2025 Joshi on Thursday? Sareee! Satomura!

Sareee-ISM Chapter VI 1/23/25

Sareee vs. Meiko Satomura

MD: Didn't expect to be writing about this one, but the stars aligned and I had a few to quickly jot down some thoughts. I am 100% a tourist in modern joshi. I'm starting back in the 70s, remember? While I've seen my share of everything that followed, I've got a working knowledge at best. While I have plenty of general admiration for Satomura, I couldn't tell you my favorite match of hers. I've seen just a handful of Sareee matches from the last few years. But it's fun to be a tourist, right? Trying to be a completionist becomes a burden. Trying to keep up with everything is a chore. We're in an amazing world that we can just drop in on CMLL or a show like this or Globo de la Muerte in Puerto Rico or the latest DPW show and then pop out and come back whenever you want. Amazing times. 

And this was a pretty amazing match to drop in on. It felt big, bigger than the venue, bigger than the stakes on paper. It felt as big as anything in the world so far this year. The sense I get is that Sareee is particularly good at that, of carrying forward that Ace quality of making matches feel bigger than they should, just because she's in them, because of how she wrestles. And of course Satomura, on her retirement run, carries herself with such stature and presence, literal stature even; she looks carved out of granite and wrestles just as tough as it. When Sareee got right in her face before the match, it set the tone immediately and from there they never looked back.

Everything was tough here. That was the point. That's what made this special. It was relatively close to 50-50. Neither wrestler was able to carry momentum for long, but because everything felt like a struggle, all the way from the first lock up to the finishing Scorpio Rising shining axe kick, it had a certain substance that most matches structured similarly couldn't begin to match. If a wrestler left her feet, it was for a specific reason. At one point, each wrestler needed to step up on the ropes to enhance an armdrag or takedown. It wasn't done for flash. It was done because they needed to get that extra bit of leverage to take their opponent over. That sounds like a given, so matter of fact, but it's actually incredibly rare for me to see a move like that and feel like it was not just warranted but necessary, that it was substance instead of just style (and style's ok! But to have it be both is always superior and like I said, so, so rare).

Sareee just gets it. She balances explosiveness and hard shots with expressiveness in the moment and engaging with the crowd. If they start to clap and it dies down, she'll slap the mat to keep them going. If she's about to lock on a hold intended to last for a little bit, she'll get them going again so that they're with her the whole way through. When it came to a stand up strike exchange, she went down hard after each blow so that she could rise back up, determination on her face, whacking the mat to show how much she cared, how much the fans should care, how much it all mattered. 

That's pro wrestling. She created something out of nothing with her reactions and attitude and body language and added it to everything already in the air (Satomura's retirement run, the specialness of these Sareee-ISM shows, her own position as a freelancer ace, the weight behind Satomura's actual forearm) to create a moment and a match that was far more than the sum of its already impressive parts. Just a hell of a place for a tourist to find himself in the middle of a frigid January week.