70s Joshi on Wednesday: Komone! Kazuko!

52. 1979.09.1X - 01 Hiroko Komine vs. Kazuko Iwai

K: This is a rookie undercard match and I’ve seen enough AJW to know this is going to be a very basic match that exists more to help the wrestlers develop their fundamentals/get reps than to be all that entertaining. Still, this is better than most matches of this type. They both look pretty competent at this match type, Iwai is actually pretty good for her experience level and it feels like the company is giving her a bit of a push by giving her her 3rd televised singles match within six weeks of debuting (and that’s with the footage gaps).

There’s a section a few minutes where Iwai has Komine in an Indian Deathlock, she’s able to hold it in for quite a while and keeps a bit of movement by slamming herself against the mat when Komine tries to wriggle out. Eventually Komine reverses it into a headlock before going mean heel offense. I thought they worked that whole section pretty well, the submission looked pretty tight and believable. Afterwards we get a very strange move where Komine has Iwai on the ground and puts her leg inside and around like she’s going for a sharpshooter, but then she leans forward and grabs Iwai by the head, and does a forward roll into a kind of monkey flip style move. I probably haven’t described it well but see for yourself/I should probably gif it. They’re getting creative already anyway. One of the reasons I’m still so interested in Joshi is how even in nothing matches like this there’s still a good chance you’ll see a bizarre move you’ve never seen anywhere else.

They built to a pretty good finishing stretch where things got more fast-paced, even if they didn’t do anything but dropkicks (which were used as a high spot), crossbodies and pin attempts. Iwai was a little too keen to rush to the next spot after one of her kickouts at 2, but that’s nitpicky. Komine won but protected Iwai a little bit in that she had to pull out a backslide pin to get the win. Solid rookie match this.

**

MD: This is probably the least consequential match we’ve seen? Neither of these two will be in the footage for 79 after that. Komine would not be long for the wrestling world. If you look up Iwai, the results you get are this project basically. But you watch this next to the matches we’ve seen with Masami and Yokota and there’s no reason that either of these two couldn’t have stuck with it and been a star in the 80s. Iwai had fire from underneath, throwing dropkicks and what have you. She looked good early with an inverted deathlock. Komine had a lot of good stuff, whether it just be slamming Iwai’s neck off the ropes or the roll-forward toehold slams she was doing or her twisting body presses. There was a level of basic competence that was expected by almost anyone on TV in the promotion. Komine leaned on Iwai meanly. Iwai fought back hard. This just wasn’t the reality where they made it.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Lucy! Tomi! Ikeshita! Masami! Komine!

49. 1979.08.XX3 - 04 Hiroko Komine, Tenjin Masami & Yumi Ikeshita vs. Jackie Sato, Lucy Kayama & Tomi Aoyama (2/3 Falls)

K: Top babyface & two buddies vs. top (native) heel and two buddies. Jackie’s team really should have the clear advantage with her having Queen Angels as her partners and Yumi just has two rookies, but that’s not how the match goes. The heels dominate the early goings easily, but with Jackie never tagging in so it’s more that they’re dominating the lesser two of her team. Still it’s a bit surprising to see Hiroko Komine in control of them for so long. Unfortunately there’s a noticeable clip around here so we don’t get to see the first babyface comeback until it’s already started, or if it really even was a comeback or just an ‘extended hope’ as Yumi Ikeshita pretty quickly shuts it down. She does a cool move as she’s taking back control where she Irish Whips Lucy Kayama straight into Komine’s flying crossbody. Someone steal that. It made the Irish Whip look a lot more effective rather than just whipping someone into the ropes as there’s isn’t the time for the opponent to react.

There’s a couple more babyface comeback moments in this first fall, both of which are started by Lucy Kayama. The first one doesn’t go very far, she just counters a running move by tripping her opponent from the side, but before she gets much going Yumi Ikeshita bursts in and she has a new villainous trick for today. She has a towel wrapped around her hand and is using it like brass knucks. I guess that would probably work if the towel was tort enough. Football hooligans used to do that with newspapers around their fists, it’s called the ‘Millwall Brick’. This is what gets Jackie involved for the first time, she doesn’t stand much of a chance against Yumi Ikeshita and her towel though. The second bigger comeback from Lucy comes from a heel mishap. She moves out of the way of Komine charging at her, who knocks Ikeshita off the apron instead and they both tumble to the floor. With a good sense of urgency, the babyfaces isolate Tenjin Masami, Tomi is tagged into the do a flurry of dropkicks and a giant swing which sets up Jackie doing a big splash (stealing Lucy Kayama’s move) and she wins them the 1st fall.

