Flupke's Month in Wrestling: May 2023
DDT - Eurovision Song Contest - Marvelous - Sareee Produce - Tokyo Joshi Pro - WWE
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 @FlupkeDiFlupke です)。ありがとうございます！
The Michelin Guide Star System
One star - Very good
cookingpro wrestling in its category.Two stars - Excellent
cookingpro wrestling, worth a detour.Three stars - Exceptional
cuisinepro wrestling, worthy of a special journey.
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ActWres girl’Z
Naho Yamada vs. Kyoka Iwai
06.05 / Osaka 176BOX
Kyoka Iwai is a taciturn tomboy punk who wants to be a battle-hardened Ice Queen but isn't quite there yet. It's a wonderful character beat for a performer who's only just over a year into her wrestling-not-wrestling career (although she did star as Sky Rex's Mira vs the artist now known as Maya Fukuda in an ARG match I tipped as an end of year honourable mention back in 2021), and it was given full focus here, with Naho Yamada holding her own as the babyface foil. Everything about Kyoka suggests an unshowy, unflappable presence that deals out damage callously and quietly, and there's plenty of pathos in the howls of struggle and frustration she lets out as she finds herself slipping short of her own self-image. I've rarely found myself invested in personal development narratives for natural heels (Kagetsu-Hana-Tam-Kris-era Oedo Tai, whose iconic theme Kyoka seems to have stolen, is the only precedent that comes to mind), but Kyoka is my girl, and I want her to find her evil powers and reign terribly over the AWG roster for many years to come.
Zooming out slightly, this was a match which showed ambition in places (Naho's bridging Figure Four felt like a powerful and dazzling move for a rookie), and skill and care when it came to executing the fundamentals (as in this exchange, whose appeal I can’t quite put my finger on - is it the slight asymmetry which makes it feel more like a real sporting contest than most generic feeling-out sequences? Is the novelty of Naho using the momentum from a Snapmare to spring up into a dropkick?). This match stands out for the same reason that Arisu Endo vs Moka Miyamoto stood out in February: it's concise and thoughtful, and it's clear that both wrestlers are pushing themselves to the limit of their skill-set, and that the stakes are scaled down but still full of meaning for the level these two are at. It’s a match we'll hopefully look back on when Naho and Kyoka are mortal rivals at the top of their game, and find that it still holds up.
Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆
DDT
Chiitan, Toru Owashi & Akito vs. Chris Brookes, Masahiro Takanashi & Antonio Honda
03.05 / Yokohama Budokan
Chiitan and pro wrestling belong together - so much so that, like Maki Itoh before them, the former self-declared unofficial representative of the city of Susaki did actually appear in a wrestling ring prior to their official debut, interrupting a match between Miyu Yamashita and Itoh herself at Japan Weekend in Madrid a few years back. So I’m glad that when it did finally come time for an official debut, DDT managed to wrangle a proper storyline for it. It’s not quite Tsukasa Fujimoto vs Tin Tin, but that angle was a mighty high bar for all future mascot-based shenanigans matches to clear: here, the central conflict is between Chiitan and Brookes, who claims in the opening promo to have hated all mascots ever since he was seven years old at Disneyland Paris and saw that Mickey Mouse was just a middle-aged French man smoking a cigarette. I won’t spoil the match itself, because it has some twists and turns which are best appreciated in the moment, but what I will say is that this match brilliantly fulfilled DDT’s original brief of presenting a hall-of-mirrors homage to WWE-style Sports Entertainment, and was only mildly upstaged by the Sports Entertainment masterpiece pulled off by the WWE itself three days later (for more on that, see below).
Eurovision Song Contest
Käärijä vs. Loreen
13.05 / M&S Bank Arena, Liverpool
The day after the dust had settled on the 2023 Eurovision Grand Final, I learned of a conspiracy theory doing the rounds, to the effect that Sweden had bought off the national juries in order to ensure that the 50th anniversary of ABBA’s career-launching Eurovision victory would take place on home turf. I don’t think you need to go as far as that to recognise that there was something slightly less-than-romantic about Sweden’s victory here. Sweden didn’t need to pay anyone any kickbacks: all they had to do was send their slickest, most Eurovision-ready act, an act they knew was built for victory because she’d won it once before. Send her with a song and a performance that ticked all the same boxes as the one she previously won with, but updated for 2023. The last time they hosted, in 2016, Sweden made a memorable joke out of the idea that one could win the competition by simply smushing together a checklist of winning elements. Here, it felt like they’d actually followed through on that idea in all earnestness.
