80s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Rimi!

Disc 2

1. Jackie Sato vs. Rimi Yokota (WWWA Singles Title Tournament Semi-Final) 12/16/80 

K: We’re at the penultimate match of this tournament to crown a new WWWA Singles Champion after the belt was vacated on the 8/8/80 show. There are only 3 matches from the tournament that we have footage of, the Nancy Kumi vs. Yumi Ikeshita match covered a couple of weeks ago, this, and the final. For those interested in the context, here is how the tournament played out.

1st Round
Nancy Kumi def. Yumi Ikeshita
Jackie Sato def. Mami Kumano
Rimi Yokota def. Irma Gonzalez
Monster Ripper gets a bye (I’m guessing it’s because she was the previous champ)

Semi Finals
Nancy Kumi def. Monster Ripper
Jackie Sato vs. Rimi Yokota.

So we’re now at the 2nd Semi-Final with the winner going on to face Nancy Kumi for the title later on the same show. They start this off by drawing the viewer’s attention to the size difference. Rimi is moving around apprehensively trying to find an opening, like she’s trying to solve a puzzle. She goes in for a couple of sliding kicks or takedown attempts, it’s not clear. The way she moves is unusual and looks more like a sliding soccer tackle than what you’ve expect to see in a wrestling match. It gets over that she is very skillful even if she’ll struggle to match Jackie in physical strength.

There’s a bit of clipping here and soon we’re in a new section of the match where Rimi is now working heelish and is targetting Jackie’s hand. She bends it backwards like a mean World of Sport heel, drags it against the rope and stomps on it with her boot. Her going for dirty tactics helps make it a bit more believable that she could get sustained offense on Jackie, but it also sets up Jackie to be all angry when she gets her comeback in. There’s a real venom from Jackie when she repeatedly smacks Yokota hard onto the mat with her variety of slams. It reminds me of late era Jumbo Tsuruta in how the grumpiness seems to make her a better wrestler. There’s another big comeback after this where Jackie’s even madder, she grabs Yokota by the collar and pushes her around, throws a bunch of slaps, big moves, hits one of the best vertical suplex backbreakers I’ve ever seen her do before going for a big pin. It’s exciting how much the crowd are vocally behind her beating up this little wretch, who is putting up a hell of a fight, they surely must acknowledge. 

I’ve talked up the good match narrative so far, it’s usually what I like to talk about, but this is also a great match in just mechanical execution. They both have great offense, though Jackie gets to show it off a lot more here due to her more dominant role. They do so well in the little moments to convey struggle.

Ok so things get heated, spill out to the outside and we get a double countout when Rimi clearly deliberately holds on to Jackie’s leg to force it. As we’ve covered before, AJW has a standard way to deal with “non-finishes” in matches where you need a winner, we get a period of overtime where someone needs to either get the win, or if there’s no decision in the extra time, a winner will be decided on based on who had the better performance in the extra time (it seems to be decided by the referee & commissioner).

They do an excellent job of upping the ante for the overtime. Both of them look really driven to win, Rimi especially, perhaps realising that her best chance of winning this match was getting to this scenario and then throwing absolutely everything she has in the next few minutes just to get over the line. It feels like it might work. There’s a brief section of matwork where you see that dream die though, I call it ‘brief’ but they actually do a hell of a lot in those couple of minutes. There’s a great struggle by Yokota to get Sato in the Boston Crab but she’s unable to turn her around, so she goes for a Figure Four instead but Jackie’s able to break out of that one. When she fails to put Jackie away here (or at least keep her under control till the time is up), that’s when it’s all over for her, as Jackie’s able to use the space to unleash another huge flurry of offense before successfully locking in her own Boston Crab, which she keeps locked in until the end. Yokota doesn’t submit, but she’s unable to fight back and when the bell is sounded with her defenseless in a brutal looking submission, there’s only one way the judges can call this.

This is one of the best matches of the early 80s and a great encapsulation of what this style could produce. It’s a shame we don’t have much Lucha footage from this era to compare it to, because there are some similarities in pacing and levels of flashiness, though I think the Joshi workers are still faster overall (that’s not a positive or negative, just an observation). You will find better matwork elsewhere, I think what these two especially excel at though is the feeling that nothing they’re doing has been choreographed. It’s a bit messy sometimes, but in a way that gets the blood pumping and draws me in.

****1/4

MD: I really enjoyed this. Contrast makes the world go round and this was full of it and they knew it. Jackie, despite wrestling the match clearly as a babyface and having the crowd behind her, came off almost like an angry Bruno at times. There were multiple moments in the match that were about her getting her hands on Yokota and what she’d do to her once she did. There was hairpulling, a goozle, and endless belly to back position moves (atomic drop, straight drop, belly to back down the stretch), plus multiple suplexes into backbreakers. 

Meanwhile, Yokota did everything possible to stay in it. This felt, if not like a passing of the guard, then definitely an elevation, especially down the stretch as she showed amazing heart. Not just then though. She started the match rolling about and picking at legs and doing anything she could to get Jackie off balance without getting caught. Shortly thereafter, she had this wonderful one or two minutes of dismantling the hand and arm, running it over the top rope, tossing it into the opposite top rope, stretching it over the ropes. And of course, Jackie, in her most Bruno/Jumbo reversed a stretch over the top rope and sent Yokota sprawling to the floor. It was less about Jackie selling it (though there were moments where she sold wonderfully in the moment, especially in the figure four once Yokota got it on), and more about pure containment of the superhuman ace so that Yokota even had a fighting chance.

That really defined the finish and the five-minute sudden death period that followed, as Yokota just clung to Jackie desperately on the outside so that she couldn’t beat the count and then, after some early scrambling that gave her an advantage in the overtime, she ended up caught once more and crushed, this time surviving a crab until the bell, though the match was awarded to Jackie nonetheless. While this suffers a bit from clipping, what we have is a very clear presentation of both women playing their roles extremely well in front of a crowd that knew they were seeing something special.