70s Joshi on Wednesday: Victoria! Day!

47. 1979.08.XX3 - 02 Cheryl Day vs. Victoria Fujimi

K: Cheryl Day starts this match with a strange leaning back a few inches more than you’d expect pose like she’s about to start doing the limbo. Whatever this tactic is it doesn’t work as Victoria takes over the match pretty quickly with one of her typical flurries of screaming offense, only to get over-zealous on one of her flying crossbodies and crashes and burns.

The match then follows that basic formula through to the end. Cheryl Day continues to aim for the throat in much of her offense, but there’s not that much malice to it really and she just moves a bit too slow for it to feel like she really beating Victoria down. I get leaving space between moves to ‘milk’ things but it wasn’t effective here. I did think it was a little bit interesting that both of Victoria’s comeback moments where basically her being on the outside and then storming into the ring throwing everything she had at Cheryl. It’s not a comeback I remember seeing very often yet she does it twice her, the second time Cheryl was unable to turn the tables on her and she got the win with what the announcer called a ‘Manji’, but really was an Octopus Hold.

But overall, not a memorable match at all. Looking forward to the next two matches we have from this card though.

**

MD: We’ve seen almost 50 matches now and this is one of the first ones where I came in thinking that we weren’t going to learn much of anything from. And that was more or less true. That doesn’t mean it wasn’t competent. Day was very good at controlling the pace and her stuff absolutely looks credible. She has a lot of different knee shots, single and double. Her stuff looks consistently good but even when she’s causing havoc on the outside, it never quite transcends in the way the Black Pair do, for instance. There were good and even memorable bits here, the two of them standing up and slugging (and Day’s slip under armdrag), Day basically flipping a table on to a heavily selling Fujimi (helped by Kumi) on the outside, and the two big comebacks were Fujimi rushed in from the floor with big fiery flurries. That included the finish where she hit a really nasty gourdbuster more or less stopping time from the impact, before finishing Day with maybe the first Octopus Hold we’ve seen in the footage. I don’t think the sum of the whole was greater than any of the parts here. Both Day and Fujimi are better as role players for someone else’s story maybe?

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Mimi! Victoria! Day! Masami!

45. 1979.08.XX2 - 02 Cheryl Day & Tenjin Masami vs. Mimi Hagiwara & Victoria Fujimi

K: This has a crazy start where Victoria Fujimi just recklessly launches herself through the air only to splat herself on the match. Well that set the scene for a wild match. Strangely though, she tags out for Mimi Hagiwara soon afterwards and then barely does anything for the first half of it, and this is a very long one.

There’s little to criticise about the work in the moment here. Mimi’s selling of strikes stands out as particularly good. But this is just way too long and they aren’t able to structure things out for us to have anything to really dig our teeth into. It feels like they keep backtracking on themselves to pad the length out. For example there’s two separate segments where the match spills out into a brawl on the floor, but the 2nd time they do this it’s played out so similarly it’s also as if they forgot they’d already done this. So you don’t get any feel of progression watching it, they’re just doing stuff. It’s never exactly ‘boring’ but it doesn’t exactly suck you in either.

If anyone felt like the weak link here it was Tenjin Masami. She’d go on to be a far greater wrestler than any of these three, and she does clearly have a good presence about her here. But she just hasn’t really figured out how to wrestle properly yet. You won’t hear this said about a young wrestler very often, but she actually seems like she’s less of an athlete here than she’d become several years down the road. She’s a bit stiff in the way she moves, and she doesn’t seem to have the strength to just launch her opponents. Obviously I’m watching this being familiar with her peak and maybe it’d be better if I didn’t think about things that way, but I can’t really help it.

I liked the finish though. Cheryl covers Mimi after a butterfly suplex and Masami dashes across the ring to cut Victoria off before she can break it up. It felt like the finish to a shorter match though, which this should have been.

*3/4

MD: Long tag match that probably would have benefited from being two-out-of-three falls instead of just the one fall tag it was. It went probably around 24 minutes which is as long as just about any tag we’ve seen I think. It was structured with heel offense early after Fujimi crashed and burned at the start, a long heel-in-peril bit in the middle and then chaos over the final third. You could have inserted falls in between each of those segments and it would have flowed better.

Masami was still just showing us the start of who she’s going to become, but she’s weighty and solid here. She hit hard. Her stuff had heft and force behind it. Day had a lot of throat based offense (even her one foot dropkicks) and she struck a bit more like a surgeon. The two of them together, even as things were breaking down in the end, never portray the same sense of mayhem that the Black Pair do.

Fujimi had come a ways since we first saw her. She even had her own cheering section! I like her hefting gourdbuster that she used down the stretch a lot. The middle section here was the two of them working over the legs and Hagiwara is a natural figure-four user. Masami kept trying to interfere and the ref stopped her which was a little odd since usually the heels get to do whatever they want. The biggest chaos in the match actually took place with Yokota, seconding Mimi and Victoria, zeroing in on Masami and dragging her around the ring to inflict violence upon her. That led to the heels finally coming back though by then it was a 50-50 stretch. Day was able to split Mimi and Victoria apart well enough to pick up the win though. I’d argue that this was probably structured backwards and if it was ⅔ falls then it probably wouldn’t have mattered as much, but since it wasn’t, it did. That’s not to say they didn’t fill the time in an entertaining manner though.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Day! Tomi!

