Flupke's Month in Wrestling: Tokyo Princess Cup 9 Special
Otemachi Mitsui Hall - Korakuen Hall - 31/07/22-14/08/22
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The Finals
Yuka Sakazaki vs Suzume
Miyu Yamashita vs Miu Watanabe
13.08 / Korakuen Hall
Yuka Sakazaki vs Miu Watanabe
13.08 + 14.08 / Korakuen Hall
In 2017, I wrote an article about Miyu Yamashita’s feud with Meiko Satomura, called “I Am The Future”.
Miyu Yamashita is no longer the future of Tokyo Joshi Pro. Nor, for that matter, is Yuka Sakazaki. But it’s easy to forget just how recently they were there at the vanguard, given the footing TJPW currently finds itself on.
In Miyu’s showdown with Satomura rested the hope that this weird upstart company might become a genuine contender in the wider world of women’s wrestling, that its top stars might rise up and become more than just novelty acts. From the perspective of 2022, we can say pretty safely that that future has come to pass, in ways that go beyond anything I might have dared predict.
In these finals, I desperately wanted the future to happen again. Tears ran down my cheeks in anticipation of Miu Watanabe toppling all three pillars, one by one. And then, the future fell short, just as it did in August 2017, at this same venue.
But I wanted it. I wanted it so badly. And what is pro wrestling if not the art of making you badly want things that you know could be unromantically, unglamorously arranged at a moment’s notice? These finals were the most artful suspension of wanting I’ve seen in wrestling all year. The final itself, I’m pretty sure, is my Match of the Year at time of writing.
I wanted to see the future that’s been taking shape in Tokyo Joshi for at least the past three years finally emerge into the light. Miu Watanabe wanted so badly to be the one to finally carve in the ceiling that there were tears in her eyes, too. In fact, between the four competitors that took place in tournament matches across these two shows, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. And that’s something that very few fans, new or old, had counted on in the run-up to this weekend - how much Yuka Sakazaki wanted this too.
She’s never won this tournament before, and as much as you could tell in the aftermath of this match that she’s delighted to be pushed so hard by the next generation, there’s zero reason to expect her to give in to the future at this stage of her career. She’s still in her prime, as a worker and as a character, and as much as Miu’s generation offer a promise to continue the work that herself and Miyu have put in over the years, they also offer a threat. The longer the final went on, the more it became an active dialogue - we weren’t just bearing witness to a visceral drama of the underdog spirit here, we were also watching a very subtle performance of the psychology of the gatekeeper. In terms of content and not just outcome, this was The Yuka Final as much as it was The Miu Final; in fact, I can’t remember the last match I saw with such emotional weight, where that weight was so palpably evenly-shared between the two competitors.
Saturday’s main event was a little more about Miu, but only a little. The moment when she rallied every ounce of strength she had left and cathartically started opening up with big two-handed chops was the first moment that wrestling has made me cry all year. And she rode that wave of emotional momentum to the finish, winning the match essentially by refusing to be beaten. Sasha Banks vs Bayley at Takeover: Brooklyn came to mind, which is maybe the highest compliment I can pay.
Just like Sasha there, Miyu wasn’t the focus, but she nevertheless had her own story. The Ace, who was once The Future, finds herself caught between wanting to see the new generation empty themselves in pursuit of the same goal she herself adopted at the outset of her career, and not wanting to be leapfrogged as she, just like Yuka, attempts to win this damned tournament for the first time. She allows Miu room to express herself, but when Miu hits out with all she’s got it awakens that demon in the Mega Champ, and she very nearly reaches her final form, the form that carried her over the line against almost every challenger you can name across her three reigns with the title. Nearly. That tiny gap in her resolution - that’s what Miu exploits, finding an opening in between skull kicks and jumping on the chance just as quickly as Shoko did at Sumo Hall.
On Saturday, for Yuka, that kind of test was still to come. Which isn’t to say Suzume didn’t give her all. Suzume is smart, and she knew what she was up against. She knew that in order to bamboozle Yuka, she’d have to do her best work in the second offensive phase, so to speak. Her strategy down the stretch is to throw some high-speed attack at Yuka, and, once Yuka has invariably caught and blocked it, to immediately follow that up with something else. There’s a great sequence towards the finish where Suzume attempts a Ring-a-Bell, and Yuka catches her and attempts to hoist her up for a vertical suplex. Suzume wriggles out of it, so Yuka pulls her down into a reverse Fireman’s Carry to buy herself a bit more control, only for Suzume to slide down Yuka’s back and pull off a crucifix pin that brings her her closest near-fall of the match.
It’s a sort of front-foot rope-a-dope, and it relies on the notion that Suzume is a quicker athlete than the power-focused 2022 version of Yuka Sakazaki (which she is - at one point Suzume baits her into a high-speed reversal sequence which almost ends disastrously for the two-time Princess of Princess Champion), but falls down on the fact that Yuka is so much stronger, meaning that any momentary lapse while attempting these incredibly complex reversals could result in Suzume’s being splatted. Which, eventually, she is.
