70s Joshi on Wednesday: Nancy! Seiko!

44. 1979.08.XX2 - 01 Nancy Kumi vs. Seiko Hanawa

K: Matt is correct in that this show is actually from July, as the commentary hypes the Jackie Sato vs. Monster Ripper title match on July 31st. To prepare for this project, I made a good effort to catalog every 70s AJW match there’s footage of and put them in chronological order, but because of the lack of dates in written sources/me not understanding Japanese, a lot of that came down to just looking at the footage and guesswork. The auto-translated captions on YouTube have since given us some new insights.

I’m writing this very shortly after seeing a tweet saying “Everyone knows the legend of Jackie Sato. But Nancy Kumi was one of the best of the 1970's.” It’s not my style to call anyone out in these posts but I’m going to use that as bouncing off point, as I certainly have not come to this conclusion about Nancy Kumi from the footage we’ve made our way through so far. She’s been an extremely uninteresting wrestler. But I’ll give her another shot here as she faces her junior Seiko Hanawa.

Well the first thing of note I saw was Nancy miss a flying crossbody, but Seiko just stood there for a couple of seconds looking a bit confused before deciding she’s supposed to go on offense now. That was a bit strange. But then again this whole match is a bit strange. They both seem to be working heel for some reason, at least in terms of structure. Seiko’s control isn’t the most engaging wrestling ever but when Nancy counters a headscissors and takes over everything grinds to a halt as she sticks her knee into Seiko’s back and, well do you know this hold where they just do that but also with the feet as well? This goes on for a minute or so and the commentary really put over how important this is by cutting to one of the announcers walking around chatting with fans.

Most of the match is Nancy in control, and it’s not that bad in a vacuum. She does have some malice in her hits and normally I’d want to get behind whoever she’s whacking with a chair on the outside. I think really Hanawa is the bigger problem here. She just doesn’t really do anything to make you want to get behind her, though like I said it’s like she was working heel earlier in the match. This all comes together when we get Hanawa launching into her comeback to utter silence and it’s just sad. Crowd could not care less about what’s happening in the ring at this point. The only thing that wakes them up a bit is when Nancy goes up top to finish this failure of a match.

3/4*

MD: This was the US vs Japan preliminary league and I’m not convinced this isn’t from July and not August due to the commentary. Lots of distraction as they had fun with the high school boys in the crowd so they weren’t fully focused on the match. They did list off some of the standings and it was more than I could follow.

Kumi was the primary aggressor here. They both went for dropkicks at the start but immediately thereafter, Kumi was slamming Hanawa around ringside. Hanawa came back after a missed move off the ropes and had a nice rolling headlock but Kumi deadlifted her up by her head out of it and took over for most of the match. That included some brutal chairshots on the outside and a bridging figure four.

Hanawa came back with this impactful gobehind roll up that almost felt like a snap German and then had a great fiery comeback with a lot of takeovers before Kumi shut her down. Kumi finished her off with these sort of Northern Lights Gourdbusters and a top rope twisting splash. Pretty good sprint overall. The legwork went nowhere, of course, but I liked the transitions and that goes a long way. I'm kinder to it than Kadaveri was but certainly not required watching.