Flupke's Month in Wrestling: February 2023

2point5 Joshi Pro - ActWres girl’z - Marvelous - Sendai Girls - STARDOM - Tokyo Joshi Pro

Front Matter

Each image used in this newsletter is linked to the Twitter account responsible for it: simply click through to bring up the original post. If you are a photographer whose image I have used here, and you do not grant me permission to reproduce your work, please let me know (Twitter: @FlupkeDiFlupke) and I will remove it. Thanks!

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 @FlupkeDiFlupke です)。ありがとうございます！

The Michelin Guide Star System

• One star - Very good cooking pro wrestling in its category.

• Two stars - Excellent cooking pro wrestling, worth a detour.

• Three stars - Exceptional cuisine pro wrestling, worthy of a special journey.

(Or, to break it down a little further, three stars means a match which I’d include in a review of the decade at large, two stars means a likely place in my end-of-year top 10, and one star means a match that was notably well executed from start to finish, without necessarily transcending its context.)

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2point5 Joshi Pro

Momoka Hanazono vs. Bambi

06.11 / Osaka Okinawa Hall

It’s nice to know that some relatively uncharted parts of the pro wrestling map still exist. This show unexpectedly turned up in my DMs in the middle of the month, ripped off a DVD (if you’re the person responsible and you’re reading this, thank you, thank you), and such is the local focus of this fledgling promotion’s marketing that I was forced to dig up a three-month old Twitter post and run it through Google Translate in order to get a sense of who everyone on the card was.

Of course, I already knew who some were. I’ve been waiting to watch Poppo the Hermit compete ever since her ring name was first revealed. I was expecting a lot of things from her, but I wasn’t expecting her first act in the ring to be a forearm exchange, or for her to bust out a perfectly competent bridging Fisherman’s Suplex deep into the semi-main event. The third-from-last match, featuring new trainees Chado, Nanami Niko, Riemaru and the excellently-named Flying Penguin, featured very minimal wrestling and very maximal antics, but Poppo’s debut was a surprisingly polished affair, and absolutely the sort of thing that’s going to keep me watching this promotion with interest, assuming my DVD plug stays interested too: Poppo’s in-ring skill-set was already fairly substantial, but she was probably only the third most impressive wrestler on show here, and Haruka Aikawa and Kagero could be sneaky rising stars before we know it.

Despite this being a landmark unveiling for the roster that Momoka and Super Delfin are building in Osaka, however, it was immensely satisfying that Momoka took the Nanae Takahashi route and booked herself as the all-conquering hometown hero in the main event. It’s still early doors, but so far in 2023 Wrestler Of The Year feels like Momoka’s award to lose. I don’t even have the space in this newsletter to deal with her match against AKINO from the 8 January OZ Academy show, so let these two GIFs suffice in demonstrating the kind of form Momoka is in right now. This showcase from late last year was effectively a meatier, less pithy version of the STARDOM match reviewed below, a time-honoured take on the classic big bear vs tiny wasp dynamic, and the first time I’ve ever really seen Momoka carrying the responsibility of a more-or-less serious singles title match.

A beautiful moment came very early on, when Momoka badly lost a setting-the-tone shoving contest against her much larger opponent, and kicked the bottom rope in frustration. Up front, Momoka is all antics, but here was a chance to see the dignity and ambition of the human being beneath the bubbles. Over roughly twenty minutes she endured Bambi’s punishment, eventually fighting back with rapid-fire headbutts and middle-rope dropkicks taken directly from the Mio Momono and Tsukushi Haruka playbooks respectively, and winning with - what else? - a sudden sneak roll-up. Thrilling as it's been to see Momoka being entirely, confidently herself in the massive limelight of a STARDOM arena show, it also felt emotionally vindicating to see her here, bossing her own little corner of the joshi puroresu world, giving her fans the ending they came to see.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆

ActWres girl’Z

Mari vs. Chika Goto

09.01 / Kitazawa Town Hall

What a heartwarming squash match! Goto technically lost this match in twelve seconds, and had to beg Mari to give her another chance, and by rights probably tapped out and was pinned at least one time each before Mari eventually wrapped the thing up, but the result was never what this match was about. Instead, it was about the veteran Mari giving a physically imposing but hapless rookie a chance to find that part of herself that will eventually allow her to become a proper pro wrestler. Mari was under no obligation to give so generously, and when Goto did eventually find her fire the veteran's selling suggested she’d got ever so slightly more than she’d bargained for. And Goto might still be a long way off the finished product, but at least she got to see for herself what kind of fighter she could be once she puts the pieces together. Some people just need a little extra push, and it feels promising (because everything in AWG feels promising right now) that they were able to reflect that nuance in what could have easily been a throwaway opener.

