80s Joshi on Wednesday: Masami! Tomoko!

Disc 2  

8. Devil Masami vs. Tomoko Kitamura (AJW Title Decision Match) 5/9/81

K: Tomoko Kitamura, in case you didn’t know, would later adopt the ringname Lioness Asuka. That her name is actually Tomoko is never really hidden from fans from what I can tell. In later years you can clearly hear wrestlers calling her by this name in on-set skits and stuff that aired on AJW TV regularly. 

As mentioned in a previous write-up, Kitamura is (still) the AJW Junior Champion, which she won in a decision match after Rimi Yokota vacated the belt. This match is for the AJW Title, which is the next belt up in the company’s hierarchy (which around this point, becomes well-defined) and, believe it or not, was also recently vacated by Rimi Yokota. It shows you how rapidly Yokota was pushed, and that it probably wasn’t all a long-term plan, that in the space of a few months she’s had to vacate lower-card belts she held because she’d become too strongly pushed to lose to anyone else who would be competing for them.

This is also - as far as I’m aware - Devil Masami’s first challenge for a singles belt that wasn’t the Junior’s Title. Her gradual improvement has been very noticeable watching all the footage, even athletically, she feels a bit more flexible and snappier with her movements than a year ago. But of course with Masami, her strongest attribute is how brilliantly expressive she is. You don’t need to understand a word of Japanese to just pay attention to Masami’s facial expressions and be engaged with what’s happening in the ring. As well as showing pain, she just looks sad when Tomoko’s got her in a hold she’s struggling to get out of. You see the fears moving in her brain when she stops to thinking of a new way to get herself out of this predicament after her previous idea didn’t work. She’ll look proper chuffed when one of her moves pays off, and she’s able to exact a bit of vindictive retaliation. Another nice touch is how she’ll make a brief pause, shout something, because hitting a move, like she’s signalling to he crowd to pay attention to what I’m about to do because it’s going to be something important in the match, without being so obvious about it that it suspension of disbelief gets killed. And she achieves all this without it ever getting too hammy, it’s the kind of thing I think Edge often tried to pull off, but he’d usually overdo it and just come across goofy. Even in this match, when she’s not fully put it together yet, and there’s a purposeless limitation on how great the match can be because of their position on the card and that’s how AJW did things, Masami looks like a special talent. She’s just so watchable. 

It may feel like I’m being harsh on Tomoko by having less to say about her, but that wouldn’t be entirely fair. She has a good performance here, even if she feels like she’s being carried in terms of who is driving the match narrative. But she hits all her spots well, her dropkicks are impressive and you can hear she’s getting the crowd behind her in her big comeback segment. She’s definitely more over than Chigusa is at this point if you compare crowd reactions in their matches against Masami. The famous clapping and screaming young female fans of this era usually aren’t that hot for anyone not the Beauty Pair, but they get pretty loud of Kitamura here, and a few of them look physically distraught when she loses in a questionable three count. I’ll note that the main event of this show (not on the set) was Rimi Yokota defending the WWWA Singles Title against Peggy Lee, and the crowd didn’t feel like they were getting behind Yokota as much as they were for Kitamura by the final minutes of this.

I’m probably going to be higher on this than most people. There weren’t many standout moments and it’s all quite basic wrestling, something about this style when done right just connects with me. There’s a gritty determination to win coming from both wrestlers in their battles on the match and over the shoulders with the various pin attempts, even if she’s a villain I still feel “oh that title means something” when Masami looks all emotional upon winning it. The selling was a bit better than normal, it’s mostly in the moment selling, but when nobody’s doing things like spending several minutes attacking a specific body part, there’s no need for anything more than that. 

The other bit of context for this is that Jackie Sato and Yumi Ikeshita are now both effectively retired. Jackie’s retirement ceremony will be a couple of weeks after this. So this match can also be read as an audition for moving up the card, someone has to fill those top babyface/heel spots, and the wrestler who moves up to fill them then has to have their previous spot filled by someone below them. It’s all quite interesting.

***1/4

MD: As best as I can tell this was the end of a Grand Prix for a chance to face Rimi, but I’m sure we’ll have more on this up above. Kitamura was the 1980 Rookie of the Year and the current Jr. champion and the future Lioness Asuka. Masami, of course, has a giant butterfly on her white gear despite being a Black Devil. 

More on Kitamura in a moment, but I find Masami fascinating to watch already. I mentioned previously how Hagiwara, a former actress, was incredible emotive in her selling. She was, but I’d say that she was conventionally emotive. Very good in all the ways one would look for and expect. Masami is emotive as well, but in unconventional ways. Her performances reach out and grasp you; they surprise you and draw you in. I had expected that when she was on offense, because she’s known for projecting a sort of malevolent glee; I’d go a step further and say that it’s almost languid at times, casual, as if she’s having a special conversation with the referee as she’s tearing apart her opponent. It’s true when she’s taking offense too though, the way her face seems to contort in both agony and near-disbelief that this is somehow happening to her. 

My big take on our first look at Kitamura was that she was very competent. She wrestled in a straightforward manner with lightning sharp focus. She won the early exchanges. Masami was able to turn things around using the ropes into a rowboat type move, but even then, Kitamura dragged her back to the mat. Mid-match she took over once again, now using dirty tactics, but Kitamura withstood them and was able to bring things back to even. It was only after things took a tumble to the outside and Masami started using foreign objects that she took over for good and was able to quickly drop her and get a, I would say, heavily contested win. It’s one thing to do these shoot pins and have wrestlers force one another’s shoulders to the mat, but we’ve seen a couple of matches now where they clearly were unable to keep them down, or even come close to keeping them down and the count continued anyway. It all feels very weird to me. Overall, this had a different feel to me as Kitamura brought something different to the table, maybe something a bit more straightforward while still being formidable nonetheless.