Which brings me to wrestling. If I were to distill my tastes in wrestling into one like and one dislike it might look like this: I dislike wrestlers who treat the task in front of them as though they were working through a laundry list of elements one might associate with “great matches”. I like wrestlers who let unpredictability come to the fore, who prick through cliche and allow their unique personalities to guide them, even if who they are doesn’t measure up to what we might expect a “great wrestler” to be. Loreen was Giulia here. I’d genuinely rank Euphoria as one of the top three songs I’ve ever heard at Eurovision, but Tattoo lacked the immediacy of that earlier entry, because it felt like we were glimpsing a formula, as opposed to a singular vision. She’s onstage alone, with the same witchy get-up and the same stark lighting, but the whole thing felt phoney and shallow, however catchy the chorus was.
If Loreen was Giulia, then Finland’s Käärijä was Momoka Hanazono. His performance felt like a singular vision, not something put together by some optimising committee. It was weird and manic and self-deprecating, and so funny and in-your-face that it made Loreen’s performance look po-faced and trite by comparison. None of the elements - the headbanging, the lime green PVC sleeves, the shit-eating grins of the backing dancers, the funny little arm-swinging dance moves in the chorus - felt like obvious pieces of the same puzzle, much as Momoka’s bubbles and straight punches to the face don’t. Cha Cha Cha felt as though it was crafted with love and soul, humour and joy, and for no other purpose than to entertain. That’s why everyone in the arena loved it so much, because although all Eurovision entries are essentially asking for our support, this one didn’t give off the impression of being micro-engineered for that purpose. And of course it lost, because art is constantly losing battle after battle in the war against committees. But as long as there’s still Käärijäs and Momoka Hanazonos in this world, that’s alright.
Marvelous
Chikayo Nagashima vs. Mio Momono
03.05 / Korakuen Hall
Bear with me, I’m going to have to go move-by-move with this one.
There’s a shot during the introductions here that brings a tear to my eyes. Mio stands in the corner, visibly breathing heavily, and when the announcer reads out her name you can see fans throwing pink streamers into the ring for her. She’s their hero. That’s when the tears come. But then Nagashima gets more streamers, and you’re reminded that this is the house that GAEA built. Whatever prestige the AAAW Championship has comes more-or-less entirely off the back of its pre-Marvelous history, and the people that made that history are still here, both in the ring and in the crowd. Mio is not assured of this crowd’s undying love.
The crowd quickly becomes a big part of this match. Nagashima is bolshy and headstrong as she walk-and-brawls Mio into their midst, clanging her head off the “WEST” sign. This, as far as she’s concerned, is not Mio’s story, but the story of her own career renaissance, a testament to her longevity. After forcing Mio into a crowd brawl, she forces her to the mat, forces her to escape grinding holds. Mio gets nothing in the first five minutes. When she does finally manage to fight back, it’s with screaming boots to the face, running dropkicks, faceplants to the ring apron. But Nagashima is easily able to use Mio’s own momentum against her, dodging a high spot that Mio takes too long over and nailing a Double Footstomp from the top to the floor. We’re very quickly into high stakes offence, and Mio is having a hard time gaining any sort of control.
Appropriately, it’s during another brawl in the crowd that Mio is finally able to turn the tide. The sight of the fans in Korakuen Hall’s grandstand giving it #limbs as Mio hits a bodyslam to the aisle floor and a diving crossbody from the top of the stairs is as iconic an image as Marvelous could have hoped for from this anniversary show. Nagashima finally has some scratches on her, and Mio’s attempt to stay on top has all the righteous fury of an avenging angel. But she can only keep it up for so long, against this vastly more experienced Late Golden Age version of herself. At the fifteen minute mark, Nagashima hits back with a damaging chinlock and a Spider German from the top, and it becomes clear that this is now a battle between Mio’s superior speed and quickness and Nagashima’s superior ring awareness.
