70s Joshi on Wednesday: Yokota! Hanawa! Kumi! Fujinami!

11. 1979.01.XX1 - 01 Nancy Kumi & Victoria Fujimi vs. Rimi Yokota & Seiko Hanawa

K: The referee of this match appears to be Miyuki Yanagi, who goes as far back as any of the wrestlers we’re going to be seeing in these reviews. She debuted in 1955 in All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling Association (not the AJW we’re familiar with, a similarly-named precursor company when the Joshi scene was split between multiple promotions) and from what I can tell wrestled for the Matsunaga brothers through the pre-TV period, holding the WWWA Tag Team Titles with Mariko Akagi as late as 1974. That’s interesting because she would have been a champion in AJW at the age of 36; the whole “mandatory retirement at 25” rule fans in the West are aware of really wasn’t a thing for very long, nor was it ever consistently enforced. After retiring she became a trainer, and can be seen in various road skits on AJW TV in the 80s running training drills and the like.

To the match. The opening of this was characteristic relentless offense from both teams, with neither getting much of an advantage. Golden Pair (Nancy & Victoria) are higher up in the hierarchy though, so it opening like this really means they’re not going to get an easy fight. After a couple of minutes of this, everything just stops and we get Victoria & Seiko doing a tentative staredown before going for grappling. If you’d played this match from 2 minutes in, you’d probably think that was the start.

We get a sustained period of Young Pair dominating things, mainly just keeping Victoria cut off on their side of the ring and smother her with moves. When Golden Pair manage to turn things around, we get pretty much the same kind of thing from their end. There is a focus on attacking Hanawa’s arm though, whereas Young Pair didn’t seem interested in any kind of limbwork. This pattern gets broken up though when they go outside the ring and throw each other into chairs/the outside wall for a bit. It’s something which happens in these matches a lot. I wonder if it’s a tactic for when they’re not sure where to progress whatever they’re doing in the ring, or feel like the crowd isn’t into it and they need to shake things up. It serves as a reset though, as they take their time to all get back in the ring while the referee counts.

After this ‘reset’ the match does go in a different direction, as now Young Pair are being more blatantly heelish. Things open with Rimi clawing at both her opponents eyes, and then raking Victoria’s face across the top rope, ignoring referee Miyuki’s warnings. It’s noticeable a bit later on when Nancy manages to escape one of Rimi’s holds and starts a bit of a comeback, she gets a bit of a cheer and applause from the crowd. When Young Pair get back into it, things spill outside again and they run right to the other end of the venue where we can’t see what’s going on, and we get a double countout.

Pretty enjoyable match with a few interesting moments. Things improved after the 1st run and throw around on the outside, but it never really went into another gear with a new narrative hook even if the action itself didn’t let up.

**1/2

MD: To remind everyone, Kumi and Fujimi are the Golden Pair and Yokota and Hanawa are the Young Pair. My impression was that the winners would get to challenge for tag belts but I’m not 100% clear on this. It was played up as a big opportunity for the Young Pair and they certainly made the most of it. This was wild, non-stop action but it followed more or less of a narrative. The Young Pair ambushed right from the get go and they pressed at full speed. That was, according to the commentary, their big advantage. They were absolutely relentless. Early on Kumi and Fujimi got some shots in but they were dragged back under. Probably most memorable here was Yokota with some lifting flapjacks and Hanawa pressing back with a headscissors and rolling with it on Kumi. Just brutal looking stuff. The ref would break it and she’d come right back in with it.

The Golden Pair had a size advantage though and were able to power their way back. That led to a series of nasty gourdbuster style drops by Fujimi. That’s one of my big takeaways from this one actually. For a lot of this, what they were doing didn’t feel like conventional spots or move so much as just them finding a way to drop their opponents on their face as much as possible. That was true for both parties. Also, so many back body drops and some of them were so quick that the camera had to shake all over the place to try to capture it. The Young Pair took over in the most dynamic way possible; Hanawa grabbed Kumi and literally ran her all around the arena before tossing her into a wall. It’d go back and forth after that before crumbling apart to their equivalent of “walk and brawl” which was more like dashing and brawling in the stands. The Young Pair almost made it back into the ring to beat the count but were held on to and the match ended as a draw.

So much happens in these that it’s hard to cover all of it. I’m glad there’s two of us working on this. It’s exhausting and they very often decide not to sell in order to just keep the action moving and the violence going but that doesn’t usually impact the overall momentum shifts so it’s a little more forgivable, even if maybe weird and preventative when it comes to the crowd really getting into things (though everyone did, as always, get a kick out of Fujimi’s butt butts). There was a moment on the tape where they cut to calmly interviewing some guests while the four were screaming and killing each other in the ring and when it cut back you really had to wonder if you missed anything essential for the match or just more of the continuous punishment. That doesn’t mean this wasn’t wild and fun to watch though.