And so to the final. Both come in riding high - Miu has just mounted the biggest challenge to the TJPW hierarchy in recent memory, while Yuka has successfully managed to defend her own patch - but damaged by the efforts that have brought them here, Miu more than Yuka. Miu targets Yuka’s back early on, which will be a theme for roughly the first half of this. It acts as a wake-up call for Yuka, just like Suzume’s high speed roll-ups did in the semi-final, and Hikari Noa’s thrust kicks did in the quarters. She slows the match down, right down, so that she can stay in control. She forces Miu to the mat, again and again, so that the younger challenger has to expend vital energy just getting to her feet. When Miu is able to pick up the pace, with her emotional rallying cry of “EEEE!!!!”, the pendulum swings back in her favour, though Yuka is able to cut off her first attempt at a Giant Swing, the expression on her face a mixture of affront (at the idea of being swung around the ring like some common doll) and determination, because she knows just how powerful a weapon that Giant Swing actually is.
It goes back and forth like this for the first five minutes. The first really big character moment comes when Yuka goes to the top rope for the Magical Girl Splash, and then looks furious with herself when Miu, obviously, pops right back up to her feet. She’s made a tactical blunder, and she immediately rallies to correct it, but something in the complexion of the match changes after this. There’s a brief high-speed flurry, out of which Yuka comes out on top with a Sliding D. But now begins Yuka’s period of really trying to slow the thing down, to take all the emotion out of it and proceed with perfectly cool logic, which of course goes a long way to demonstrating just how much emotion there is bound up in all this for Yuka in the first place.
The next really big character moment: Yuka attempts a Magical Merry-Go-Round and Miu drops out of it, holding Yuka in the kind of tight front-neck lock that might prefigure a DDT. There’s a beat where you can tell the cogs in Miu’s brain are whirring, and then she starts swinging Yuka around by the throat. It’s a work of improvisation that speaks to the wrestler Miu has become: she not only has the brawn to do this to you, she has the brains to engineer it on the fly, as a way of achieving the same effect she earlier tried and failed to achieve with the Giant Swing.
The next time Yuka is able to fight back, it’s with big dirty strikes, and slow mat control again, and more pin attempts that are designed to tire Miu out rather than win the match. The emotions are becoming more visible on her face now. There’s a pre-emptive melancholy about the idea of failing in this last act of resistance against the arrival of the new generation. “I saw Shoko and Miyu go down, which really hit my emotions hard”, she states in her post-match, post trophy-presentation to the crowd. “I’m the big sister here so I want everyone to do well and I want people to see our roster members do well, but as the same time I want to do well too.” It’s this conflicted figure that starts to emerge at this point in the match. With each strike she lands on Miu’s chest she seems to grow more upright; with each strike Miu lands on her she seems to crumple more and more, until she’s close to tears. It’s a phenomenally effective performance.
Miu takes the last big dramatic verse. Yuka is offering her space to fight back, just like Miyu did, and Miu keeps picking herself up and dusting herself off after each fresh set of blows from Yuka, with all the raw emotion and brute physical force she can muster. Whether it’s the damage from the semi-final, or whether Yuka is just less sentimental and more determined than her pink counterpart, Miu isn’t allowed to find the opening she needs this time. Yuka stands up tall, and, with brutally streamlined efficiency, she lays Miu out. One big forearm to the jaw knocks Miu’s battery to almost zero, and then Yuka waits for her opponent to rise to her feet, holds her by the wrist, and lays her with something that looks a little like a short-arm lariat, but which lands squarely on the temple.
A Magical Merry-Go-Round - the first finisher of the match - seals the win, and suddenly Yuka’s face, which has been all ambivalence, half-apologetic, half-determined, ultimately inscrutable but hinting at about a dozen emotions all playing out at once, melts to match the expression on Miu’s - there are tears, so many tears, and an embrace between the two finalists which shows us the human beings that have been there at the heart of this power struggle the whole time.
Back in 2017, the future had to go through Satomura because TJPW hadn’t found its feet yet. I still think about that match every time Miyu Yamashita caps off another career milestone. Assuming there’s a world to watch joshi in, I’ll still be thinking about this match in another five years time, when the Up Up Girls are the Old Guard.
Non-tournament highlights
Mei Suruga came into Tokyo Joshi in late 2020 as a new face, but those who’d already been following her in Gatoh Move and elsewhere were in no doubt as to why she’d been put alongside Suzume, Sena Shiori and Moka Miyamoto in that match - despite only being two years into her career herself, she was there to show some bright prospects how it was done. Amazingly, her singles match against Arisu Endo on the first day of the weekend double-header is still only her third appearance as herself in TJPW, but those three matches all add up to a complete picture.
