80s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Rimi!

Disc 2 

7. Jackie Sato vs. Rimi Yokota (WWWA Singles Title) 2/25/81

K: These two wrestled each other in the tournament for the vacated title just two months before this (and covered earlier) but this match feels very different to that one. The pace is a lot slower (not that I’d call it ‘slow’, but comparatively) and plays out more as a straight wrestling contest. We do get a bit of heeling from Rimi when she targets Jackie’s hand, for example grinding it against the ropes, but it’s so brief it feels more like a wrestler determined to win than actual villainous behaviour.

The standout moments for me here are the moves that they don’t execute cleanly. I liked when Rimi first bridges out of one of Jackie’s pin attempts, she wobbles a bit trying to come up straight to her feet, like she was only just barely able to pull that off. The delay that wobble caused is enough for Jackie to hit her with a big forward thrusting kick. 

There’s a similar sense of struggle in the pin attempts. They don’t allow their opponent to get anywhere near a pin if they can help it. There’s even one cover where I’m not sure Rimi would even have got a count of 0.1 as Jackie launches her shoulder off the mat and tries to roll onto her side before Rimi had even applied the cover properly. It’s one thing I wish was more prevalent in wrestling as a whole, the wrestlers treating being on your back as being in mortal danger. After seeing too much of this it throws me off a bit when I watch some other wrestling and it seems like wrestlers are just voluntarily allowing their opponents to cover them because “well I’ll just kick out at 2”. In matches like these if the referee gets a 2 count it means you’re in serious trouble and might just be about to lose, often by your opponent just reapplying the cover until you’re too exhausted to escape it and get pinned.

Which is how this match ends and a new champion is crowned. I don’t want to sound too downbeat here, as I still think this was well-wrestled and enjoyable for the most part, and has a few moments I thought were very good indeed. But considering the magnitude of the occasion, I wish this match was a lot better or at least more memorable than it was. It’s possible that it came across ‘basic’ as they just wanted to demonstrate that Rimi Yokota was the superior wrestler now and there was no need to add any more sparkle onto it. In that regard, it probably was a success. But looking back it results in a match that isn’t all that interesting and - contrary to the reputation of acclaimed 80s Joshi - hasn’t aged well.

***1/4

MD: They made this feel like a big deal by having previous champions, Jumbo Miyamoto and Maki Ueda out there pre-match and commentating. Maki, of course, wanted Jackie to win and noted as much. For obvious reasons, this didn’t have quite the contrast of their last match and I think it might have suffered relatively, even if it still accomplished what it set out to do.

That’s not to say that Jackie didn’t dominate early. She clearly did. Rimi was able to cartwheel through at one point but not really capitalize on it. Instead she got tossed around and stretched by Jackie. When she did take over, it was dramatic. She stepped on each toe and then stepped over an arm before following from her big offensive flurry of their last match, that nasty, nasty destruction of the fingers on the top rope. It’s really brutal stuff and we get to see it more clearly here because the VQ is a little better than last time. 

Jackie was able to reset things by going out to the floor and she took back over, building to putting on an Octopus. Rimi came back with her dynamic press up sitting senton but instead of following it with a second, she arched backwards for a ‘rana and a surprising nearfall. Jackie reset on the floor once more (which does involve Rimi bashing her into chairs first). The rest of the match was bomb throwing, with Jackie hitting some devastating offense onto the back and Rimi hitting double underhook suplexes like there was no size difference between the two at all. To hit them so easily did really make it seem like she and Jackie were equals in a way that wasn’t present in the first match. Which takes us to yet another one of those abrupt early 80s AJW finishes where it comes down to pressing shoulders onto the mat in a scrappy shooty way that sort of leaves story behind. It’s akin to running a marathon and then trying to sprint over the finish line, I guess. To me it feels disjointed even if there’s a wild energy to it. Here Yokota had some small advantage for the way she bridges out of pins athletically, but after a slam and three attempts, and I think to everyone’s surprise, she won. Jackie was quick to shake her hand, clap, and get the heck out of there. This was a little more subdued then their last match but that was the price of having Rimi of more of an “ace” equal. If she had accomplished more with speed instead of power, they probably could have still gotten much of the same effect across, but that’s not what they were trying to do.