70s Joshi on Wednesday: Finale

CLOSING THOUGHTS

K: I’m coming at this from a very different place to Matt in that I’d seen maybe 60% of these matches before starting this, but I’d written very little nor did I have many organised thoughts about 1970s Joshi. I mostly saw it as an interesting precursor to my prime interest, the 80s & 90s Joshi boom periods. Have my views changed? No. Not in any significant way at least. But I do feel much more comfortable in writing about it now that I’ve seen basically everything there is available to see.

Overall Pros:

I love the very rudimentary way in which AJW presented pro-wrestling, and I can see that’s still here early on. They present what you’re watching as a sport, but it’s also a collection of human interest stories. We meet all the AJW wrestlers from a young age, often before they’ve even debuted, and see them scratch and claw to move up the rankings as spaces open up above them (something that’s constantly happening due to retirements), some will make it all the way to the top and some won’t. 

On the face of it, AJW sells itself as providing an opportunity for girls to become glamorous stars and even pop singers. But there’s a darker side to this that isn’t shied away from. The training is depicted as harsh and gruelling and the injuries are real. There’s a sense of apprehension from watching the bigger matches that someone getting seriously hurt might happen at any moment, and the wrestlers really play into it with their desperation mannerism. It doesn’t feel like something ‘real’ incidentally creeping into the performance of pro-wrestling, but part of the show itself.

That leads me into another AJW speciality: tragedy. They’re not the only promotion to ever put on matches that make you feel sad, but there’s this specific combination of high melodrama in some famous big heel victories that transcends standard pro-wrestling. Part of is it feels like the focus isn’t on the heel for doing something dastardly, but rather with the babyface, like the purpose is to generate empathy between the audience and babyface as they witness and share in their suffering. Sometimes the matches themselves aren’t great but the spectacle itself is special and should be seen. The 7/31/79 tag between Black Pair and Queen Angels is the best example of this from the 70s, the Jackie Sato vs. Monster Ripper match where Jackie is left in a pool of blood before her distraught fans is also in the same vein.

Another appealing thing to me is the sense of camaraderie between the babyface wrestlers, the tag teams in particular. This is probably mostly down to gender (and social norms), but the way the babyface tag teams seem to care deeply about each other’s wellbeing whereas the heel tag teams are strictly business gangster types gives the company a different vibe to other wrestling around the time.  

The in-ring: First things first, 70s Joshi is not the best wrestling in the world at the time, nor is it even my personal favourite. It is one of the most creative and interesting scenes though. The general attitude that women’s wrestlers had to go above and beyond just to be taken seriously makes for an intriguing watch. The moves Tomi Aoyama and Yumi Ikeshita were pulling out on the regular wouldn’t have looked out of place in today’s wrestling, except maybe in that they look a little more like they’re trying to hurt their opponent than most modern wrestlers. But we’re still in a primitive time here, where the Zenjo crew hadn’t really figured out how to effectively deploy these innovations into great wrestling matches. While the high-octane, running, jumping, dropkicking style Joshi is most associated with is already here, we’re still missing two essential elements of the prime years. Firstly, nobody really wrestles a ‘heavyweight’ style, other than the foreign wrestlers (I suspect seeing Monster Ripper influenced some of the later Japanese wrestlers). Secondly, the shootstyle/martial arts influenced moves/strikes are also absent, in fact you rarely see any 70s Joshi worker throw a strike that isn’t a dropkick.

Cons:

For reasons touched on earlier, there’s a lack of great matches. It can get quite frustrating when you see good matches that look like they’re going to become great but never do. Either because the wrestlers haven’t figured out how to hit that higher gear, or they’re not really even thinking in those terms. The closest example I can think of a match where it felt like the wrestlers consciously tried to have a ‘great match’ is the Beauty Pair showdown in Budokan Hall, which we’re only seeing heavily clipped so we don’t really know if it was a great match or if the editing makes it look more coherent than it actually was. 

The booking. The Matsunaga Brothers have never been renowned as bookers (though they certainly had some good runs), but 1978-79 at least barely resembles a ‘booked’ wrestling promotion at all. They did competently build up Monster Ripper I’ll give them that, but for the most part matches just seemed randomly thrown on shows just for the sake of having matches. That’s not necessarily a bad thing as it can help your important matches/furthering of angles feel more meaningful if there’s some inconsequential stuff to stand out against, but the ratio is way off. I couldn’t tell you who was mainly feuding with who the vast majority of the time. And while I do see some merit in keeping the Named Tag Team vs. Named Tag Team matches to the big shows, the amount of times members of Named Tag Team would tag with someone other than their partner on regular shows without any sort of angle being made of it does feel like laziness more than anything else.

