80s Joshi on Wednesday: Rimi! Masami!

Disc 1

6. Tenjin Masami & Rimi Yokota Interviews - 4/4/80

MD: Big takeaways here are that Masami’s family didn’t want her to get into wrestling so that was inspiring her to become a champion to show them that she could be one and the interviewer making Yokota stop her jump roping and being super patronizing before getting Jackie’s opinion on things. This made it seem like Jackie was her mentor in a way we haven’t really seen on screen so far as I can tell.

K: Just responding to Matt’s comment here. Yes Jackie Sato is depicted as Rimi Yokota’s mentor on AJW TV from early 1980-ish, there are a lot of these backstage/on location interviews/skits on the TV shows that are used to build characters (though in a less obvious “this is a TV show” way than most US wrestling). Part of the reason I included this little interview was to have at least one clip where viewers can see the Sato/Yokota relationship.

7. Rimi Yokota vs. Tenjin Masami (AJW Junior Title) - 4/4/80

K: This is, afaik, the first singles meeting between these two. In a vacuum, this might not seem like a particularly noteworthy match, but it’s also the beginning of a rivalry which would become central to the promotion within a couple of years when these two moved up to feuding for the World Title.

You can also see that these two are talented, probably the best babyface/heel of the new generation, which I’ll define as those who joined the promotion after the Beauty Pair boom had already begun. You see a few slight hesitations in their movements, especially in that early stretch where they tried to start the match all action, but for the most part they pull it all off well. Yokota is not just an incredible athlete, but she manages to incorporate it into her offense far more functionally than almost all wrestlers physically capable of pulling off what she can do. The spot where she dodges Masami with a handstand flip to the side before spinning around in a dropkick is both meticulous and all the more effective because it doesn’t look totally smooth.

Masami is a bit less developed in terms of mechanics. Her offense is very good and most of it looks like she’s really trying to hurt her opponent, but her bumps are still a bit awkward and stiff. It’s most noticeable when she gets hit with a monkey flip and, well the way she took it wasn’t that aesthetically pleasing even if it wasn’t outright ‘bad’. But where she already shines is in her demeanour. She feels like a menacing and vicious presence throughout, there’s something about the way she walks that makes her feel even bigger than she is. She has these slightly bigger than you’d expect strides. Her facial expressions are excellent, even in moments where not much else is happening she just looks like a dangerous angry woman on the verge of really snapping, without getting too hammy with it.

And of course I couldn’t write about this match without mentioning the memorable moment. The lemon. It’s not just that she pulls out a lemon and rubs it in Yokota’s eyes to blind her in an acid attack, although that alone would have been cool. It’s also how she sets it up by attacking the eyes earlier in the match, so the crowd has eye-attacks in mind. She also doesn’t get the lemon out until Yokota is on the outside recovering, so the crowd has plenty of time to notice that she’s about to do something evil. It’s not just a spot being good but working to get the most out of it.

We had a lot of chaos early on with the Black Pair (they’re becoming more of a faction now, and that will shortly become official) and the babyfaces fighting on the outside, which makes things feel really heated until they’re all cleared out so we get more of a straight match. I think the interference was deployed quite well here seeing as the heels were doing it from the start and it felt like a storm Yokota had to fight to weather before her friends cleared them out rather than just some random external thing breaking up the match flow.

The more straight match section was definitely the weaker part of the match, even with the lemon incident. Probably because they’re having to go to a time limit draw and didn’t really have it in them to work that long a match and keep it interesting (yet), although they do pick things up for the last few minutes. Definitely a cool thing to have though, so let’s keep an eye on these two going forward.

***1/4 

MD: The future unfolding before our eyes. I’m not going to say these two were fully formed (they weren’t), but they were farther along than I might have expected. You could see it in Yokota’s early explosive athleticism. I had to watch an early spot where she burst through a cross-chop block and did a front handstand at lightning fast speed in order to get an advantage three or four times. It was that good and relatively hard to follow. Meanwhile, everything you needed to know, and I mean really, really needed to know, about Masami was in her face, the little malicious sneer she was able to carry herself with throughout most of the match. And they had so many of the other trappings down just when it came to how hard they hit, how deeply they struggled, the way they’d bridge up out of pins or roll onto their stomach after a move to save themselves. 

Masami countered that early athleticism with sheer cruelness. She had an advantage on the outside with Black Army coaches helping her do damage and inspiring her to be her worst. That meant doing Kumano’s hanging choke on the apron followed by the fireman’s carry press slam. Eventually, they were able to clear the ringside area with no small effort and things reset. That meant a brief advantage for Yokota before Masami started on the eyes, and she started on them with a vengeance, first with rakes, but then by squeezing a lemon (that she hid in her bosom mind you) and driving it into Yokota’s eye. Brilliant heatseeking. 

I could have used a more definitive moment of comeback, but Yokota did fire back, using first a body scissors and then a figure-four, with Masami trying to bite Yokota’s knee to get out of it. They escalated to bombs, including a nice over the shoulder facebuster by Masami (which is where Yokota immediately went to her stomach), and as time was ticking down, Yokota had a last advantage with an over the shoulder backbreaker. As we know, I haven’t watched too far ahead even if I have seen a couple of Yokota vs Masami matches in passing, but this felt like a great foundation for everything to come.