Flupke's Month in Wrestling: June 2023

ActWres girl'Z - Gatoh Move - Hana Kimura Memorial Produce - Tokyo Joshi Pro

Jun 30, 2023

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.

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ActWres girl’Z

Asahi vs. Misa Matsui

28.05 / Shinkiba 1st Ring

First thing’s first, my love for the AWG undercard has become so total that I was ready to write this show off as a dud off the back of an undercooked first singles performance from Kanamic in the opener and a muted crowd reaction to Asako Mia’s schtick in the match that followed, forgetting that this show also featured two prestige singles matches, one for the title. On top of which, the midcard also brought big emotional breakthrough wins for Sakura Mizushima and Chika Goto, over ACT and Bulldozer Todoroki respectively. But still, that crowd should have shown Asako more love.

You could say that this Teppen supremacy challenge match didn’t quite hit the heights it offered in prospect, but true to form for this promotion (and especially for semi-main-events in this promotion), it was a match which knew what it was. What it was was a scrappy battle between friends and stablemates, one which both parties approached in an atmosphere of mutual respect, but also with a pointed kind of urgency: better to finish the thing quickly and both live to fight another day than to let the thing drag on and risk your health and chemistry as a team.

Two moments defined it. The first was Misa’s crossbody to the outside, which Asahi caught, landing with her back on the mat but her head on the exposed floor beneath. The noise and subsequent reactions from the ring seconds felt very concussion-y, and it’s hard to say whether this was an intentional part of the storytelling or not. Fortunately, Asahi didn’t look too worse for wear as the match went on, but it did set a tone that had Asahi believably fighting from underneath for the rest of the contest, and made Misa’s eventual win more plausible than if this spot hadn’t been in place, so one way or another it was a job well done.

The second defining moment came almost precisely three seconds before Misa’s victory, and was arguably the highlight of the whole match. Asahi and Misa are trading strikes, roll-ups, both going full pelt, both hoping to force the advantage or seize on a momentary slip-up. Misa grabs Asahi by the wrists and drags her down into one of those seated pins where you pull your opponent’s arms out wide and force their shoulders to the mat with the soles of your feet. This is very commonly used as a set-up for a European Clutch and Asahi knows it - she knows that if she kicks her legs upwards too forcefully to break the pin, Misa will be able to go over the top and trap them with her own legs. Asahi tries her best to wriggle out of the cover without kicking out, and when she does kick out it’s with as little upwards swing as possible, but it’s still not enough - Misa has got her stablemate right where she wants her and transitions into the European Clutch for an easy three. The match could have gone either way, but for that early damage and this sudden moment of tactical sharpness. Asahi smiles once it’s over and you know that Teppen will be stronger for it: that drag-out epic can wait for after the honeymoon period is over.

Natsumi Sumikawa, Chika Goto & MARU vs. Kyoka Iwai, Allen & Rensan

24.06 / Shinkiba 1st Ring

Kyoka Iwai lays a steel chair on a prone Rensan, daring Natsumi Sumikawa to drop the double knees she had ready and waiting! Sumikawa hesitates, morally uncertain about dealing such heinous damage to such a fresh-out-of-the-box rookie! She eventually goes for it anyway, and Rensan rolls out of the way! Sumikawa is thrown off her rhythm, and Rensan is filled with confidence, kicking out of a Somato! An assistance spot goes awry, and Rensan rolls up the veteran for the one, two, three! There’s so much to love about the character psychology in this one - the way Rensan rallies from near-death to pick up a shock win for her team in spite of the willingness of her teammates to put her in that near-death situation in the first place, Sumikawa’s palpable frustration at falling so easily for Iwai’s trap. Also, Chika Goto does a Giant Swing which goes round twenty-four times.

Gatoh Move

Mei Suruga vs. Momoka Hanazono

29.05 / Shinjuku FACE

I’m writing this deep in the midst of a dramatic 2023 Ashes series, with England Test Cricket captain Ben Stokes’s record still standing at a very respectable 11 wins from 14 matches, so take what comes next with a pinch of salt. But England’s fortunes in the most long-form version of the sport have seen a massive upswing over the past year off the back of a philosophy known as “Bazball”, named after its originator, head coach Brendon “Baz” McCullum. “Bazball”’s central idea is a deceptively simple one: cricket is a form of entertainment, and should be entertaining.

I say “deceptively”, because cricket is an odd, imbalanced kind of sport. In the test match format, while a bowler-dominated game can be wrapped up inside two days, a batter-dominated game can trundle on for five days and finish without a result. Forcing a result - say, by sacrificing the possibility of a safe second innings lead for the sake of giving yourself more time to bowl out the opposition - is intuitively understood by everyone to be the sort of thing the game needs, but is also potentially suicidal, handing the opposition a much greater opportunity of chasing down the runs they need to win.

