70's Joshi on Wednesday: Introduction

Kadaveri: For as long as I can remember I've always been interested in roots and beginnings. I've always been interested in history in general, right now there's a book on the Korean War sitting on my desk that I'm reading in between my wrestling fandom, but the closer to the start of something is where my interest peaks. It seems like that's the moment where a thing's true essence is formed, and everything following is an evolution of that fundamental form. This personality quirk is probably why I'm extremely interested in the current efforts of cosmologists trying to document the 21cm wavelength light emitted by the quantum transition of hydrogen atoms from aligned to anti-aligned state, as solving this would mean we could significantly expand our understanding of the universe to the time before stars (and thus, detectable light) existed…

But anyway, back to wrestling, where doing that is not possible. Even just focusing on Joshi, its origins go back to Mildred Burke's tour of Japan in 1954, whereas the earliest footage we have comes from the mid 70s. But the aim of this project is still to get as close to the heart of this thing as we can.

My own personal story and attachment goes back to me being just a few years into my (almost dying) wrestling fandom. I’d been one of those British schoolboys who got very much into 2000 WWF after the Royal Rumble was shown on our Channel 4, and for a year or so it felt like all the boys at school were watching it. I was one of the weirder kids who stuck around a couple more years after the fad in this country had ended, but by 2004 I’d almost entirely lost interest in watching WWE, which for me was virtually synonymous with wrestling. This all changed when I stumbled upon ‘The Wrestling Channel’ by going way too high up the Channel numbers on Sky TV. I can barely describe how much my eyes were opened seeing all the new and different wrestling in front of my eyes I had no idea even existed. I remember watching World of Sport on there, which I did know about from older relatives, but all they ever told me about was Big Daddy, and their descriptions of him did not exactly appeal to me, but the old British wrestling I was seeing was nothing like that and radically overturned my ideas of what ‘old’ wrestling looked like (they moved so fast!) There was also TNA and the Japanese promotion NOAH, and many others I can’t remember clearly now. But there was one promotion which impacted me far more than any other: GAEA Japan.

GAEA Japan was a women’s wrestling promotion founded in 1995 by Chigusa Nagayo (not that I knew that at the time), a stylistic offshoot of AJW, the biggest women’s wrestling company ever which this project will be centred on. Although there’s no doubt that a significant part of what caught my attention was simply the fact that it was women’s wrestling and it was actually good (I  hope you understand that 99% of my wrestling viewing being 2000-03 WWE left me habitually fast-forwarding all women’s matches), but there was still more to it than that. Unlike in North American wrestling, where women’s wrestling really just felt like fundamentally the same product as men’s wrestling but not done very well, these girls (the ‘GAEA Girls’ will always be my girls) had a distinct flavour to how they wrestled that would have caught my interest even if it were men wrestling like that. I eventually worked out that what I was watching was called ‘Joshi’. It’s not really accurate to call Joshi a ‘style’, it’s more of a scene/tradition in way people use the term ‘Lucha’, in that it has developed in relative isolation from the rest of wrestling and has its own traditions, tropes and tendencies even if the wrestlers themselves can be very different. It would be strange to say that Aja Kong and Chikayo Nagashima wrestle the same style, Aja is a big bullying bruiser wrestler and Chikayo is a speedy high-flying trickster, but there’s still a common essence or rhythm to how they work, and the more I watched the more I tried to dig into what that really is.

An early memory I have of going on the internet to learn the history of Joshi was finding an old forum thread where a poster talked about having just watched some 70s footage and being stunned by what he’d seen. The popular narrative then (and still now in fact) was that the generation that came to prominence in the early 90s were great innovators who defined Joshi as we understand it now, yet already in the 1970s, the poster reported, the wrestling he was watching was unmistakable Joshi. Yes the moves were more simplistic, more primitive perhaps, but that rhythm was still there, the gritted-teeth reckless determination to win or die attitude instilled into the wrestlers and yes the fluid and sometimes flawed use of transitions… Perhaps we didn’t really understand the history of this thing at all.

Since those days, I’ve felt a personal mission to get to the bottom of this as best I can. It can feel like a research project sometimes, like something I’m doing for homework, but even if I sometimes write in an analytic way I’m doing all of this out of passion. I am of course a huge fan of professional wrestling and believe there are many ways it can achieve greatness, and it need not necessarily be through inspiring passions. One thing I’ll say about my own personal fandom though is there’s no form of wrestling which has pulled more visceral emotional reactions out of me than Joshi at its very best. Even most recently in 2023, while it certainly wasn’t the best match of the year, no other wrestling match made me feel genuinely upset than watching Mio Momono lose her title to Mayumi Ozaki. Wrestling match as tragedy is one specific thing I think Joshi has for whatever reason been able to successfully pull off like no other scene has. It won’t be long into this project where we’ll be watching the Black Pair vs. Queen Angels in another match I’d describe as a great tragedy. Where the purpose seems to be not so much to get the audience angry at the heels, but to build an intense connection between the audience and the babyfaces in their suffering. I once saw someone compare the first Chigusa Nagayo vs. Dump Matsumoto match as Passion of the Christ as a wrestling match, and while depicting Chigusa as a religious figure would be a little too far… I still totally understand where this is coming from. So please interpret my sometimes analytic style of writing not so much as analysing the performance of the wrestling itself, but more an attempt at sober investigation into why a certain piece of wrestling evoked certain emotions out of me.

MD: 2023 was a rewarding year on the blog as it pertains to underlooked areas of the pro wrestling world, finishing up the French footage, hitting five years without missing a week for New/Found Footage Friday, and partnering with Graham and Esteban to focus on different footage in a new way. I’d been giving some thought about what would fit well with Panama and Puerto Rico as a potential third day. Meanwhile, our old and dear friend Charles/Loss has been dutifully and brilliantly cataloging and curating the entire history of pro wrestling footage over on the Wrestling Playlists project. He was able to link to our French Catch reviews but noted that there was almost nothing out there for swaths of 70s and early 80s Joshi that had popped up. I don’t think SC has always done a great job covering Japanese women's wrestling in general. That and WoS feel like the two biggest gaps (we should really do a C+A Jim Breaks or Caswell Martin or Jon Cortez; maybe someday, but that’s for another year).

Moreover, it’s not exactly my area of expertise either. I’ve seen and enjoyed some of the usual suspects, the Chigusa vs Dump feud, my share of Kandori or Ozami, but I’m certainly no expert. I barely have a working knowledge. But there is footage, and there is knowledge out there, and I thought we could do some good in trying to watch the footage and link the knowledge and make a map for people like we’ve done with the French footage and like we’ve been trying to do with Panama and 89-on Puerto Rico. In a lot of ways, anything pre-Crush Gals feels like pre-history, but we’ll be doing a lot of what we’ve done for the other projects, going chronologically, defining the players, looking for stylistics advancements and patterns, pulling in context whenever possible, trying to identify the standout matches, just trying to make sense of it all.

Since I’ll be figuring it all out as I go, it was a no-brainer figuring out who to pair with here. When I’ve had a question about old Joshi over the last few years, Kadaveri stood out as the person that the people I would think to ask would themselves go to for answers. He’s already done some legwork on this and I’m glad he agreed to tackle this footage with me. At a glance, we have over 70 matches from 1978 and 1979, with some clips from 1975 and 1976 and one match from 1976. There’s always a chance more things might emerge as well. So starting next week we'll look at a match or two a week (with links, of course).