70s Joshi on Wednesday: Hori! Komine! Yokota! Sato!

27. 1979.04.XX1 - 01 Ayumi Hori vs. Hiroko Komine

K: Ayumi Hori is part of the class of 1978 but didn’t debut until the end of the year as she suffered an injury during training, so she’s really a lot less experienced than her classmates at this point. She’s also probably the tallest wrestler in AJW’s history, billed at 180cm.

I can tell Hiroko Komine was leading this at some points, she moves a lot more naturally than Hori does. At times it looks like Hori’s not really doing anything but concentrating on doing her moves correctly, she doesn’t screw anything up but the vibes of the match are all off as there’s little semblance of struggle over things and she takes a bit too long to do her stuff. It’s a better watch when Komine is on offense, and Hori’s bumping is fine at least. They do play into Hori being much larger in a few moments, for instance when Komine picks her up presumably to do a slam but then collapses backwards from her weight. But mostly Komine has little trouble taking her down, it’s doing Hori a favour really that in kayfabe she comes across as not really knowing what she’s doing.

We only saw 5 minutes of this, though I doubt there was much more to it. Komine did well but Hori looked just barely fit for TV at this point.

*

MD: Our first look at Hori. It’s funny. The way they shot her at first , in the corner, by herself, with her robe, I was thinking that she didn’t look all that big, but when she was up next to Komine, she was giant. They also had this way of shooting up from the floor that made her seem all the larger once things got going. Komine was, apparently, injury prone and she had her hand taped up here. It’s pretty clear right from the get go that they have something with Hori. Though obviously green, she moved well, could take things like monkey flips, was clearly strong enough to do any physical feat she wanted to with Komine, whether it be a sort of head between the legs back body drop or just tossing her about by her hair. This went five minutes but it was a very full five minutes, maybe even seeming clipped. Komine would get her with mean shots and tight holds, but Hori would just sort of power out and run right through her. Komine did get the win with a sort of flowing cross body where she ended up almost vertical by the time they landed. My biggest surprise is that they weren’t talking about Monster Ripper the whole time. If I was booking this, I would be building Hori to face Ripper.

28. 1979.04.XX1 - 02 Chino Sato vs. Rimi Yokota

K: This match had more of a ‘traditional’ babyface-heel dynamic than Black Pair matches. Chino doesn’t really cheat, well except a few moments of competitive feistiness, but the match is laid out so that Rimi gets some shine only for Chino to take over and go into a long heat section where Rimi still gets to do cooler stuff. For example Chino goes for a Boston Crab a couple of times but Rimi just forces her head forward to roll out of it both times before Chino can lock it in, but she doesn’t give up and gets it on the third attempt. There was a cool bit of camera work where they show Rimi dragging her body over the mat while in the Indian Deathlock to try and get to the ropes, only for Chino to pull her back, but just out of shot so you don’t see it coming until suddenly Rimi starts magically moving in the opposite direction. The moment I enjoyed the most was when Chino was trying to work on Rimi’s leg, but Rimi counters by taking Chino down with a headscissors while her back is still on the mat. It was pretty simple but it made Rimi look more intelligent than necessarily athletically impressive as I didn’t even consider that counter as an option until she did it.

There was a bit of an odd moment where Chino locked in a Figure Four really close to the ropes, like, Rimi actually gets her hand to them, then lets go, and Chino then rolls over so they’re in the middle of the ring now. It would have been find if Chino had forced Rimi off the ropes because merely touching the ropes isn’t considered a rope break in AJW, you need to keep a hold of them, but instead it just looked like Rimi let go for no reason. It’s made more odd by this little section ending by Rimi forcibly rolling back to where she was to start with, grabbing the ropes again and so forcing a break.

Matt’s done his write-up for this match before me so I’ve already seen his comments on the leg-selling. I don’t agree with him on this one. I thought Rimi sold the leg appropriately for the situation. She didn’t come across to me like her leg was perfectly fine. She shakes it about several times while she’s in her comeback. At 12:20 in the YouTube video for a quick example. I also interpreted her favouring one side being part of her selling her right leg (she seems to a have a very slight limp on the one Sato had been working over) rather than just selling her side. We’re getting into very nitty gritty here but I just felt the need to justify myself a bit here. The other thing I’ll say is I wouldn’t expect Rimi to be outright limping on one leg kind of selling, for one thing she is Chino’s senior and in kayfabe definitely the better wrestler, so it feels right that she sell just about enough to register that the legwork has had an effect on her, but not enough to severely impact on her, or stop her winning.

The finish is a great example to me of what makes Rimi Yokota so special. She counters Chino’s rolling headbutt into a sunset flip pin, and it looked perfect. The timing on it is exquisite. Most wrestlers could never make that spot look good but Yokota does this kind of thing time and time again. Of course I know what she turns into to, but even here you can see she’s a special talent.

***

MD: I was not expecting this out of Sato after her being sort of a plucky rookie the last time we saw her. Yokota rushed in early, but Sato took over very quickly and focused for minutes and minutes on the leg. Lots of brutal looking, varied offense, including a series of damaging holds and moves while Yokota was in a cross-toehold. The best of that might have been these bounding splashes down onto the hold. It was brutal and the selling in the moment and immediately thereafter by Yokota was good.

Of course, once she had her comeback, the leg was perfectly fine. In fact, the big issue was her side after she missed a splash. Sato was quick to just crush her over and over with power bombs. There was some talk about a 6 on 6 series of Americans vs Japanese where you’d have to qualify and could score different points with different outcomes but I don’t see immediate sign of that in the match list, but who knows. This went fifteen and was good as segments in a bubble and if you learn to swallow your thoughts about consequence. Sato did move on from the leg and maybe that was her folly. Finish had Sato doing these roll through headbutts only to get caught on the second and sunset flipped. She decked the ref post-match for good measure. Yokota was very sympathetic here (maybe for the first time as she had leaned more aggressive in previous matches), but Sato absolutely made an impression.