41. 1979.08.XX1 - 01 Cheryl Day vs. Tomi Aoyama

K: I usually do my write-ups going through the match chronologically while trying to explain my thoughts rather than just doing a play-by-play. I’m going to break that habit here though because this match really felt they started with that spectacular finish in mind and then worked backwards. Tomi counters an Irish Whip with a top rope boomerang into a flying bodypress for the three count. I thought this spot was ahead of its time when I saw Manami Toyota do it in the mid-90s so imagine my shock learning that someone was doing this in 1979. In more recent years when I’ve watched Toyota do her boomerang leaps I’ve noticed Aoyama being referenced on commentary, so the Japanese fans got what she was doing. It really helps in understanding Manami Toyota when you realise- contrary to Western fan conventional wisdom - she wasn’t supposed to be an innovative wrestler at all. She was being a stylistic throwback. That’s why she had such a plain look with the long black hair, basic black gear and was all softly spoken in promos. The ‘traditional’ girl presentation matched how she wrestled in the eyes of longtime AJW fans.

I hope you’ll pardon that digression, it’s just the rest of the match doesn’t really invite analysis. Tomi takes control early until she misses a dropkick and then Cheryl Day starts her heat section very early on with a series of strikes targeting Tomi’s throat before settling on working her arm, but the match doesn’t go on long enough for that to really go anywhere and they were probably just killing time to get to the big finish. They put some physical effort into the body of the match though, I don’t think it was ever boring. Pedestrian seems a fair description though.

**¼

MD: This was a pretty complete piece of business. Day took over early with a quasi-dropkick right to the throat, intentional enough as she followed it up with a throat chop. Then she took the arm and bulldogged it down right onto her knee. They worked the brunt of the match after this with Day grinding the knee into the arm and eventually Tomi coming back with kicks to the legs and working it over. Eventually Day got her out and beat her up a bit but Tomi came back on the inside with a flurry of her own and it was all spirited stuff. Obviously you’d rather the arm and legwork matter in the end but expectations are what they are and they at least framed things well enough due to one bit leading to the other. Finish was Tomi’s leap back body press where she lionsaults-styles her way to the very top back onto a standing opponent and it would be an impressive spot in 2024 let alone 1979.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Day! Tsumaki! Masami! Mimi! Jaguar! Victoria!

35. 1979.07.XX - 01 Cheryl Day, Masumi Tsumaki & Tenjin Masami vs. Mimi Hagiwara, Rimi Yokota & Victoria Fujimi

K: This one looks a bit different as it’s outdoors, you can see the odd tree peaking up in between the stands. Anyway I’m in very familiar territory from the jump as we get a bit of outside brawling and then Tenjin Masami taking great delight in noisily beating up Mimi Hagiwara. I keep my knowledge of future events on these pieces to a minimum, but seeing how this is the earliest footage we have of Masami, it’s too fitting to leave unmentioned how she was torturing poor Mimi from the start. Sometimes two wrestlers are just made for one another.

We get a really long period of control from the heel team. The execution of everything in the micro was quite good, but the whole thing went on a bit too long without the faces getting any hint of a comeback at all so by the last couple of minutes I was waiting for it to end. A flawed structure can undermine something even if the wrestlers are really doing anything bad in the moment.

Referee Miyuki Yanagi tries to stop the heels cheating but is thwarted when Masumi Tsumaki gets sick of her and just throws her out the way. This actually got a bit of laugh from the crowd, which doesn’t usually happen. They then double down on this bit by doing it a few more times, getting increasingly overtly comedic and more laughs. It’s not clear to me if the wrestlers planned to do that from the start or they just saw the crowd seemed to enjoy that so gave them some more, but it was pretty interesting to me.

Once Yokota gets the comeback spot in and tags out the match becomes a lot more enjoyable. Everyone gets to show their stuff now but the heels aren’t just totally dominated. Mimi’s cute armbar takedown thing (I’ve always been bad with move names…) is certainly aesthetically pleasing here. Tenjin Masami doesn’t look out of place at all, in fact she may be the strongest performer of the heel side in this. She has been wrestling almost a year at this point though, even if it’s the first time we’re seeing her wrestle. She does a really great but simple bodyslam on Yokota towards the end of the match where she’s holds her up in the air just for a couple of seconds after her shout gets your attention, and it just builds a bit of suspense for her hitting the move and makes it feel bigger than if she just did it immediately.

The finish was Rimi Yokota just hitting a frantic flurry of flying offense and then a big butterfly suplex to get the win. I don’t remember her ever hitting a sequence of moves with such urgency before this. What really made it hit home is when she did a flying crossbody onto Masumi Tsumaki from behind rather than wait for her to turn around to take it normally, which made it look a lot more violence and certainly got a reaction from the commentator.

Slow start, turns into a good match and a strong showing from Yokota and Masami at this stage in their careers.

**3/4

MD: Spirited match here with our first look at Tenjin (Devil) Masami. Assuming that she and Tsumaki were the up and coming bad guy bench for AJW, they were in good shape. Again, we get a mismash of heroes with the Young Pair, the Golden Pair, and the ever-adaptable Mimi coming together. Everyone was civil until the bell but then chaos ensued. It seemed like Mimi and co. would turn things around but they got swept under early and spent most of the rest of the match working from underneath with a few big comebacks interspersed.

Day came off as credible with big mares and face rakes. Tsumaki had some very nice neck twists and imposed as you’d want her to (including taking out the ref at least once), but all eyes ended up on Masami. She was pretty formidable already, with a few different choke variations, one of the knee and a nasty hanging tree choke. During one of the comeback bursts, she went rope running with Yokota (including Rimi sneaking around for a slick pin). The comebacks, when they came, were energetic. Lots of big moves (Fujimi’s bodyscissors rana and goardbusters, Mimi’s neckbreakers and gutwrench suplexes, Yokota with big flapjacks). The cutoffs came quick though and the overall story more or less flowed. The finish had Fujimi hitt some butt butts out of nowhere setting things up for Yokota to get the pin on Tsumaki after a dangling butterfly suplex. It’s well worth noting how far the babyface side had come in the last year or two.

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