Naru vs. CHIAKI vs. Kira An vs. Kyoka Iwai vs. Marino Saihara vs. Haruka Ishikawa vs. Asako Mia vs. CatMASK Calico vs. Kanamic vs. Koara Fujimoto vs. Rensan vs. Yufa

09.01 / Kitazawa Town Hall

You should watch this battle royal if you think you would enjoy the following: one (exotic plant-themed) rookie opening the contest by theatrically challenging another (squirrel-themed) rookie to a back bump challenge, and then going for the pin the second her opponent is horizontal. Another rookie entering at a moment in the match when everyone was stood around arguing, and trying to dropkick several opponents who are too distracted to notice. Another rookie entering, taking a good full minute to wave to the crowd, and then joining in with someone else's kip-up-stand-off spot before having done a single move. Another, very new rookie entering, running around a lot, getting the fans whipped up with a bit of Butlins-esque crowd-work, then helping to tap out the tallest, strongest entrant in the match in an everyone-grab-a-limb four person submission spot. Two very fast rookies running into each other, and the original exotic plant-themed rookie stealing the win with a Santino Marella-at-the-2011-Royal-Rumble-esque sneak attack. And even if you’re agnostic about all of that, you should watch it anyway, because matches like this are always a great palate cleanser to help refresh your mind and put the bigger stuff in its proper perspective.

Marvelous

Mio Momono vs. Kaoru Ito

12.02 / TKP Garden City Chiba

More than eighteen months after the fact, Mio’s career still feels defined by having come so close at GAEISM to defeating Chihiro Hashimoto for the AAAW Championship (the elimination tag having become a de facto singles title match once DASH and Rin had been eliminated), only to fall at the final hurdle. At time of writing, Ayako Hamada, Sareee and ASUKA are the only wrestlers to defeat Big Hash in a context like this in the past five years, and Mio came within a whisker of peaking at just the right time and adding her name to the list (she’d have got there before ASUKA, too). But every peak needs a valley, and Mio’s post-GAEAISM slump - nine months of which were spent rehabbing yet another big injury - have had me close to thinking the unthinkable: maybe she’s no longer one of the best wrestlers in the world?

This was the first in a five-match trial series for Mio, and it was preceded by a singles match with Tomoko Watanabe which served as a fitting prelude for what we saw here. All throughout this relative fallow period for Mio, there’s been this dangling carrot of a notion that maybe Marvelous are already in the midst of a slow-burn redemption arc for their most charismatic babyface. These two matches turned that notion from a tantalising hypothetical into a reality. Since her return last summer there’s been a lingering feeling that Mio is searching for something to bring her back to the level she was at a year earlier, and against Tomoko she appeared to find it, unleashing a flurry of petulant ultraviolence that called back to the unlimited confidence of her rookie days.

The only problem with fucking around, though, is that sometimes you find out. Tomoko’s response to Mio’s rediscovery of her old self was to put her back in her box, reminding her of the very simple, very brutal fact that one logical consequence of pissing off a much larger, more experienced fighter than yourself is that you get your head smashed into a wall.

It’s equally logical that if you then go on to face that fighter’s tag team partner a couple of weeks later, and that that partner is equally-if-not-more large and experienced, you should probably be prepared not to have everything your own way. Ito is utterly ruthless here, putting Mio through hell while barely breaking a sweat. Mio spends most of the match led on her stomach, crushed under her opponent’s bulk, and you’re left to puzzle over how she ever managed to raise such a fight against Chihiro in the first place. But the raw emotion of her selling is somehow rawer and more emotional than 99% of wrestlers out there. And of course, this is all just build-up to the moment where Mio does manage to turn the tide, stealing a moment of separation when Ito bashes her arm against the ring post, gathering up all her fighting spirit to exploit this tiny gap in her opponent’s armour. For a few minutes, as in the Tomoko match, Mio is thrillingly, substantially back.