It’s a gambit that very few captains would ever attempt, until Stokes did it in Rawalpindi and was proclaimed a genius. He then did a similar thing at the end of the first day of the first Ashes test at Edgbaston, to a decidedly more mixed reception. Cricket is full of very conservative characters who prize grit, patience and proper technique above flair, excitement and mass appeal. The message of Bazball is that the game is better when players forget all this received wisdom and just charge forward, taking risks and being the truest versions of themselves they can be. Don't listen to old crusties who insist there's a right way of doing things; confidence breeds confidence; if you fail at least you fail brightly, and the paying punters are entertained either way.

Still with me? Good. Because Mei and Momoka are Bazball. They do have grit, patience and proper technique, they just don’t feel the need to have that be what you think of when their names come up in conversation. They both cultivated playful, clownish acts from the beginning, not shying away from the prospect of being labelled as “comedy wrestlers”, but even then it was clear from very early on how technically sound they were. Here I’m thinking more of Mei, whose early matches showed a prodigous grasp of the kind of precision you need to make wrestling work in the close-up confines of Ichigaya Chocolate Square, but it’s true of Momoka too - it didn’t take many appearances in OZ Academy openers for it to become clear she belonged there, alongside the likes of AKINO and Sonoko Kato. It’s the argument about deathmatch wrestlers all over again: Mei and Momoka became clowns because they wanted to be clowns, and they knew they could do a damn good job of it, not because they lacked the skill to work holds.

This match, booked to mark Mei’s half-decade anniversary (Momoka’s is in October), is a dramatic exploration of all the above. It starts off silly, silly in a way that only these two could be, especially when together. Lots of bubbles, lots of running around, lots of chaos. There’s a feeling of co-operation tempered by one of one-upmanship. They both want this match to be a zany spectacle, and are willing to give each other room and license to do their thing, but they also both want to be the most zany, and to come out on top of all these silly exchanges. The silliness would be enough to piss off plenty of wrestling fans, but you can’t ignore this streak of competitiveness holding the whole show together.

That competitiveness becomes a lot more pronounced in the second half. At one point, Momoka decides to mimic Mei’s signature springboard armdrag, slips on the middle rope, and then gets the audience to chant “one more time!” for her. The whole match is made to slow to a crawl as Momoka gingerly ascends to the middle rope on the opposite side of the ring. Mei has had enough by this point. It’s one thing to steal her move, it’s quite another to make it look this crappy. Mei doesn’t wait for Momoka, and initiates a slick, high-speed springboard armdrag sequence of her own, taking Momoka to the mat and working on both her arms before going to the ropes herself and landing with all her weight on the outstretched crease of Momoka’s elbow. It’s a definite escalation, but everyone knows there’s a fine line between playfulness and cruelty.

The war that follows is what shows us that neither Mei nor Momoka are using their respective gimmicks to cover up for any kind of shortfall: if the motivation is there for them to have a hard-hitting and technically-demanding puroresu match, then they’re more than capable of following through with it. Momoka is woken up by Mei’s targeted violence and retaliates, actually gaining the upper hand for a significant chunk. Mei is even more pissed off now, and we get that rarest of things - a strike exchange that doesn’t feel like filler. Mei and Momoka hit each other really, really hard. It’s as much a battle of one-upmanship as the rolling cradle-with-bubble gun spot was earlier in the match, it’s just more desperate, shorn of creativity, a full-blown four-letter word as opposed to an innuendo. There are submission sequences here that would not look out of place in Okada vs Danielson, because Mei and Momoka can do that. And then Mei, fighting and clawing from underneath, puts Momoka away with a virtuosic clutch pin that I’ve only seen her bust out once before, in Yuna Mizumori’s graduation match.

A match like last month’s AAAW title decider between Mio Momono and Chikayo Nagashima is very simple and elemental. A match like the Mahiro Kiryu one reviewed below is very complex and innovative. Both are great in their own way, and this match, which is also great, represents a kind of middle ground between those two ends of the spectrum. What Mei and Momoka do here is to start with something very idiosyncratic and full of colour and character, and to work towards an increasingly universal image of struggle, pain and effort. We see how the two of them go from friends gleefully mucking about to proud rivals locked in a life-or-death contest, we see the joins and the emotional escalation, and we see how the pride was always there in the mucking-about to begin with. Long live the ones who get told that there’s a silly way of doing things and a proper way of doing things, and dedicate themselves to scrubbing out the lines between the two.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆☆

Hana Kimura Memorial Produce

“Kyuusei Hana Kimura” (Sakura Hirota) vs. Minoru Suzuki

23.05 / Korakuen Hall

The first time Sakura Hirota dressed as Hana Kimura at one of these memorial shows it felt like bad taste, until you allowed yourself to reflect on the fact that this is probably the most profound way for Hirota to pay tribute to somebody she admires, especially now that her impersonations aren’t ten-a-penny like they were back in the GAEA days. This year, Hirota and Kyoko Kimura ran with the cosplay gimmick and did something more long-form with it.

