Miyu Yamashita is Good at Tournaments Now: On Picking the Right Winner for the Princess Cup

How the Pink Striker's Achilles Heel Became Her Greatest Strength

Front Matter

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Miyu Yamashita is bad at tournaments. For as long as I’ve been watching Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, that has been canon. Established. Fact. She could become Princess of Princess (POP) champion any day of the week, but the minute she was drawn in the first round of a tournament you knew she was getting rolled up as part of the longest-running joke in the promotion. In the end, wasn’t even an upset. It was just her thing.

The Pink Striker’s ups and downs in the tournament mirror her relationship with TJPW and the company’s own evolution. As the promotion was finding its feet and determining who would lead its growth in 2014 and 2015, she reached both those years’ semi-finals – a relatively fair reflection of where she might have been on the totem pole. But once 2016 and her first POP Championship reign came around, she began that run of infamous Princess Cup luck that felt inversely proportional to her success. She lost in the first round in three of the next four years, with only a brief respite in 2018 before losing to a pre-gimmick change Nodoka-Oneesan in round two. 

It’s always fun to see a chink in the armour of a seemingly unbeatable hero. Invincible characters are rarely very interesting, a truth which has proven as difficult for filmmakers struggling to find nuance in Superman (I’m looking at you, Zack Snyder) as it has for bookers trying to keep their aces on top. 

Miyu’s oddly specific Achilles heel was more than just an annual giggle or a get-out-of-jail-free card for a booker who needs to build credible challengers. Having a weakness – and the attendant ability to laugh at herself, or at least be laughed at – was actually crucial to Miyu’s success. As Roman Reigns will tell you, the ace’s popularity can nosedive the minute that nobody believes they could ever lose.

Glimmers of hope started to come back into Miyu’s tournament record as the long-established King’s Road era really took shape. In the spirit of continuous improvement at every level that defines the Princess Road, Miyu adapted to the tournament format just as her opponents were getting stronger. It was the semi-finals before Miyu lost in 2020, and she lost to Shoko Nakajima – another of the Three Pillars dominating the title scene – before losing in the quarters to Mizuki in 2021. Last year, she put in a great performance in another semi-final only to take a pin from Miu Watanabe.

In hindsight, the direction and eventual end of this phase of the Princess Road were telegraphed in the Princess Cup. Mizuki won back-to-back in 2019 and 2020, proving that she was a main event talent even among the endless failed title challenges. In 2021, Cutest in the World Maki Itoh finally won something big (keep the faith, readers) to catalyse her rise to the top. And in 2022, just to prove that the old guard were still just as hungry as the new, Yuka Sakazaki had to go all out to beat Watanabe – the upstart who had already knocked out the Pink Striker. 

The talents that have now broken through that glass ceiling made their first cracks with upsets in the Princess Cup, and the first signs of fallibility for the Three Pillars of Shoko, Yuka and Miyu appeared there too.

So here we are in 2023. Eternal nearly-woman Mizuki is finally leading the charge down the next phase of the Princess Road with a raft of emerging talent at her heels, Itoh-chan and Watanabe among them. What does that mean for the Pillars?

For Shoko it seems to mean taking bumps onto massive boxes of kaiju in wonderful nonsense matches with Hyper Misao. For Yuka, it means working more and more in the US. Miyu isn’t short of international bookings either, but she clearly feels the same enduring connection to TJPW that Yuka spoke of when she won last year’s tournament. And we know that because on 13 August 2023, at the tenth time of asking, she won the Princess Cup.

Booking the Pink Striker to beat an insanely over up-and-coming main eventer like Yuki Kamifuku at this point could be seen as counterintuitive. Put Kamiyu over, says one school of thought. Give her a huge win over the company ace and make her a credible title challenger. 

That overlooks the way Miyu has been humbled by the collapse of the Three Pillars: she hasn’t held a TJPW singles championship in more than a year despite multiple failed title shots; her most recent belt was a brief run as a tag champion with an Itoh-chan who was only just getting onto her level; and if nothing else, she hasn’t been around as much as the new blood. Her EVE title match with Sawyer Wreck at Summer Sun Princess felt like a sideshow, positioned apart from the main thrust of the promotion’s storytelling, and below a tag match featuring upstart rookie Wakana Uehara.

There was a time when Miyu could just walk to the ring and assume that being the Pink Striker would earn her a title match. This time, she admitted that she had wanted to challenge for the title since the minute Mizuki won - but didn’t think she had the right unless she could earn it.

Miyu doesn’t need an Achilles heel anymore. She has started to feel fallible, cut adrift. This was the perfect time for her to win a tournament, in other words.

In the end this result bodes better for Kamiyu, too. When the Pink Striker was unquestionably the most dominant force in the company, getting drawn against her in the Princess Cup was pretty much the only sure-fire way to beat her. That meant nobody got a genuine rub from doing so: you could fluke your way into pinning Miyu once, but the minute you challenged her for a title you were going to be flattened like roadkill. Now that her world has been flipped upside down, holding your own against Miyu in a tournament match can actually be made to mean something. Kamiyu is going to be fine, with an International Championship challenge all but guaranteed after her win over Rika Tatsumi, but she was also elevated by losing in this final than anyone who beat Miyu in the first round ever was - Master of the Pin-Pon-Pan included.