70s Joshi on Wednesday: Komine! Hagiwara! Sato! Akagi!

13. 1979.01.XX2 - 01 Hiroko Komine vs. Mimi Hagiwara

K: This is our first look at Hiroko Komine, who (along with Mimi) is from the AJW class of 1978. Hiroko would quit after another year, I was going to say that there’s almost no information on her but just this March she was interviewed on Jaguar Yokota’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_JoKLR4Q5s The gist of it is she was constantly injured while wrestling. She tells a story of going to hospital thinking she had a sprain only to be told she has a bone fracture but it was already broken so long ago it’d already hardened so there wasn’t much they could do. No wonder she didn’t last long.

I’m also just noticing how very thin Mimi is here. In 1983 she did an interview where she claimed she’d put on 11kg since she’d started wrestling so she could compete better, the reason may be a little kayfabed but looking at her here she probably wasn’t exaggerating the weight gain.

To the match, pretty early on Hiroko establishes herself as being on the heel-side of things, but it’s a bit “box-ticky.” She does the standard tropes of stomping on Mimi she’s in the ropes and scrunching up her face, but the aura of malice isn’t there. When Mimi gets a comeback going it’s a bit abrupt as just pulls Hiroko up while in a body scissors and slams her down to break it. It doesn’t get any reaction but I guess the quicker things got changed up the better, as alongside being more charismatic Mimi is actually a bit better on offense (though neither are ‘good’), her neckbreaker drop early into this section had a nice execution to it even if she’s still a bit rough.

Things improve when Hiroko starts to get back into things, but rather than the generic heel offense she goes for running elbows and some decent-looking dropkicks. Mimi manages to counter snapmare-attempt into a backslide and gets the pin. This wasn’t much. But it’s also just a rookie opener which nobody thought we’d be watching back 45 years later, so it’s fine for what it is and there’s not much else to say about it.

*1/4

MD: If I’m reading the poorly translated commentary right, they were making fun of Hagiwara for wrestling 300 times in 78 and only winning about twenty times and said that Komine was rookie of the year. This went less than seven minutes. They were pretty even to start with rapid succession alternating armdrags, but Komine took over. She was competently mean but didn’t stand out, using eyerakes, standing hairpulls, and front facelocks that she rolled back with. Hagiwara pulled her hair out of a bodyscissors to takeover with her neckbreakers and a nice gutwrench of sorts before they went into finishing stretch with dropkicks and cross chops and body presses (some missed) and finishing things with a few pin attempts and a Hagiwara backslide. Competent for the experience level is the phrase that I’d use but Hagiwara seemed a bit more confident than the last time we saw her.

14. 1979.01.XX2 - 02 Chino Sato vs. Mariko Akagi

K: Chino Sato is from the AJW Class of 1978. She retired in 1981 and I believe her retirement ceremony was the first to have the ‘When A Child Is Born’ instrumental playing while her career achievements were read out, which would become the standard format from then on.

Chino gets a bit more offense in this than you’d expect considering the gulf in status, but her offense also isn’t very good and it comes across like Mariko is just humouring her more than she’s a genuine threat. Mariko a couple of times just brushes her off and decides it’s her turn to take over and imposes herself far more convincingly. It’s fitting then that the finishing run is Chino hitting a bunch of offense, the first move of which she totally misses (unintentionally), there’s a Giant Swing which she tries a splash but Mariko moves out of the way, then just puts her in a Figure 4, Chino submits and that’s the end of that.

This has some value in that it’s a rare look at Mariko Akagi in action just before she retires, and it does look believable from the footage that she really was the best worker of her era. But it’s also just a veteran vs. rookie squash low on the card (and one of the less good rookies at that), and a match like that is always going to have a low ceiling.

*1/2

MD: My last impression of Akagi was that she was a fiery and unrelenting heel. Here things seemed to be nice and calm right at the start but then she came charging in with kicks. She had amazing snap on everything she did, especially her headlock takeovers and snap mares. Really, everything though. She’d bound to the top rope at a moment’s notice to leap off with a twisting body press and the way she locked in the figure four at the end, right after eating a giant swing, was absolutely flawless. In comparison, Sato was a bit of a clutz, well meaning but stumbling all over the place. She was presented as gutsy, charging right in and kicking out of move after move when she probably should have stayed down and she had a late flurry full of power bombs and that giant swing (that probably made her more dizzy than Akagi). She was a work in progress. Akagi came off, especially in comparison, like a surgeon in there. These two were quite short and much more focused and direct than the longer tags we’ve been seeing with a lot of momentum shifts and I found them refreshing but I’d like to have a mixing of things moving forward.