This was actually quite a riveting match from a psychological perspective, because of the inherent danger involved if Suzuki decided at any point to stop toying with Hirota and take the match seriously, and also because they somehow succeeded in creating a few moments close to the end where it looked like Hirota might have him, only to tap out before The Murder Grandpa could deliver his Gotch-Style Piledriver. We went from cowardice - Hirota trying to escape the ring after the identity of her mystery opponent was revealed - through courage - the spot where Hirota dares to ascend to the top rope and hit a Hana-style dropkick, though not without a long wobble on the turnbuckle first - and canniness - Hirota finding the holds she needed to immobilise Suzuki on the mat - before circling back to cowardice again.

What made this a special match, and an excellent tribute, is the way in which it plays off Hana’s own in-ring confrontations with Suzuki at her mother’s retirement show, where Hana - less than a year into her career at this point - stood up to the brute at every chance she got. Hirota was handed the honour of cosplaying Hana at the big Hana Memorial Show, and Kyoko called her bluff - if you’re going to dress as Hana, you need to show me that you can match her heart and soul too. The fact that Hirota tries her best to do this is touching, and the fact that she ultimately fails is touching too, bringing Hana’s spirit back into the room, if only way of contrast.

Sareee & Aja Kong vs. Mio Momono & Mika Iwata

23.05 / Korakuen Hall

There’s a moment in this main event where Iwata is just about holding her own against Sareee, and Mio bustles in, triggering a double dropkick and then running over to the corner in an attempt to hold back Aja Kong, while Iwata goes for the fall. Naturally, Aja simply catches Mio, hoists her in the air, and throws her into Iwata to break up the pin. But this one simple moment is the most resonant moment of the match for me, because it says a lot about where Mio and Iwata are in their respective developments as wrestlers. They came through at the same time, and competed in the same Sendai Girls rookie tournament in 2017 - as, crucially, did Hana. Iwata has always been a fierce, fucked off, never-say-die kind of wrestler in her own way, but here it’s AAAW Champion Mio that tries to show her how you really do it: there’s no sense fighting inside yourself; you always have to be doing nothing short of attempting the impossible if you want to put the pressure onto fighters of the calibre of Aja Kong and Sareee (this, too, is Bazball). Mio knows this fact because she’s completed her journey already - the fact that Iwata still isn’t there yet could be read as a failing on her part or on the part of the Sendai Girls booking committee, but it could also be read as still just about a tantalising prospect.

Tokyo Joshi Pro

Mahiro Kiryu & Yuki Aino vs. Rika Tatsumi & Arisu Endo

25.05 / Kitazawa Town Hall

The first thing to say about this match is that your enjoyment of it may hinge on a certain amount of faith. I’ve read English-language summaries that gave me the gist of what was being said, and I’ve seen it with my own eyes and confired certain things using the relatively small amount of Japanese vocabulary I understand, and I believe this match is everything it claims to be.

The second thing to say about this match is that it is a monumental creative undertaking.

They say the first novel you write is the work of a lifetime, regardless of how deep into your life you write it. All the ideas you’ve been carrying around with you get emptied out and the next thing you make has to be made from scratch. I don’t know when Hyper Misao will next produce a show like this one but it’s clearly taken her her whole career to get to the point where she could conceive of a main event like this.

What’s so remarkable about it in this sense is that Misao is not the protagonist here. Her decision to foreground Mahiro Kiryu makes a deep kind of psychological sense - Kiryu is the Misao we all haven’t learned to appreciate yet. But its also deeply counterintuitive, not least since this is the longest we’ve ever been allowed to linger on Kiryu’s in-ring persona. At some point in this match it struck me that Kiryu was carrying herself differently, at which point I realised it was more a question of exposure and duration than anything else - she’s the sort of character we’re used to seeing disappear pretty quickly once she’s served her useful purpose.