In the middle match of the three, at Ota Ward, Endo showed a never-before-seen amount of fight, and here she was out to prove herself against a wrestler who doesn’t *really* have an investment in helping to develop talent for this company, but who has nevertheless very easily slipped into the role of senpai-at-large. Endo fights here like she’s got a chip on her shoulder, and Mei fights like the mirror image of that- it’s not that she doesn’t care, but she clearly considers herself the overdog, and there’s a sense of pressure as she fights to maintain that (self-) image.
It’s a great dynamic, as Endo strains to go further than her strong showing last month, and Mei is forced to work increasingly hard to keep up. Mei is a wall for Endo to overcome - and we see tiny flashes of the top-level wrestler that Endo might one day become here - but there’s also a degree of drama surrounding Mei's claim to mentor status, because although she’s been earmarked for this role from the start, this is maybe the first time in this company that she’s taken the mantle on this explicitly. A real treat for anyone who’s been following Mei's career since the early days and who has also been keeping tabs on the development of this generation of TJPW talent, but fundamentally you only need to have watched two matches prior to this to get all the good nutrients out of it…
…I’ll go on record as saying that Max the Impaler is the best international guest star TJPW have ever had. This was clear from their first match of the weekend, against Pom Harajuku, where a very simple, immediately enjoyable idea - Max is terrifying and Pom is terrified - was executed to absolute perfection. Inside four minutes, we got Pom being corner-charged right from the bell and laid out with a Wade Barrett-type Wasteland slam that looked better than anything Wade Barrett ever did, Raku callously/heart-warmingly (and literally) dragging her friend back into the ring after she tried to escape, and Pom actually managing to inflict some damage with a kick to the shins.
Everything that happened ruled so hard and I wouldn’t find fault with anyone calling this their Match of the Year. But the follow-up on the Sunday, where Max tagged with Yuki Aino against the super-team of Rika Tatsumi and Shoko Nakajima was in many ways just as good, a comic-book combustion of different fighting styles and body-types, humour and brutality, that reminded me of the Maki Itoh vs Maho Kurone vs Mil Clown three-way from 2017 that first got me into Tokyo Joshi, only with more of that 2022 polish on it…
…I love the idea that Yuki Kamifuku and Mahiro Kiryu didn’t actually know each other at Tokyo University, and had wildly divergent experiences there, but because Kamiyu is essentially a very warm and guileless and social person she saw a way of connecting with a fellow roster-member and seized it, and now Kamiyu and Kiryu, who might never have given each other the time of day otherwise, sort of complete each other - you can imagine Kamiyu looking up to Kiryu for her relative soulfulness and book-smarts, while Kamiyu's excess of confidence helps fill in some of Kiryu's lack. On the Sunday, they came up against what feels like another potentially fruitful pairing (I can totally imagine Hyper Misao riding her bike around with Kaya Toribami in a sidecar, all dirty work and minion deeds and 11th-hour rescues) and won, strengthening their bond ahead of their upcoming tag title challenge. And then Kamiyu bigs up Kiryu's blue highlights to camera as they leave, because as her crisis tweets about Maki Itoh proved, Kamiyu is the friend we all need.
Earlier in the cup
That Ring-a-Bell that got Suzume back into her quarter-final match against Rika Tatsumi at Otemachi Mitsui Hall on the 31st of July felt more than a little like Ella Toone’s wondergoal against Germany - an act eked out against the run of play, skilful and perfectly weighted. You can see Suzume wrenching and pulling down on Rika’s neck in mid-air - she doesn’t just fly up and down in one continuous arc but breaks the flight up into stages, making the eventual collapse to the mat feel so much more impactful, and more than justifying the younger wrestler’s eventual victory, at a point where she looked to be cruising to defeat. The clutch pin that seals the deal is also very precisely calibrated, Suzume targeting some spot just under Rika's armpit that she wouldn’t think to defend, knowing that if she executes her set play she’s got every chance of pulling off the win. Suzume doesn’t actually do a whole lot in this match other than those two moves, really, but that’s tournament wrestling for you…
…It’s truly amazing that Miu Watanabe wasn’t originally down to wrestle Ryo Mizunami at Ota Ward last month, because her upset win over Shoko Nakajima on the same show it felt it owed so much to that earlier encounter. Being across the ring from someone so capable at combining power and speed clearly gave her the answers she needed to defeat the Princess of Princess champion, and the answers were as follows: you need to be as alert to possibilities to reverse and to capitalise, you need to be as quick on the draw as Shoko is, but you also need to be stronger. The pin that won this match was one of those where you can clearly see the victim is trying to kick out, but can’t, because they’re being held down by someone whose upper-body strength is greater than their own. And the moment where Miu caught and reversed Shoko’s Hurricanrana attempt was the second such reversal Shoko had suffered in as many main events, but the damage inflicted here was ultimately more impactful than anything Rika could manage at Summer Sun Princess, which felt like an early indication that Miu might have the juice to go all the way in the tournament.
Alas.
Same time next year?