70s Joshi on Wednesday: Kumano! Ikeshita!

33. 1979.05.XX3 - Mami Kumano vs. Yumi Ikeshita

K: This is a spiritually satisfying match. A trope of more recent times that I both dislike and don’t really understand is when heels are pitted against each other in round robin tournaments, you expect them to not take the match seriously enough. Well, I’m sure the idea is to get themselves heat by not giving the fans a good show. They’ll just dawdle about barely even pretending to make an effort against each other. Sometimes there’ll be a creative twist on it, like the Taichi vs. Taka Michinoku match where they did as much offense as you could possibly imagine without ever touching each other. It’s not for me though. I also don’t think it really even works as intended. Any heat generated is dissipated by the time it’s over anyway.

This the earliest heel vs. heel match we have from AJW, where they take the opposite approach. If anything, the take these matches as an opportunity to unleash all these bottled up resentments they stored up for the other. Right from the bell they’re not just trying to win, but there’s a nastiness to all of it. These two are just not nice people at all. But fortunately for us, it’s entertaining, and who doesn’t want to see these two maim one another anyway.

I’m not sure about this thought, but if there’s a slight nuance to the alignments here, I’d say Ikeshita may be working very slightly more babyface. She has more of an earned comeback about 5 minutes in than Kumano ever does. It’s done with a surprising kip-up, and a bit later she goes for what looked like the beginning motion of Sliced Bread #2, but instead of the neckbreaker motion she just lands on her feet behind Mami and then quickly hits her with that signature twisting slam. There’s a flicker of the spectacular with some of Ikeshita’s offense that we never see from Kumano.

But I may be reading too much into that, as before long Ikeshita is also upping the ante in terms of pure viciousness when she gets hold of the microphone cable and strangles Kumano with it like she’s just trying to murder her. The match descends into both wrestlers mainly just trying to strangle and choke each other actually. It’s really ugly stuff that part of you feels like you’re a bit of a sicko for watching this. Especially when you’re not rooting for either of them. But also, I feel like I have to watch it not just out of enjoyment of seeing the heels get hurt, but I want to see how far they’ll go. How much they piss each other off. Seeing them competing over who can be the most vile also benefits future matches, coz even if we’re not rooting for anyone here, the memories of this will be in the back of our minds when we next see this evil pair up against wrestlers we do like. So even if the match is only in the good - not - great range, it achieves something beyond that.

***1/4

MD: This was a league match to help pick the six women for the Japan side. And it is the Black Pair exploding. And it’s great. We don’t know what we don’t know and we don’t have what we don’t have, but these two really do come off as the prototypes for every major joshi villain for the next decade. They’re screaming, merciless, violent, dynamic, interesting monsters. I’d say that Kumano was stronger and fiercer but Ikeshita was more athletic, but it didn’t really matter. They were more than the sum of their parts and their parts were pretty formidable.

This was a war; no quarter was given. Kumano rushes right in with nasty hairpulls and she escalates soon enough to these rigid neckbreakers where she just tries to twist Ikeshita’s head off. Kumano does damage on the outside first but Ikeshita spends the first chunk fighting back whenever she can, going for a leg or a face or whatever in reach. She finally fires back with a slingshot body press followed by these pendulum power slams, but Kumano’s right back with the seated senton off the top.

When things boil over, they really boil over, with Ikeshita destroying Kumano with nasty chairshots on the outside and Kumano having a fit in return, grabbing a chair and fighting her way back in with it. She was able to get her dangling hanging chokehold on the apron but when she went for it again Ikeshita’s familiarity won out and she was able to make both of them tumble. She missed a death stomp to the floor and they ended up choking each other almost to death with a microphone cord and beating each other with the microphone itself. It all devolved into a double countout, but it was some beautiful chaos while we had it.