We’ve seen Misao push the envelope before. We’ve seen other wrestlers and producers push the envelope too - DDT is famous for opening the floodgates and allowing a “wrestling match” to be so much more than its dictionary definition. But I’d be hard-pressed to recommend a match which pushes the form of pro wrestling with as much heart and conviction as this. You get the feeling that Misao, who first got into the business via DDT’s Rojo street wrestling sub-brand, wants to fuck around with what’s possibe under the banner of a “wrestling match” precisely in order to drill down into what made her fall in love with wrestling in the first place. This, it turns out, is an origin story she shares with Mahiro. So we get alternate timeline shenanigans, cut-scenes, theatrical freeze-frames, an Up Up Girls number, a memorable NEO Biishiki-gun parody, a bunch of zany interludes like something out of Commedia dell’Arte, an on-stage arrest by the space-time police and an extended heartfelt in-ring dialogue to tie the whole thing together, all with the purpose of delivering a message that out of all the things one might regret in life, loving pro wrestling shouldnt be one of them.

You could write so much about this match, because Misao has put so much thought and feeling and creativity and genuine human warmth into it. Pro wrestling isn’t often thought of as a nuanced, reflective kind of medium but Misao doesn’t accept that, even as she grasps some fundamental truths about wrestling’s limitations. This match isn’t nuanced or reflective in the way that one might expect from arthouse film or literary fiction or experimental visual art; it’s nuanced and reflective in a way that suits pro wrestling to a T, but which few figures in the industry would ever conceive of trying on for size. The only reason I’m not giving it the full three stars is that not every minute of it was completely gripping. But that’s also true of a lot of great art, music, film, literature. Normalcy is a register that can set off the weird stuff to perfection when used right. Mahiro’s epic adventure may have ended with a “normal” match, but it was a normal match with an abnormally profound message behind it.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆☆

Shoko Nakajima vs. YOSHIHIKO

25.05 / Kitazawa Town Hall

Following up on that theme, what was striking about this undercard match from the same Hyper Misao Produce show is how classical Shoko worked to make it. The moments of absurdity - like the moment where she sends YOSHIHIKO flying into the crowd with a headscissors takedown - are few and far between, and get a big crowd reaction as a result. I often find myself praising weird or funny matches for making sense or for being well-constructed, and it might seem odd but really it’s an essential ingredient for making stuff like this work - look at the deadpan way in which the Japanese DDT commentary team typically handle the absurdities unfolding in the ring and compare it to the way that western commentators often deal with in-ring comedy (dismissively, or with loud guffaws, showing their hand), and ask yourself which approach is more successful at making this stuff land.

The more out-there the concept, the more po-faced you may have to be in executing it. Shoko approaches this match by studiously, almost laboriously adopting all the classic tropes of a prestige wrestling match. It’s almost as if she’s proud to be wrestling YOSHIHIKO, he of the legendary Kota Ibushi match, and wants her match to be one of those that people will think of when they summon up the YOSHIHIKO canon. And all that uncanny magic of a human being wrestling a lifeless doll hits twice as hard as it would have had she decided not to take the challenge quite so seriously.

Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆

Arisu Endo vs. Yuki Aino

11.06 / Korakuen Hall

Late June. This has been a catch-up month, and all the wrestling I did watch was bunched up in the first couple of weeks. There’s a lot of other hobbies and projects taking up room in my brain right now and I’m not even sure I like wrestling all that much any more.

Then, finally, I watched this match, and oh boy do I like wrestling. This could rightfully be described as a Big Bomb Fest, which is a description that often has negative connotations for me, but those three words wouldn’t tell the whole story. This is a thrilling match, because it goes above and beyond the kind of match we’d be expecting these two to have, working hard to live up to the Korakuen Hall main event billing. It wasn’t always supposed to be this way: the tag title contest between Magical Sugar Rabbits and Daydream was supposed to go on last, but Yuka Sakazaki got injured, so Endo and Aino and their International Princess no.1 contendership match were asked to step up. It’s real serendipity that they were, because they were able to use the slot to tell a really important story, which actually bears some parallels with some of the good stuff going on in ActWres girlZ right now.

Endo very clearly and vividly represents the new generation rising through the ranks in Tokyo Joshi, as the dominance of the old big three begins to wane. That was the story of her show-opening bout against Suzume at Grand Princess, where she came very close to overtaking her senpai. Aino represents the new as well, but in a very different sort of way - she’s held tag gold and made a number of failed singles titles challenges over the years, and is looking to consolidate herself as a major player in the current almost-but-not-quite-a-power vacuum. There’s a strong echo of Miku Aono vs. Kouki to this, in other words, only this match was better, more desperate and urgent. This match represented a subtly different kind of massive opportunity for Endo and Aino respectively, and they both wrestled it like they were willing to put everything on the line. It was fast and scrappy, full of passion and quick thinking, before Aino’s power advantage eventually won out. Exactly the sort of thing to shock my brain into appreciating this sweating, screaming artform again.