Flupke's Month in Wrestling: September 2022

Gatoh Move - Ice Ribbon - Just Tap Out - STARDOM

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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Gatoh Move

Mei Suruga vs. Miya (5 Minute Exhibition Match)

28.08 / Ichigaya Chocolate Square

This was a very special match, though not in the way one might have expected. When the Fourth Generation of Gatoh Move rookies had their pre-debut exhibition matches in 2019, we immediately learned a lot about who they were. Lulu Pencil’s 8-0 defeat inside three minutes to Yuna Mizumori was definitely the most evocative of these, and would go on to become an essential foundation stone for her gimmick going forward, but it wasn’t un-typical - Tokiko Kirihara also showed us her technical skills, Sayaka showed us her athleticism, FKA Rin Rin was a fearless brat.

Miya still feels like a relative blank canvas, although she has given us a couple of hooks. In her previous exhibition match she grabbed a sleeper hold after the bell and wouldn’t let go, leaving Mei with a genuine fight on her hands. Here she opens up with with the same gambit, striking a surprising tone of parity from the off. Mei wins this exhibition match by one fall to nil, but the move she wins with - a roll-up described on commentary as a Schoolgirl - belongs among the techniques Mei might reserve for much tougher opponents (and is arguably more than Mei needed to put away Kakeru Sekiguchi in SEAdLINNNG last month). Mei then leaves a single-leg Boston Crab applied after the bell, revenge for the rookie’s earlier transgressions.

Mei gets the last word then. And really, this match is more about Mei than might seem wise, given what this match is trying to achieve (building up Miya in the eyes of the audience, ahead of her debut at Gatoh Move’s tenth anniversary show). Mei is loud and boisterous, and sells Miya’s offence theatrically, and draws attention to herself. But that’s Mei - she’s my undisputed wrestler of the year, and I would go to bat for her being one of the best wrestlers in the world right now by any conceivable metric. She’s an irrepressible source of energy, and she will not recede into the background even in a context like this one. I don’t know if she could even if she tried, and she’s right not to try.

Because if we’ve learned anything from the last couple of months, it’s that senior wrestlers and their characters matter when it comes to the process of turning newer, fresher talent into outright stars. Mei could have sat back and offered Miya a blank canvas to reveal her skills. But that’s not how any of this works. We know that Mei is one of the figures most responsible for training new recruits at Darejo, and her influence will be inexorably stamped on Miya throughout her career, however long it might last, much as Emi Sakura’s influence is felt in just about everything Mei herself does in the ring. If Miya wants to thrive in this environment, she can’t expect anyone to turn down the volume around her, she simply has to shout above it. Based on this showing, she’s well on her way to being able to do that.

Like I said, special match - having the audience back in Ichigaya helps with this, but there was a feeling here that we were a privileged audience getting let in on something very magical happening, as the first avatar of what will hopefully end up a legion of Mei Suruga-era Gatoh Move rookie recruits started to find her voice.

Emi Sakura vs. Miya Yotsuba

15.09 / Shinjuku FACE

Two weeks on from that exhibition match, and it was an interesting decision to have Miya wrestle the Gatoh Move founder in her pro debut, because Emi Sakura (alongside Riho) is one of the few key Gatoh Move figures that Miya has had almost no significant interactions with prior to taking to the big stage. A singles match with Mei or Chie or Sayaka or Yunamon would have been a more classic introduction for the rookie, and you can pretty much feel how a match like that would have gone: Miya would have fought hard but been undone by her relative inexperience, and there’d have been smiles and hugs at the end as the new recruit was officially welcomed to the fold.

What we actually got here was something quite different, something with two arguably contradictory effects. On the one hand, this felt like a huge landmark - here was the first debutant of the post-Sakura generation, not the first wrestler moulded by Mei Suruga's influence maybe, but the first to be shaped without Sakura looming over proceedings. Sakura's first wrestling grandchild, so to speak - her DNA is still there, but this is an early glimpse of a future for Gatoh Move that doesn’t rely heavily on her direct input.

On the other hand, the lack of direct connection between Emi and Miya meant that Emi's actualy performance in this match felt more than a little generic, at least when compared with her key matches during the first year of Choco Pro, where she often found herself acting out intricate narratives, building on and paying off deep lore (viz. the feud with Yunamon, the tag title matches with Best Bros, the Pencil Army saga). The Emi Sakura that returned to Japan for this show reminded me of the one I’ve seen at Pro Wrestling: EVE shows - she’s not a worse wrestler than the Choco Pro version by any stretch, but Choco Pro Emi was constantly adding new wrinkles to her in-ring persona, whereas this one played the hits, trading almost exclusively off her pre-existing reputation.

