Flupke’s Month in Wrestling: August 2022 (Part One)
ActWres girl'Z - Ice Ribbon - Marvelous - OZ Academy
Front Matter
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写真家さん、ここにイメージが写すことが許可しなければ聞いて下さって私は大至急除きます (ツイターの @oystersearrings です)。ありがとうございます！
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ActWres girl'Z
Miku Aono & Mari vs. Kouki & Natsuki
12.08 / Korakuen Hall
There isn’t a lot I can add to Penguin's analysis of this match, but it’s still worthwhile to note that August really has been a great month for seeing senpai-kōhai battles from the point of view of the senior party. Yuka Sakazaki vs Miu Watanabe (which I reviewed in a Tokyo Princess Cup special, here) properly re-wired my brain in allowing me to see what kind of stakes and emotional resonance a victory over the up-and-coming next generation might have for a wrestler who's already been on top, and there’s a lot to say about this first Korakuen Hall main event of the new, Fuka-led ActWres girl'Z era when viewing the match through that same lens. As Penguin puts it, the pressure isn’t just heaped on the less experienced talent in the ring here - Aono and Mari have ‘stayed, and sacrificed the world that they had in front of them to be the rocks that ActWres could anchor itself to’, meaning that ‘They HAVE to pull something great out of Kouki and Natsuki […] Because if they cant, then all their sacrifices were for nothing’.
You might add to that that Aono and Mari feel a great deal of pressure to win here too Kouki and Natsuki are undeniably exciting prospects, and this is a great watch just to see what they bring to the party. But, even more than with Yuka in the Tokyo Princess Cup, it bears thinking about just how recent a thing this being-on-top-of-her-home-promotion lark is for the likes of Aono. The frustration that a rookie she’s helped to blood in might immediately usurp her and take her place at the top is etched all over Miku's face during the finishing stretch here, where she tries over and over and over again to put Kouki down, and barely manages it. But manage it she does, and if anything that degree of struggle elevates her claim to being the leading light of the ptomotion. It’s a very strong founding bit of narrative tension for a revamped promotion that, under Fuka’s tutelage, and with the help of a whole raft of charismatic newbies and returnees like Natsumi Sumikawa (who beat Misa Matsui in another mini-referendum on the company’s future here), really ought to be on its way to developing a top-shelf in-ring offer within the next year or two.
Ice Ribbon
Asahi vs. Maika Ozaki
31.07 / Korakuen Hall
It’s slightly counter-intuitive, but this ICE x Infinity title number one contendership match did a great job of making the latter-day Ice Ribbon main event scene feel paradoxically harder to crack, for all the space that’s been freed up there. On paper, these two would be right at the top of your list of rightful claimants to the crown, but we’re not dealing with paper anymore - seven out of the last eight individual champions are now either retired, on hiatus or no longer with the company, so it’s no longer a question of if or even when the second row will come to the forefront - Asahi, Maika, Kaho Matsushita, Yuuki Mashiro et al. are top billing now, and they have no choice but to try and stake their claim to the biggest prizes.
You can sense the added pressure this puts on Asahi and Maika from their muted ring entrances. Mashiro vs Anou was not the ICE x Infinity tournament final that many predicted, and it showed that nobody had the right to be in that spot, even if Asahi was Tsukushi's annointed final singles opponent, and Maika is the perennial nearly-woman ready and waiting at any time to take the top spot. Expectations are at odds with recent results: both Maika and Asahi lost to Tsukushi in her final run, failing to edge out a champion who’d already decided to retire from the business. Unlike the match between Ibuki Hoshi and Hikaru Shida that comes after this one, where Ibuki isn't really expected to do more than put on a good performance, there’s almost more to lose here than there is to be won - for the loser, missing out on a title shot for the second time this summer will just heap more pressure on their quest to measure up to fan and peer expectations. The low attendance at this Korakuen show reflects the fact that Ice Ribbon is slap-bang in the middle of a major transition period, but in a way the stakes couldn’t be higher.
This is a fairly slight match, but a serious one. Asahi and Maika both have strengths and they play to them. Asahi finds early on that Maika's power advantages neutralises a lot of her techniques (she can’t manage to get Maika over for that headlock takedown), and later on Maika finds that Asahi's resilience and fighting spirit means that even big hits won’t keep her down. Asahi is very good at popping back up from things that rightfully should have flattened her, and she shows some freakish strength to land a couple of big Northern Lights Suplexes that keep her in with a fighting chance, but in the end, as we’ve already seen in that Yokohama Budokan main event, she’s not quite quick and smart and intense enough on the transitions to seal the deal, and she has no answer for Maika's Muscle Buster-Rock Drop combo. She does manage to get off a picture perfect joshi bridge just before the end, though. That move, which always gets a pop because it’s a convulsive expression of a wrestler who’s going down but not without a fight, felt well-placed here.