Finishes. I’m not one of these “matches should have a clean finish” guys. DQs and countouts are important, even if for no other reason than to establish with the audience that they can happen. And I know it’s a bit silly to watch any wrestling from this period not expecting a lot of non-finishes, especially when the bigger names are wrestling each other. It is definitely still a negative though that it happens so often. To touch on the 80s, I think a secret element to Dump Matsumoto’s success is that, while the finishes to her matches were hardly ever ‘clean’, they usually were decisive. 

So, who are the best wrestlers from the 70s? I guess I’m being pretty uncontroversial in saying Jackie Sato was the deserving Ace as she also was the best wrestler in the promotion, especially after Maki Ueda retired. We don’t get to see much of Ueda before she’s already gone so it’s hard to assess her, but I think it’s safe to say she was one of the better workers in the period we saw her.

I prefer Yumi Ikeshita to Mami Kumano overall, but Matt’s perspective has helped me appreciate Kumano more than I did previously. I like that she has a distinct in-ring identity to Ikeshita in that she feels a lot more hot-headed and visceral in her heeling, whereas Ikeshita is more of a rational but evil cheater. It creates more opportunities to develop the narratives of matches when you can focus on either aspect of their villainy.

Tomi Aoyama is the most fascinating to watch because she’s just so desperate to use her athleticism to stand out and be great even when she barely knows what she’s doing. The sheer recklessness in her flying around gives it a slightly different flavour to e.g. the NJPW junior matches, although she predates them becoming a big influence. 

Rimi Yokota of course later becomes Jaguar and we’re mainly watching her because of who she becomes. While she’s clearly the best of her generation of wrestlers even early on, I definitely disagree with anyone saying she was already the best (or close to) the best wrestler in the company already at this point. She’s special and she gets it, but she still needs a bit of seasoning.

I am not a fan of Nancy Kumi and deep-diving her matches did not do her any favours at all. She does have a handful of very good performances but boy does she feel like the most uninteresting wrestler alive on her average day. She’s still alive and occasionally pops up on social media so I hope no one starts telling her she sucked in the 70s but I will speak the truth here.

I think that’s all I have to say for now. On we go to the glorious 80s and some of the best wrestling that has ever happened. 

MD: When we started this, I didn't really have any expectations. I thought we might find some great matches (and we at least found some very good ones). I thought we'd be doing some good work in mapping out one of the few mostly unmapped areas in wrestling, and I think we did manage that quite well. 

Mainly though, I thought I'd give myself the best possible basis, and maybe the best basis that anyone's ever had, to dive into 1980s joshi, and I feel like I absolutely have that. 

I had been warned about some repetitive matches and I didn't necessarily see that so much. The biggest issue was the relative greenness of some of the wrestlers and then the extremely unfortunate US vs Japan series which might have been okay, if substandard relative to what came before and after, were it not for the constant heel ref antics. 

It was great to see the ascension of Jackie as a singles Ace, the debut of Monster Ripper as an immediate force, the early development of 80s stalwarts in Yokota, Masami, and Hori, to name a few. It was absolutely surprising to see that most of our 78 footage was from Hawaii. Who knew, right? 

To me, though, the story of this footage can be told through two teams, The Queen Angels of Tomi Aoyama and Lucy Kayama and the Black Pair of Mami Kumano and Yuki Ishikawa. While they do make it into the 80s, they weren't people I knew much about coming into this. 

We have so little footage of Shinobu Aso, who preceded Kumano in the Black Pair, but there's every indication that you can trace back the chaotic heel energy that would carry forward to Dump and onward at least from her. But Kumano and Ikeshita had it in spades. Kumano was cool as could be with her one-armed ring jacket and hangman's choke off the apron. Ikeshita had a few huge top rope moves like a seated senton. Both of them would play hide the object or whack their opponents in the head with a metal box or just rub their faces into the mat. If they were in a match, you knew it was going to be good and that it would eventually devolve into glorious chaos. I lean towards Kumano over Ikeshita. The latter might have been a more complete wrestler, but Kumano had this singular energy and presence to her.

The Queen Angels stood out to me more than the Beauty Pair. Tomi feels like the missing link to some of the high octane stars of the 90s, big dynamic offense, some of which, like her leap back off the top rope, would still seem impressive today. And "Mt. Lucy" was the perfect partner to her, full of fire. And then both were buoyed by the "Queen Rocket" dive that won them matches via countout and gave the crowd something to hope for each and every time out. 

So now that we're done, what's next? Kadaveri had lovingly put together the 80s joshi set last year but now we're going to go through it match by match. So much of this save for the top top best known stuff will be new to me, and it’s going to take us a while to get through it (I won’t be ready for GWE next year certainly) but it’s a journey worth taking. I’ve looked ahead and at least for the first couple of years there are no (or maybe very, very few) wrestlers I’m not already familiar with. So this project has prepped me for it perfectly. While it’s great to go through the weeds like this too, I am very much looking forward to the more curated approach ahead of me. If you’ve been on the fence watching it, follow along with us one match a week.