It makes sense: she’s been away for a while and she’s understandably a little out of the loop. But then in another very real sense she is the loop - even now, Miya’s career couldn’t really begin in earnest without her first going through this rite of passage - and hearing Mei on commentary willing Miya on to victory was all that was needed to convey the psychological stakes from her perspective: if Miya could get something out of this, could come away with head held high, it would vindicate everything that Mei and Co. have done with the promotion since Sakura went Stateside. Sakura didn’t give the rookie an easy ride, but she survived, and she’s a pro now. What emotional depth might have been lacking from Emi’s performance on the day was made up for by this sense of a ritual fulfilled.

Elsewhere on the show…A couple of times over the past few months I’ve found myself wondering aloud about whether Mei Suruga, for all her genius in the particular niche of high-speed, high hi-jinks wrestling she’s made her own, can hack it in what we might risibly refer to as “serious wrestling”. For the main event of this Gatoh Move 10th Anniversary show, she took on Yuna Mizumori in a match that went some way to answering that question. Here was targeted limb-work - Mei giving - and back-work - Mei receiving. Here was apron-side peril. Here was an exchange of big bombs to signal the arrival of the third act. Here was Yunamon unveiling a new key counter and a new potential finisher, and a sequece where both rivals stole signature spots from each other, one after the other.

It didn’t quite connect with me in the way that, say, Mei’s High Speed title match against AZM did, but it was all very accomplished and impassioned and convincing, enough to put to rest any doubts that Mei can do conventional fornaquarters for those fans that need them. Mei can’t go twenty minutes without doing something wildly original, however, and in the end she won with one of the smartest pin reversals I’ve ever seen, grabbing hold of Mizumori’s wrists and crossing them over one another just as Yunamon kicked up out of a sitout pin, then using the momentum and the wrist control to pull Yunamon all the way over onto her shoulders, then bridging up off her own shoulders and pressing all her weight into the crooks of Yunamon’s knees, which at this point were somewhere around her ears. It had all the instinctive skill of an Erling Haaland karate kick, and it took me a good ten watches before I could even figure out what she’d done. See for yourself…

…Lower down the card, the special cross-promotional tag match between Orange Panna Cotta (Chie Koishikawa & Sayaka) and Daisy Monkey (Suzume & Arisu Endo) was a great showcase for all involved: Sayaka and Chie’s early careers took place in a context of relative isolation, both from fans and from the wrestling scene at large, so it was great to see Chie getting loud pops for all her signature spots here, and just as great to see the inexperienced but naturally-gifted Sayaka finding her level against a couple of well-matched contemporaries. Endo has also had a relatively sheltered upbringing in the business since her debut early last year, and we probably have Mei to thank for this rare, quite thrilling opportunity to see her working outside her normal home environment. Thanks Mei, and more please.

Ice Ribbon

Rebel & Enemy (Maya Yukihi & Ram Kaicho) vs. Asahi & Misa Kagura

28.08 / Ryogoku KFC Hall

It's been a lot of things over the years, but Ice Ribbon was always two things to me first and foremost. One, a promotion that was just so easy to watch, where the vibes were always enough to carry you through even a minor show where nothing was really at stake. And two, a niche of the pro wrestling landscape that was thrilling in its obscurity, where deeply left-field storylines seemed to unfurl on a semi-regular basis, and where Anglo translators largely feared to tread. The Tsukka-Andreza-Tin Tin love triangle got the most attention, but who could forget Suzu breaking into the dojo to guerrilla-christen the new ring canvas and leave behind cryptic notes, or Hideki Suzuki turning the Triangle Ribbon belt into a Sumo title? I certainly can’t.

Anyway, at the outset of this show, I had fears for the vibes. You can’t deny the talent of the current Ice Ribbon roster - I’d be willing to bet money that any of Kaho, Asahi, Ibuki or Mashiro would make a splash if Hell ever froze over and they got themselves booked on one of those STARDOM New Blood shows - but the roll-call at the beginning felt a little sad and meager by comparison with what we once had. For me, it was this match that saved the vibes, and it did so by really leaning into that other big strength of Ice Ribbon's that I mentioned in the previous paragraph - I have a very foggy sense of everything that went on here between the four participants, but it ended up leaving a massive smile on my face. Mission accomplished.