All planning goes out of the window, for Mio at least. All the oxygen is going to her heart and her muscles and there’s none left for her brain. It’s Nagashima that gets the first plausible false finish, after she gets the better of a brutal strike exchange and follows up with a running knee. But Mio keeps going, because there’s no other option. Her career has been derailed too many times already, and she’s not about to let this opporunity slip through her fingers. Nagashima keeps cutting her off, but Mio keeps going, hitting three back-to-back German Suplexes and a Momolatch. Mio keeps going, but then Nagashima cuts her off with a spinning backfist and a stalling Fisherman’s Buster for another near-fall. In real sports, a few minutes can feel like an eternity when the result hangs in the balance, the odds heaving one way and then the other with every tiny shift in play, every possible outcome presenting itself in thick simultaneity. Even on rewatch, knowing the result twice over, the moments following this near-fall feel like they go on forever.
Everything is perfectly poised, neither wrestler is giving an inch. A flash of inspiration allows Mio to hit a JK Bomb. An equal and opposite flash of inspiration allows Nagashima to hit a second Fisherman’s Buster and lock Mio in an arm submission. We’re at the “finisher and rest” stage of the match now but it feels entirely dynamic and entirely justified. They go to the top rope. Mio hits a headbutt, and another JK Bomb, this time an avalanche version. Two. Referee Tommy is losing her mind just as much as anybody else. A Chihiro Hashimoto-esque bridging German and a third JK Bomb are enough for the three. Mio kept going, and kept going long enough to finally fulfil her destiny. It takes time to get to the top, but do it right and your legacy will last ten times longer. This match made me sob the first time I watched it, even though I’d already seen all the pictures of Mio with the title belt, and it made me sob again on rewatch. She’s finally done it. She’s fucking done it, lads. Match of the Year, in a heartbeat.
Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆☆☆
Sareee Produce
Sareee vs. Chihiro Hashimoto
16.05 / Shinjuku FACE
“Playing the Hits” is a pejorative. If you're a performer who's famous and successful enough to have “Hits,” capital H, then the peak of your career is almost definitionally the point at which you were making those hits, launching them on an unsuspecting public. Playing the Hits is what comes after, when the excitement isn't as strong. For the first ten minutes of this return match, Sareee played the hits, against an emblematic opponent from her career-high year of 2019, when she held the Diana and Sendai Girls titles simultaneously and felt like the biggest wrestler in the world. She wore her old gear, she hit all her old signature spots. I was happy for that to be the sort of match this was - a nostalgic reintroduction for a much-missed performer, before she gets down to the real stuff, whatever that might turn out to be.
The second half went in a completely different direction. We'd been watching a slideshow and now we found ourselves in a proper flesh-and-blood live performance. Sareee grabbed Chihiro's arm and dragged her out of the ring, both bodies spilling gracelessly over the ring apron. Chihiro charged Sareee into the first two rows of the stage seats. Sareee dusted herself off and refused a spit bucket. Sareee adapted the old jackknife-pin-into-pop-up-footstomp combo, turning in mid-air to land with all her weight on Chihiro's outstretched arm. By the time we got to the heated finishing stretch, with Suplexes and Uranages being exchanged like there was something real at stake, it felt like we were witnessing a Hit, not just a reprise of one. Nowhere near as big a Hit as their 2019 match, of course, but then very little is.
Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆
Tokyo Joshi Pro
Mahiro Kiryu vs. Gabai-ji chan
01.05 / Shinkiba 1st Ring
Gabai-ji chan tends to have Gabai-ji chan matches. That’s not a problem - just like Momoka, Natsu and Miyacoco he’s such a strong character that it wouldn’t make sense for him to play second fiddle. But this was something more - this was a Gabai-ji chan and Mahiro Kiryu co-production.
Someone on Twitter recently described Mahiro Kiryu’s character as “stressed lady”. It took her a while, but I’m so happy she’s found this niche, which has sneakily turned her into one of TJPW’s most must-watch performers. She’s effectively a sitcom protagonist, playing out a range of unlikely situations. At the Member’s Only show a week before this, she borrowed Neko Haruna’s costume and apologised to the audience for looking so good as a Catgirl. They were embarassed on her behalf, but she owned it, like something out of Broad City. Here, she played the tried-and-tested role of “frazzled mum tasked with co-existing with her outrageous, senile father” to absolute perfection. There really isn’t anyone out there that could better play this role than Kiryu, and there may not be a role out there better suited to making the most out of Gabai-ji chan’s potential as a comic character.