But it is a tiny gap, and Ito has spent most of the match doing very little, and when the veteran picks up the win with a disgusting-looking top rope double footstomp, it’s a look of disappointment as much as pain that shows on Mio’s face. She’s still got a mountain to climb if she wants to redeem that loss at GAEAISM, but then wasn’t Mio always more compelling as a striver and a crasher than as a champion anyway? What we saw here was just a glimpse and a glimmer, but it was enough to re-confirm something I’ve known for a very long time: nobody does it like Mio.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆

STARDOM

Naniwa Roulette Match

04.02 / EDION Arena

There was a fair amount of chaff in this one-in-one-out singles match gauntlet (I’m sorry to say but I may have skipped Mai Sakurai vs Mariah May), but this hour of variable quality threw up one moment of wrestling nirvana: Momoka Hanazono vs Natsuko Tora. If I resort to simply describing what happened, it's only because that’s sometimes what the very best matches demand. Momoka enters, and you can tell that the (cheering permitted) crowd isn’t quite sure what to make of her. Within a minute she has them eating out of her hand: she attacks Tora in the corner with her big blue flower, leading Tora to rush over and grab a metal pipe to defend herself. There’s a brief skirmish and then Momoka bonks Tora on the head with her bubble gun, to maybe the biggest pop of the show so far. She steals Tora's pipe and hands her the bubble gun, then gets the crowd to yell “kawaii” at Tora. She swings the pipe at Tora and then Tora smashes the bubble gun over her head, for another big pop.

There’s a bit of back-and-forth, a bit of high speed offence from Momoka, and then she nearly succeeds in eliminating Tora over the top rope. Tora downs Momoka with an elbow to the jaw for another big pop. While Tora poses, Momoka manages to magic up a party popper. Tora tries to steal it off her (they’re both standing on the apron at this point), and Momoka starts screaming “chotto matte!”, then cold-cocks Tora in the face with a closed fist as soon as she gets a split second of opportunity. Momoka tries to suplex Tora off the apron, slips, and is forced to hang to Tora's torso for dear life, eventually managing to pull herself back to apron. Tora hoists her up into a Fireman’s Carry, and Momoka sets the party popper off in her face, causing both of them to spill off the apron and eliminating each other.

That’s the entire match, and it’s as perfectly formed as Saki Kashima vs AZM from last year’s 5 Star Grand Prix or even Max the Impaler vs Pom Harajuku for me, because it sets up a brilliant contrast between two very charismatic wrestlers, and then has literally every single thing that happens in the match play up and play around with that contrast. Momoka is a lawless little imp and Tora is an ungovernable street punk, and their respective brands of skullduggery only succeed in cancelling each other out. The randomness of the encounter worked to its advantage too, as there was no chance to exhaust the comic potential of the pairing in pre-match antics. All the crowd reactions here were amplified by the fact that this was the first STARDOM show since the pandemic where crowd cheering was permitted, but there were moments in this match where everything felt as if it was popping like a peak GAEA-era Sakura Hirota match, and if you know me you know that that’s a very strong recommendation indeed.

MIRAI vs. Chihiro Hashimoto

04.02 / EDION Arena

I wasn’t going to write anything about this match, because it more or less speaks for itself. It’s not as crafty as Hanazono vs Tora, but its strengths lie in its brute simplicity. The effect of watching these two very large, very fast wrestlers run into each other and throw each other round is utterly undeniable. You know what you’re going to get before you press play, but that doesn’t make it any less gripping.

But let’s just take a moment to acknowledge Chihiro Hashimoto, because I feel like I give her relatively short shrift in this newsletter, despite the fact she’s the only wrestler to compete in not one but two of my Matches Of The Year since I started keeping count of such things. She feels broadly underrated, which I think has to do with the fact that her role hasn’t changed in more than five years, but then her role hasn’t changed because she’s so consistent at delivering in big matches. The intensity she brings to the ring time after time can sell a historic main event like the GAEAISM trios tag, but it can also be used like it is here, in a palate-cleansing midcard match designed to showcase a different style of wrestling from everything else on the card, as well as to provide a landmark singles encounter for an up-and-coming talent. Whatever you want doing Big Hash will do it, and she’ll look excellent doing it, and make her opponent look excellent too. If I tend not to think of her in Wrestler Of The Year conversations it's only because she’s always in the conversation; if anything she’s too consistent.

Tokyo Joshi Pro

Miyu Yamashita vs. Raku

30.01 / Akihabara Twin Box

Kyō mo Princess Road arukimasu! TJPW celebrated its 10th anniversary by returning to the place of its origins for a one-off no-fans mat wrestling tournament, and unsurprisingly, in spite of the five minute time limit, two-count rules, janken tie-breakers and general lack of ropes and turnbuckles, the whole thing felt entirely in-canon and in-universe, perfectly of a piece with standard TJPW logic and booking. The significance of that really came into focus here, because the special format of the matches meant that Raku came about as close as she might ever come to defeating the Mega Champ.

