70s Joshi on Wednesday: Day! Tsumaki! Masami! Mimi! Jaguar! Victoria!

35. 1979.07.XX - 01 Cheryl Day, Masumi Tsumaki & Tenjin Masami vs. Mimi Hagiwara, Rimi Yokota & Victoria Fujimi

K: This one looks a bit different as it’s outdoors, you can see the odd tree peaking up in between the stands. Anyway I’m in very familiar territory from the jump as we get a bit of outside brawling and then Tenjin Masami taking great delight in noisily beating up Mimi Hagiwara. I keep my knowledge of future events on these pieces to a minimum, but seeing how this is the earliest footage we have of Masami, it’s too fitting to leave unmentioned how she was torturing poor Mimi from the start. Sometimes two wrestlers are just made for one another.

We get a really long period of control from the heel team. The execution of everything in the micro was quite good, but the whole thing went on a bit too long without the faces getting any hint of a comeback at all so by the last couple of minutes I was waiting for it to end. A flawed structure can undermine something even if the wrestlers are really doing anything bad in the moment.

Referee Miyuki Yanagi tries to stop the heels cheating but is thwarted when Masumi Tsumaki gets sick of her and just throws her out the way. This actually got a bit of laugh from the crowd, which doesn’t usually happen. They then double down on this bit by doing it a few more times, getting increasingly overtly comedic and more laughs. It’s not clear to me if the wrestlers planned to do that from the start or they just saw the crowd seemed to enjoy that so gave them some more, but it was pretty interesting to me.

Once Yokota gets the comeback spot in and tags out the match becomes a lot more enjoyable. Everyone gets to show their stuff now but the heels aren’t just totally dominated. Mimi’s cute armbar takedown thing (I’ve always been bad with move names…) is certainly aesthetically pleasing here. Tenjin Masami doesn’t look out of place at all, in fact she may be the strongest performer of the heel side in this. She has been wrestling almost a year at this point though, even if it’s the first time we’re seeing her wrestle. She does a really great but simple bodyslam on Yokota towards the end of the match where she’s holds her up in the air just for a couple of seconds after her shout gets your attention, and it just builds a bit of suspense for her hitting the move and makes it feel bigger than if she just did it immediately.

The finish was Rimi Yokota just hitting a frantic flurry of flying offense and then a big butterfly suplex to get the win. I don’t remember her ever hitting a sequence of moves with such urgency before this. What really made it hit home is when she did a flying crossbody onto Masumi Tsumaki from behind rather than wait for her to turn around to take it normally, which made it look a lot more violence and certainly got a reaction from the commentator.

Slow start, turns into a good match and a strong showing from Yokota and Masami at this stage in their careers.

**3/4

MD: Spirited match here with our first look at Tenjin (Devil) Masami. Assuming that she and Tsumaki were the up and coming bad guy bench for AJW, they were in good shape. Again, we get a mismash of heroes with the Young Pair, the Golden Pair, and the ever-adaptable Mimi coming together. Everyone was civil until the bell but then chaos ensued. It seemed like Mimi and co. would turn things around but they got swept under early and spent most of the rest of the match working from underneath with a few big comebacks interspersed.

Day came off as credible with big mares and face rakes. Tsumaki had some very nice neck twists and imposed as you’d want her to (including taking out the ref at least once), but all eyes ended up on Masami. She was pretty formidable already, with a few different choke variations, one of the knee and a nasty hanging tree choke. During one of the comeback bursts, she went rope running with Yokota (including Rimi sneaking around for a slick pin). The comebacks, when they came, were energetic. Lots of big moves (Fujimi’s bodyscissors rana and goardbusters, Mimi’s neckbreakers and gutwrench suplexes, Yokota with big flapjacks). The cutoffs came quick though and the overall story more or less flowed. The finish had Fujimi hitt some butt butts out of nowhere setting things up for Yokota to get the pin on Tsumaki after a dangling butterfly suplex. It’s well worth noting how far the babyface side had come in the last year or two.