourite rookie, who first started creeping into my attention back in January, and who has slowly become the most essential name on my catch-up list, the one wrestler whose matches I’ll prioritise above all others.
Sonoko Kato vs. Mei Suruga & Momoka Hanazono
24.10 / AKINO Produce / Shinjuku FACE
Mei's sudden move to the States means this could very well turn out to be a one-off pairing, but it’s one I feel I've been waiting all year to see. Momoka reminds me more of an early Mio Momono than she reminds me of Mei per se, but she’s still very much within that same Chaos Goblin bracket. Here, two great performers of physical comedy got to share ring-space, and not to put too fine a point on it, but it was like getting the chance to see Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin share screen-time.
Besides the sheer giddy accumulated effect of seeing two wrestlers I love interacting for the first time, this was also a nice opportunity to find out precisely how they differ - Momoka, it turns out, is more frenetic, while Mei is more refined; Momoka's movements are clownish and expansive, while Mei's are that bit more economical and calculated. This makes sense - while both have worked intense schedules this year, Momoka has mostly done so in front of potentially-indifferent crowds on the shindies, while Mei has mostly done so in the unique confines of Ichigaya Chocolate Square, as dedicated a space as any in the world of wrestling for perfecting the subtleties of live physical performance.
This was another example of Momoka shining on an OZ Academy-adjacent undercard, but she didn’t steal the show here, not just because this was also another shining example of Mei's seemingly bottomless depths of charisma when wrestling outside her usual comfort zone, but also because Kato brought a lot to the party, raising her intensity levels down the stretch to turn what could easily have been nothing more than a fun anniversary show comedy romp into a tight 15-minute thriller reminiscent of Eccéntric-era GAEA. Big moves, a strong sense of strategy (Kato focusing on Momoka while trying to hit Mei with enough to keep her out of the ring), and a genuine whiff of an upset once the match reached its third act; this ended up being a more gripping battle than it even needed to be, given everything else it already had going for it, and if this is the last Mei Suruga match I cover this year it’ll rank among her best.
See you back here tomorrow for the real thing!
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