Even before the three consecutive drawn rounds of sudden death janken, Raku looked like she had a very real chance of sealing the deal in the closing minute or two of regulation time. Miyu had dodged Raku's attempts to put her to sleep at the start of the match, but Raku had managed to weather the subsequent storm, and it was only a fortuitously-timed bit of in-match announcing from Sayuri Namba that stopped Miyu from going down to Raku's lullaby. Seizing the initiative with sixty seconds left, Raku hit a facebuster and a brain chop and was in the process of climbing up a platform to hit a big aerial move when the time ran out. Miyu was saved by the timekeeper not once but twice then, and you don’t have to have been watching TJPW for long to realise what an exceptional set of circumstances this is; you wouldn’t want a show like this every week, every month or even every year necessarily, but it’s a delight to see how much TJPW are capable of shuffling the deck when they change a few fundamentals but keep everything else rigorously consistent (see also last year's pool wrestling match, where Raku also showed a propensity for jumping off high things).

Moka Miyamoto vs. Arisu Endo

11.02 / Korakuen Hall

Stuart’s review already has this match mostly covered, particularly with regards to its relationship to the show-opening singles bout between Wakana Uehara and HIMAWARI: I can’t put it better than Stuart does himself when he notes that

this a natural sequel to the opener, another battle between peers looking to establish who is higher in the hierarchy. That gave it the same competitive edge, but where Wakana and HIMAWARI are still trying to put all the pieces together, Moka and Arisu are close to having them all in place.

Still, I want to give this match its due consideration in the newsletter, both because it was absolutely excellent, and also because, taken as a package along with that opener, both matches put forward as strong a case for the (also excellent) main event of this Korakuen Hall card in demonstrating that “TJPW is King’s Road” isn’t just some meme we keep harping on in order to annoy recusant STARDOM fans.

I’ll get into more of this below, but one of the reasons that TJPW main events have become so outstanding in recent years is that they keep showing us the progressive in-ring development of the company’s leading lights, patient step by patient step. It took seven years and three Princess of Princess title reigns each for Miyu Yamashita and Yuka Sakazaki before one of their title matches featured a headbutt spot. Increasingly, this is also true of the undercard. HIMAWARI and Uehara pushed each other to their limits, which it turns out are appropriately basic, HIMAWARI tapping out when she couldn’t overpower Uehara’s sleeper hold. Endo and Miyamoto, who are two years further advanced into their careers, also pushed each other to their limits, and everything they did felt two years more developed and more mature than anything we saw in the opener, from the quality of the grappling to the speed of the ropework, from the resilience in the face of advanced offence to the strength and skill with reversals and counter-reversals, to the power on Endo’s Water Wheel Drop. There's a sense of drama and momentum to the way the match escalates that isn't present in the opener, showing how well these two know each other by now, and how capable they are at building on the lessons learned from previous encounters. The emotion on Uehara’s face when she picked up her first career victory was doubled on Endo’s, who’d waited for this for twice as long.

In last month’s newsletter I wrote about the Max Heart tournament quarter-final match in which Endo and Miyamoto faced off alongside their partners Suzume and Juria Nagano, comparing it to the final of the tournament to crown the inaugural Princess Tag Champions back in 2017. In the same way, I think an argument could be made that this match measures up to the main events TJPW was running back in the early days of the Princess of Princess title. In 2023 it reads unmistakably as a midcard affair, a sneaky banger, but I'd be willing to bet that in terms of in-ring action this would shine as brightly as anything TJPW had to offer were you transport it back in time by five or six years. Move-for-move and spot-for-spot this could have been a company-wide match of the year in 2017 or 2018, and if it doesn’t stand out to quite that extent now, it’s only because the high-water mark has risen so much since. Paradoxically, that crystalline fidelity to the very compelling story of TJPW’s ongoing development does make me want to call this one of the best matches of 2023, and the second landmark match in as many months involving these two.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆

Kyoraku Kyomei (Shoko Nakajima & Hyper Misao) vs. 121000000 (Maki Itoh & Miyu Yamashita)

11.02 / Korakuen Hall

I gave the STARDOM main event scene another try while watching that show featuring the Naniwa Roulette - Suzu was in the red belt match, and Momo Watanabe vs Saya Kamitani seemed like a good time - but I’m still no more a fan of it than I was this time two years ago. There’s three main problems (not necessarily shared across both of those matches) that feel pretty fundamental: one, a lack of narrative thread linking one sequence to the next, so that it’s hard to tell “who’s winning”; two, a lack of intermediate gears between “feeling out” and “big bombs”, which gives the matches a predictable and repetitive structure; and three, a tendency for whoever’s winning the match to simply pop up from whatever last put them down when it’s time to mount their comeback, regardless of the magnitude of their opponent’s offence (this was especially egregious in the white belt match). I needed a big TJPW main event to confirm for myself that the Cyber Agent territory is generally smarter and more sophisticated than the Bushiroad territory on all these counts, and as luck would have the Futari wa Princess Max Heart Tournament final was precisely that: a match which demonstrates that the current TJPW main event scene is a cut above when it comes to structure, pacing and nuance.

