80s Joshi on Wednesday: Mimi! Kai!

Disc 2 

12. Leilani Kai vs. Mimi Hagiwara (All Pacific Title) 8/25/81

K: I'd say Mimi Hagiwara is the earliest Joshi wrestler who was obviously pushed for being conventionally attractive to male fans. Her gimmick was that she an 'idol wrestler', but I'd argue she is not truly a precursor of Idol Wrestling (capitalisation deliberate) as we know it today. It was a gimmick, something to make her stand out. She wasn't working in a company full of idols, she still had to operate under pro-wrestling logic. Especially now that she's being pushed as the company's #2 babyface.

My first thought on the opening is how it's laid out to make Mimi look strong and should be taken seriously. Leilani makes the first attack, but Mimi just starts throwing strikes back in retaliation and doesn't even seem phased by the attempted ambush. She doesn't just win the striking battle though, but she gets to throw in a few impressive take downs as well like her flying headscissors, and counter-wrestles Kai to beat her on the mat. Watching this in kayfabe, you'd have to reach the conclusion that anyone dismissing Mimi's wrestling ability is a fool, but even outside of kayfabe, she hits all of this with pretty good execution. She's not Jaguar Yokota but it's all good enough for me to buy into it.

Kai's comeback is that move where she just throws her opponent chest first into the top rope. I've never liked that move and it's a weak transition here and didn't play off well everything that'd happened before (i.e. Mimi steamrolling her). It barely goes anywhere though, as Mimi's back on offense soon enough, this time looking even more dominant taking things to the outside and throwing Kai into the chairs. And when Kai gets in the ring, Mimi pulls out her boxing skills and pummels her with a flurry of body-shots which I thought Kai sold very well. She looked like the air had been punched out of her.

The finish is a double countout after Mimi apparently got so carried away beating up Leilani on the outside that she forgot about the 20 count. I don't know how else to read it as Kai was hardly stopping her from getting back in the ring. I guess there was a bit of politics involved, even if it is a bit funny to me that it was ok for Kai to look totally dominated by a skinny pretty girl so long as she didn't take a pin. 

***

MD: Well, this was a match. Mimi took about 80% of it over 14 minutes or so, maybe even more. They slugged it out to start and Mimi took over with a great headstand ‘rana/flying headscissors takeover combo and she really never looked back. There were two bits of Kai coming back and she looked pretty credible when she did, but this was not shine/heat/comeback. It was a mauling. First time she missed a splash after maybe two or three chained moves and the second she missed a top rope splash after a (nice) suplex and body slam.

Meanwhile, Hagiwara was a force, inside the ring, outside the ring. Her offense started to loop a bit because she could only do so much to Kai. She hit a bunch of neckbreakers, a couple of suplexes, had an octopus hold, some pinning combos, and so on. Jackie was on commentary and I wouldn’t say Haigwara looked like an ace here, but when she was tossing Kai around the outside without any real opposition she looked like a force. Finish had them roll out on the figure-four and brawl with Mimi just missing the count back in to make this a face-saving draw for Kai. Kind of a weird one, honestly.

13. Mimi Hagiwara Sings Stand Up 1/4/82

K: I’m not going to review the singing performance ha. There is an old DVDVR thread discussing a potential 80s Joshi set where someone comments that each disc must have a song, and they’re right. You’re missing too big an element of the promotion without them. If you watch the original TVs (which were 1 hour or 30 minutes) almost every episode has a song on it. So they actually take up a much smaller proportion of screen-time on the set.

MD: And just like that, we’re in 1982. And Mimi Hagiwara is commanding the room, or the ring, singing Stand Up. I’ve seen Jackie and others sing as part of this and you don’t get quite as much of their in-ring personalities, but I think you do get that more with Hagiwara, but I am not going to go much deeper than that here, sorry.