In a nutshell, I think that the story here is that Misa wants Ram to be a member of KISSmeT Princess, and Ram sort of led her along at the last Korakuen show, making out that she’d join, but now she’s claiming she’s too busy for it, and that before becoming a princess she wants to become a Ninja. She pretends to throw a bunch of shuriken and Misa sells them like a John Woo Dropkick. It’s daft and possibly entirely ad-lib, but the audience are having a lovely time, and Misa and Ram both lean into it really hard: at another point Misa holds Ram in a leg grapevine and attempts to turn her into a princess via some kind of magic lullaby, to no avail.

For the first half of the match there's a zany, free-wheeling sense of something character-driven and funny taking shape before our eyes, and then before it can get old Yukihi and Asahi take over and have a really lovely little battle of Ice Ribbon legends past and future. I’m back in that happy place, watching larger-than-life buffoons engaged in some sort of inter-personal drama whose internal logic I can’t possibly unpick or predict. Of course, its entirely possible that if you understand every word they’re saying it’s all derivative and hacky, but realistically that’s not who I’m writing this newsletter for, is it?

Just Tap Out

Tomoka Inaba & Aoi vs Maika & MIRAI

12.09 / Yoyogi National Gymnasium #2

The moment this match really started clicking for me was the moment when Inaba and Aoi looked for all the world like they had it won. My mind flashed back to January, at Korakuen Hall, when the pair's superior teamwork allowed them to dispatch senior opponents in the form of Maya Yukihi and Yuu Yamagata. Here, a step up from Korakuen, it looked like history was about to repeat itself, only for Maika to step up and remind everyone, but especially Inaba, that she was the original TAKA-trained-starlet-signed-to-STARDOM, and that she’s still the one to beat when it comes to JTO alumni.

The near 2000-strong crowd, still not over the novelty of being allowed to cheer, were equally molten for both possible outcomes, and neither one really felt like an upset - Inaba and Aoi's teamwork can be strikingly effective for a duo that don’t work together all that regularly, and Maika and MIRAI are on opposite sides of the Great Giulia/Syuri Schism of 2022. But Maika and MIRAI (especially MIRAI, who is one of the best female wrestlers in the world right now without question or reservation) feel like real-life superheros, capable of just flat-out trucking through an opponent as skilled and as motivated as Inaba. Maika was the returning prodigal daughter here, but those lariats MIRAI hit at the close ought to have earned her legions of new fans.

This was a blast, in other words. There was inter- and intra-generational tension, those who leave vs those who stay. There was a sense of lightning in a bottle as we got to see Inaba putting in a huge performance at what feels like a crucial juncture in her career. There was MIRAI doing MIRAI things and once again making me want to shout from the rooftops about what a generational talent she is, which is not something I’ve wanted to do about a wrestler under contract with STARDOM in quite a while. And there was a febrile crowd - easily one of the best of the year, if you also consider the atmosphere they lent to the main event between El Desperado and Jun Kasai - feeling and roaring on every second of it on. One to remember, one to savour.

Marvelous

Mio Momono & Ayame Sasamura vs. Maria & Riko Kawahata

16.09 / Shinkiba 1st Ring

About half way through this match I found myself thinking again about how, while it’s great to have Mio back in action, she still hasn’t been given anything to really get her teeth into, at least not anything with the kind of weight she had to work with last year, when the stakes of the GAEAISM feud allowed her to tap into that side of her persona that, once unleashed, makes her one of the best babyfaces I’ve ever had the pleasure to watch. Then, as the intensity turned up with the match heading to a time limit draw, I found my perspective shifting - just look at the effort Riko and Maria are putting in here; maybe this is less about Mio lacking the material to work with than it is about everyone else having stepped up over the past year, in the space opened up by her injury.

Quite a lot has happened in Marvelous since Mio began her most recent hiatus. Mei Hoshizuki fell off the face of the earth. Mikoto Shindo vanished and then reappeared in WAVE. Takumi Iroha returned and captured the AAAW Championship from Chihiro Hashimoto, avenging the loss at Ota Ward. Rin Kadokura did the same, bringing the AAAW Tag titles into the fold with help from friendly outsider Itsuki Aoki. There was the whole colour-faction thing at the start of the year that made Marvelous shows feel like utterly essential viewing again. Riko became a beloved regular and helped Maria to polish her game both as a team-mate and as a rival. A lot of compelling stuff has happened under Chigusa Nagayo’s watch over the past year that has nothing to do with Mio. And as this match went down to the wire, it felt like Mio’s opponents were flying the flag for the version of Marvelous that’s been honed in her absence.