“Who’s winning?” It was clear that the answer was Kyoraku Kyomei, for most of the match. There’s a couple of moments in the first half which really crystallise this as a theme. Miyu and Itoh break out some double team manoeuvres early on but they’re all sizzle and no steak, to borrow a phrase. There’s a lot of posing and showboating with very little in the way of material reward. A little while later, Misao loses her mask but manages to remain focused on the task at hand, and succeeds in bashing Miyu’s kicking leg hideously against the ring post (a little detail I love - Misao doesn’t then abandon the mask entirely, but recovers it and puts it back on after her work is done; this isn’t Misao saying “I’m going to be a serious wrestler now”; this is Misao showing us that she can be the New Hero Protecting Love and Peace and still perform her in-ring duties effectively in a tournament final). This opportunistic and damaging move from Misao is immediately followed up with a leg submission from Shoko. Ineffective teamwork, effective teamwork.

Appropriately, it’s also a teamwork spot that turns the momentum of the match in 121000000’s favour. This is Itoh’s first main event since the 2021 Princess Cup final, and serves as a reminder of her absolutely undeniable charisma, but the sections where she leads the match one-on-one with Shoko end up in a stalemate. With the damage to Miyu’s leg putting 121000000 broadly on the back foot, the Mega Champ manages to turn the tide using the oldest trick from the Maki Itoh Motivational Manual: she headbutts her partner, unlocking some window in her soul that had previously been shut. Itoh smiles, fires up and headbutts Miyu back, and suddenly everything is different.

After this purposeful bit of mutual self-sabotage, 121000000 are coming out on top in all the double-team face-offs, and Itoh has that little extra edge she needs to tap out Nakajima for the win, which is something we’ve seen her do before in this venue, back when she was competing for the chance to face Miyu for the title at Ota Ward Gymnasium. It seems to give Miyu an extra level of determination too, and she sets up the victory by clinging on to Misao’s wrist after Misao hits the HiPami Returns, surprising Misao and using the second of hesitation time this gives her to hit a match-ending Skull Kick. In 2021, we saw Itoh succeed in finally crossing the finish line without sacrificing any of the unorthodox methods and psychology that make her Maki Itoh; here she manages to drag Miyu to a long-awaited first tournament victory too. Their teamwork dynamic finally clicks when it really matters, in spite of the early indications that they were way off the pace compared to their speedy, industrious opponents. You can argue that the moment which turns the match on its head is silly, because it is, but you can’t argue that it isn’t focused storytelling, and I’d rather that than a random assortment of po-faced big bombs any day.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆

From the Vaults

Meiko Satomura & Tyrannosaurus Okuda vs. Azumi Hyuga & Arisa Nakajima

05.10.2007 / Sendai Girls / Zepp Sendai

I watched this match after asking Twitter for recommendations of joshi wrestlers from before my time that my followers felt I should check out with the same intensity that I reckon everyone should check out Tsukushi Haruka. Azumi Hyuga and Tyrannosaurus Okuda both came up as names and as luck should have it here they were, on opposite side of the rings in the main event of a year two Sendai Girls show. There wasn’t anything about either Hyuga or Okuda (besides her name) that immediatey convinced me I was about to find my new retro-fav here, but as this match built to its climax it became increasingly clear that it would be remiss for me not to recommend it in this newsletter.

This match rules. It has a staggered sense of seniority, which makes for some really meaty dynamics: Hyuga debuted in 1994 and so slightly lords it over Satomura, who started a year later; Nakajima and Okuda both debuted in 2006 but Nakajima is already a JWP Junior Champion here while Okuda is still a dropkicking swimsuit rookie. It’s also beautifully structured match, with a really gripping sense of back-and-forth, but maybe the most remarkable aspect of it is that Satomura goes absolutely beast mode down the finishing stretch, stringing together a run of offence that feels about as unrelenting and devastasting as anything you’ve ever seen in a wrestling ring, and Hyuga still manages to come out on top a minute or two later, and this turnaround is somehow completely convincing. Watch it now, and pass it on.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