The match was smoothly, thoughtfully paced and plotted. Every gag was given enough time to land without being done to death. There was spontaneity, in the weird, bizarrely funny spot where the two opponents just stared at each other for about ten seconds before the old man put his back out attempting a Powerbomb, and there was character development too: Gabai-ji chan went from frail to hapless to canny to monstruous, and Kiryu’s reactions went through a similar spectrum: at first she was irritated, then horrified when she suspected she might have accidentally choked the old man to death, then flabbergasted when the old devil tossed away his walking stick and began turning on the high-speed energy (that’s a bit that Gabai-ji chan does in every match, but it felt fresh here for having someone like Kiryu to bounce it off). It was a journey inside ten minutes, and it ended with a perfectly pitched punchline which I won’t spoil here. All in all, this was the most Mahiro Kiryu that Mahiro Kiryu has ever been, and that’s a glorious thing. With all sincerity, this deserves to be thought of as this year’s Pom Harajuu vs. Max the Impaler, if not this year’s Hyper Misao vs. Jun Kasai.
Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆
Hikari Noa vs. Sawyer Wreck
01.05 / Shinkiba 1st Ring
Suzu Suzuki’s latest career move is an interesting one, suggesting three things: 1) Suzu and STARDOM want each other, enough to get her out of her deal with Prominence, the company she co-founded less than two years ago; 2) STARDOM do not want to run deathmatches; and 3) Suzu and STARDOM are both happy to consent to a home-promotion-but-not-exclusive contract so that Suzu can do most of her work there without giving up deathmatches. Looking back on joshi in the late ‘10s and early ‘20s, you might say that one of the major running themes has been a preponderance of joshi wrestlers who got into the business off the back of their love of the deathmath genre, and the conflicting reluctance of joshi promoters to commit to promoting deathmatches. It’s given rise to eye-catching sub-deathmatch spectacles like Tam Nakano’s exploding barbed wire bat match, to phenomena like the FantastICE title, which was only a hardcore title half of the time but was really hardcore when it got down to it, and most recently to an entire, wrestler-run splinter promotion which recently ran Korakuen Hall.
And now to this: TJPW’s first official dalliance with the genre after the toe-dipping hardcore match at Inspiration #3 which launched Free WiFi as a tag team. I doubt this match would do a great deal for real deathmatch heads, but it’s a genre of deathmatch which is recognisable from the earlier efforts of Sera and Suzuki: it’s one where you cheer on the under-sized, under-experienced protagonist for finally getting to test themselves in a demanding style that they love. She acquits herself well enough, though the test is less in the ferocity she shows on offence than the resilience she shows when working from beneath. It’s interesting to compare this match, and indeed those early Sera and Suzu hardcore matches, with something like Dump Matsumoto and Chigusa Nagayo’s hair vs hair matches in the mid-80s. There, wounds were wounds, a sign of impending defeat; those capacity crowds screamed in horror to see their hero bloodied and suffering. Here, a torn-up back is a vivid emblem of personal growth, of a dream realised.
There’s less of a sense of jeopardy here than in those matches, but there’s maybe an equal sense of earnestness: when this crowd, which is presumably not representative of the whole Tokyo Joshi crowd, chant Hikari’s name at the end of the match, it feels like the most over she’s been in ages, making up for her having fallen behind Miu and Raku in popularity over the past couple of years. She’s accomplished something difficult and scary, and the crowd get to share in that sense of accomplishment, just as they did when Miu won the International Princess title. The Tokyo Joshi sicko section have their hero, and Suzu’s continuous ascent since leaving Ice Ribbon proves the value of having a niche fanbase behind you, hanging on your every move. The question is whether Tokyo Joshi will now break with form and allow Hikari to keep pushing in this direction, perhaps adopting a similar multi-ring-circus approach to their partner promotion DDT. Whether they do or not, now that Hikari’s had her first proper taste of edgy cult hero status it’s hard to imagine her being content with going back to being a safe, reliable midcard hand.
Miu Watanabe vs. Arisu Endo
06.05 / Korakuen Hall
This had one of those sorts of finishes that usually annoy me, where the challenger and/or kohai is on the front foot down the finishing stretch, only for the champion and/or senpai to pop up, hit a couple of moves and win. But it worked really well here, not only because Arisu was always fighting against the odds and Miu never truly felt down and out, but also because of the specific mechanics or choreography of Miu’s comeback. As the match reaches its climax, Endo is battling to keep Watanabe in the Camel Clutch: presumably she’s studied the way that Rika beat Miu at Grand Princess, and knows how effective a properly cinched-in hold can be when you time it just right. Endo focuses all her effort on keeping Miu in the hold, giving us a beautiful moment where she busts out a wild-looking Waterwheel Drop and imediately goes back to locking it in.