Mio remains a fan favourite, of course, but Maria and Riko have every right to feel like they’re defending that part of the audience’s collective heart that’s rightfully theirs. A year or two ago, you’d have backed a team led by Mio to absolutely smoke these two, but Mio just spent nine months away from the ring while the world kept turning. Even with backing from a canny operator like Sasamura, she can’t manage to put the pieces together to get the win here. Her intensity is matched by her opponents, and it’s far from clear that she’s the most gifted worker in the ring. The juniors are catching up, and Mio may need to prove herself against a wrestler she helped to train before she can even dream of moving up to challenge Takumi for the top spot in the company. I may be getting ahead of myself, I might be overthinking it, but maybe this is the straw that Mio ends up spinning into gold.

STARDOM

Saya Kamitani vs. Suzu Suzuki

11.09 / Yokohama Budokan

To the extent that I’ve been following it at all, Suzu’s involvement has been my key to this year’s 5 Star Grand Prix. I was pleased that her match with MIRAI main evented the biggest joshi show at Korakuen Hall since the pandemic, because that rivalry feels like the most important thing for me in all of STARDOM right now (of course, there’s also the small matter of Suzu’s upcoming singles match with Giulia to think about, but we’ll get to that next month). But here it was Saya - flopping around like a Magikarp, sustaining a tournament’s worth of damage in the opening few minutes, mostly self-inflicted, then spending the rest of the match desperately trying to fight back from underneath - that really had me spellbound.

Suzu was 0-3 in the tournament coming into this, and her win here really helped to turn things around - one defeat, in another Korakuen main event against Mayu Iwatani, was the outlier in September, coming as it did before six straight tournament victories. Saya has gone the other way - she defeated Iwatani, Hazuki and Saya Iida before this, but has since gone on to draw with MIRAI and lose to Mina Shirakawa and Giulia. And much like intrepid England all-rounder Charlie Dean, she only has herself to blame. Suzu wrong-foots Saya from the off, taking the match to the outside; a match which descends into a brawl early on is clearly going to be one that favours the competitor that just co-founded her own deathmatch promotion.

Saya’s response is frantic and rash - in her first spell on offence, she attempts a swandive crossbody to the outside, slips on the rope, trips over her own feet, and lands on her fucking forehead. Given time to recover, Saya goes again, nailing a delightfully loose hurricanrana from the apron to the floor, and unquestionably inflicting more damage on herself than on her opponent, who’s pretty much fine at this point with being hurled off ladders and dumped into tacks and tables. Just to prove this point, the next big move sees Suzu German Suplexing Saya off the apron and almost winning by count-out.

Structually speaking, I was struck on rewatch by how much Saya dominates the remaining, doomed, seven-or-so minutes. The focus of the match is how she fights back, and there’s some really delightful moments, like the Nagayo-esque spinning heel kick that Suzu sells with a hands-free cartwheel, and the bridge-up that embodies the concept of Fighting Spirit so perfectly that it made the cover of Weekly Pro Wrestling. But she’s always swimming against the tide, struggling to make up the deficit inflicted by those early blows, and Suzu is too hungry not to capitalise - after a few minutes where she looks fairly rocked, Suzu is able to recover in the time it takes Saya to set herself up for yet another high spot, a 450 Splash which she once again fails to land. Tequila Shot, headbutt, Avalanche Dolphin Buster, double bridging German Suplex, good night.

It feels a weird thing to say about a spectacle of recklessness like this, but what I really love about this match is that it has a kind of perfect mathematics to it: Saya drains her energy meter early on trying to do Saya things, and from that point on she’s always at a disadvantage to Suzu, whose accumulated damage never even comes close to equalling the damage Saya sustains in those early apron spots. You understand why Saya attempts the moves she attempts, and their failure is allowed to become part of the story of the match; there’s tension and excitement in Saya’s attempt to fight back to parity, but it’s clear why Suzu is able to win and turn her losing streak around. It’s a match that’s made special and vivid and real by the sloppiness it contains, and by the way both performers commit whole-heartedly to the story that opens up after that initial botch. Here’s hoping their forthcoming White Belt match is even worse.