Elsewhere on this card…TJPW probably took the award for best use of a foreign import this summer in the form of Max the Impaler, but Kaho Matsushita & Hikari Shimizu vs. Dalys la caribeña & Stephanie Vaquer offered something almost as good. At seven-and-a-half minutes, this was only a little more than a squash, but the intensity that Dalys brought to proceedings (projecting to the few hundred fans gathered here like she was trying to reach row Z of Arena Mexico) gave Kaho and Hikari a chance to fight back with real urgency and intent, and the match didn’t hang around for too long before it became quite an exhilarating sprint, full of danger and feeling. Accept that Dalys and Vaquer aren’t here to lose to emerging talent, and this is an unexpected little gem.
Marvelous
Mio Momono, Ayame Sasamura & Kyuusei Ninja Ranmaru vs. Tomoko Watanabe, Yuu & Hibiscus Mii
08.08 / Korakuen Hall
There were strong, presumably intentional echoes of the GAEAISM main event in the way this shaped up - except that instead of a prestigious cross-promotional showdown with months of build and everything on the line, this match started out firmly in the mould of the holiday camp mixed tag. As Mii and Ranmaru’s patented nonsense gave way to a more serious two-on-two affair following their respective eliminations, the focus shifted to Mio, and how she’s hit the ground running on her return from injury. Mio’s career is defined as much by its stop-start nature as by anything else at this point, but each time she’s come back it’s been as a full version of herself.
The stakes aren’t as high here as they were at Ota Ward last June, but it’s the same Mio we’re presented with. Once she hits her stride in the finishing stretch against Tomoko, it’s almost scary how dominant she is - not in terms of power, or monopolising the offence, but in terms of seizing the initiative, showing limitless self-belief and will to win. Every phase of Mio's career has seen her hit new heights and there’s nothing about this essentially quite throwaway match that suggests that trend is about to reverse - after all, it was throwaway tags that first made me fall in love with her tenacious and inspiring in-ring work, long before there was anything as real as company pride on the line.
Also on this show…I had no idea it was a makeshift replacement for an inter-generational tag match that was also supposed to involve Chigusa Nagayo and Yumiko Hotta, because the singles match between Riko Kawahata vs. Maria ebbed and flowed beautifully over its tight eight minute run-time, with Riko looking comfortable and confident throughout the early going and Maria just springing traps at the right time to stay in and eventually win convincingly. The handshake at the end painted a picture of two fellow-travellers pushing each other in the name of friendly mutual improvement, but there was a vein to this which called back to GAEISM, if not as obviously as the show opener did - these are two trainees of two AJW dojo veterans after all, so some scrap of wrestling ideology was always going to be on the line, even if the elders weren’t present to make that conflict official.
OZ Academy
Beast Friend (Hiroyo Matsumoto & Kaori Yoneyama) vs. MomoRingo (Mei Suruga & Momoka Hanazono)
22.08 / Korakuen Hall
Reading back throuh this year’s newsletters the other day, one thing that jumped out to me was just what a big theme Momoka has been this year. Mei Suruga is having a Wrestler Of The Year kind of year, and Suzu Suzuki is never very far from my attention, but Momoka is probably third only to these two in terms of individual wrestlers who’ve rewired my brain a little every time I’ve seen them perform. At no point this year however have aI given even a passing thought to Momoka’s win-loss record, which is why I was surprised here by how emotional it all got when she picked up the win for her team, reversing a classic Yoneyama roll-up into a technically immaculate clutch pin of her own.
Officially, Momoka now holds victories in OZ Academy over Mayumi Ozaki, Rina Yamashita, Kaori Yoneyama and Hiroyo Matsumoto. Wins and losses aren’t everything, especially with a wrestler like Momoka, who excels at opening cards and who is effortlessly entertaining no matter what role she’s given on a show, but - given Ozaki’s usually slow-and-steady approach to promoting the next generation - they’re not meaningless either. The closest comparison I can find for this match would be the excellent TJPW tag title match between Magical Sugar Rabbits and Daisy Monkey back in April, except here the veteran team were defeated fair-and-square by the zippy young upstarts. It goes without saying for Mei (though if you want lots and lots of words about it, read on), but Momoka is really, really good - she’s not just a natural clown with a great sense of physical comic timing, but she’s a really quick and technically sound wrestler too, and although I don’t really need her to kick on and win more matches and accolades in order to keep enjoying her work, I do wonder if this could be the beginning of something beautiful.