The crowd are clearly very invested in all of this - they’ve seen Miu lose in very similar circumstances only a couple of months ago, and their cheers swell in anticipation of what would easily be the single biggest breakthrough moment of Endo’s career. But the whole time she’s being held immobile, there’s a tension building in Miu’s body which is finally released once she gets the rope break, like a coiled spring bursting free. The Baseball Chop she hits straight after being released is believably powerful enough to stun Endo, and she’s already teased the Teardrop earlier in the match - now she manages to hits it, and picks up the win.
There’s an echo of Mio Momono’s recent match with Chihiro Hashimoto here - as with Mio’s two German Suplexes, it’s the thing that brings Endo closest to victory that in the end sews the seeds of her demise. She’s not at Rika’s level yet, and she couldn’t keep hold, and letting go unleashed a backlash she lacked the strength to deal with. Endo definitely feels on the road somewhere - a run with the International Princess title, maybe - but first up I’m expecting lots more of this: her in-ring game improving almost exponentially with each fresh challenge, only to fall repeatedly short because the key to actually winning big matches doesn’t belong to her yet. Her reputation going up and up and up, but held back by the sluice gate of seniority, until it’s time for everything to burst out in one major performance, like Miu escaping a Camel Clutch and hitting a Baseball Chop that would have hopitalised the majority of us.
WWE
Bad Bunny vs. Damian Priest
06.05 / Coliseo de Puerto Rico José Miguel Agrelot
I watched none of Wrestlemania this year, so this will have to do as my one annual slice of mainstream North American wrestling, and I don’t think I could have picked a better match to sample. There was, as you’d expect, a large amount of gaga, spectacle and razzmatazz here. There was a section of the match between the second and third acts which had no fewer than three surprise run-ins with full music and titantron (and two without). Every Latino act on the WWE’s alumi page was presumably contacted and asked if they’d like to appear in this mid-match reunion party. And I’m not even sure if the pops for Savio Vega and Carlito came close to beating the noise that greeted Bad Bunny himself received when he walked out and revealed a Raven-esque shopping trolley full of plunder. Booking the world’s current most popular recording artist, a dedicated WWE nut, in a well-built match in front of a hometown crowd that rarely gets to see live WWE events, in one of the most significant territories in the history of professional wrestling, feels like a pretty safe formula for creating a memorable atmosphere.
With all that in mind, maybe the most impressive thing about this match is how well structured, paced and acted it was - much, much better than it needed to be. Bunny is an absolute phenom, bumping with reckless abandon and executing all his own offence perfectly well, but I came away from this with a real respect and appreciation for Priest too. The way he sold the effects of Bunny’s Rika Tatsumi-esque limbwork felt like a necessary step in getting to the result we eventually did get to (spoiler alert: Bunny wins!), but there was nothing perfunctory or functional about Priest’s selling: it was a properly compelling performance, a convincing, gripping portrayal of a bully who gets (almost literally) cut down to size and has to deal with the consequences, both moral and physical. You’d have had the insanely hot crowd reactions with or without this layering of little details, and the face-heel dynamic evidently worked perfectly well at a more instinctive, crowd-pleasing level too, but for me, sat in my living room in Manchester watching this on a laptop, it was the economy and emotion of Priest’s performance that pushed this into the realms of the unforgettable.
I decided before this match even ended that I was going to give it two Michelin Stars, which pushes it up into Match Of The Year territory. The last men’s match I felt this strongly about was Go Shiozaki vs. Kazuyuki Fujita back in the early days of the Pandemic, but there isn’t a doubt in my mind that this deserves to be thought of in the same breath. This felt like a properly historic event, the kind WWE like to claim they’re always making but very rarely are, and a 10/10 execution of their own Sports Entertainment concept. At a certain point in the match, commentary pushed the line that, as a result of Bunny’s immense fame, more people from outside the wrestling bubble would be tuning in for this match than at any point in the WWE’s recent history. Even without all the additional bells and whistles, the shenanigans and the nostalgia pops, Bunny and Priest did wrestling proud.
Michelin Guide Star Rating: ☆☆