The first thing I want to comment on from the 2nd fall is that Tomi Aoyama hits such an excellent violent looking dropkick it gets an audible gasp from the crowd. She follows that up with this pretty dynamic vertical suplex where she’s never stood up straight at any point, she just kinda falls into it and her opponent goes over with her. No wonder Ikeshita felt the need to bring out the towel to stop her momentum. This time she’s just strangling her with it. She even manages to simultaneously fight off Jackie trying to intervene by kicking her away while still using her arms to continue strangling Tomi. What a… villain. As we go into the finishing stretch for this fall Jackie really looks like a hero throwing everyone around. Queen Angels look cool in a different way with their cool moves. Lucy Kayama does a couple of proto Tiger Driver like moves setting up Tomi Aoyama to get the win with the Queen Special splash for a 2-0 victory. Good match.

***

MD: Maybe I’m crazy for saying this but I think certain structural things are starting to come together with the style. If you look at the matches from a year prior (or even six months), there were more momentum shifts but they all had less meaning. Now there’s more in the way of hope spots before they build to a big comeback. The large majority of this match had the Black Army controlling even though they didn’t pick up either fall and it felt a little like an initiation for Masami and Komine. Komine was slicker; she has this high-speed, too close, askew cross body that is very nice, especially when Ikeshita added oomph with a whip. Masami was more of a bruiser. She just runs headlong into people. Ikeshita was a force of nature like usual, just chucking people over her head at will.

We lose a little of one comeback due to a clip but we get this more or less in full otherwise. At one point they use a towel as a weapon, first wrapped around their hands, and then later, around Tomi’s neck. Jackie comes off like the star she is when she’s in there but she does get beaten around a bunch too. The finish of the second fall has Lucy with this run-into-the-corner headstand splash. I probably would have liked to see the Army get one fall but they did take most of this and the Angels and Jackie do come off like a super team of sorts.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Komine! Hanawa!

36. 1979.07.XX - 02 Hiroko Komine vs. Seiko Hanawa

K: We’d consider this a ‘rookie match’ in later years but the average experience level is so low in the company at this point that this isn’t quite worked like that. The spirit of the thing is done correctly, it constantly feels heated and that they’re both trying hard to win the match and getting mad at each other. That bit of pettiness at the end where Hanawa gets one last spiteful smack in is the kind of thing I’m talking about and what AJW excelled in stylistically. The mechanics and structure of the match were uninspired. The standard shine, heat, comeback stuff but there wasn’t really anything of interest in how it progressed or memorable moments, they just went out and did their match while getting the vibe of the thing right.

*3/4

MD: These two nominally competing for a spot on the Japan national team for the upcoming series vs the US women. Komine was in black and was more the rookie and Hanawa was in yellow. It was spirited but the transitions weren’t great, except for the first one which was Komine breaking out of a bodyscissors by grabbing Hanawa by the ears and lifting her up. She then ran her face across the top rope and rubbed her boot into it and it was all pretty good for a bit. The comeback was just Hanawa getting behind her and using a waistlock to drop her for an awkward rolling bodyscissors. From there it was back and forth and they worked hard but I’m not sure it entirely flowed. Hanawa finally came out on top, winning with a figure four. Ok when they were going but I wouldn’t say it all came together.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Hori! Komine! Yokota! Sato!

27. 1979.04.XX1 - 01 Ayumi Hori vs. Hiroko Komine

K: Ayumi Hori is part of the class of 1978 but didn’t debut until the end of the year as she suffered an injury during training, so she’s really a lot less experienced than her classmates at this point. She’s also probably the tallest wrestler in AJW’s history, billed at 180cm.

I can tell Hiroko Komine was leading this at some points, she moves a lot more naturally than Hori does. At times it looks like Hori’s not really doing anything but concentrating on doing her moves correctly, she doesn’t screw anything up but the vibes of the match are all off as there’s little semblance of struggle over things and she takes a bit too long to do her stuff. It’s a better watch when Komine is on offense, and Hori’s bumping is fine at least. They do play into Hori being much larger in a few moments, for instance when Komine picks her up presumably to do a slam but then collapses backwards from her weight. But mostly Komine has little trouble taking her down, it’s doing Hori a favour really that in kayfabe she comes across as not really knowing what she’s doing.

We only saw 5 minutes of this, though I doubt there was much more to it. Komine did well but Hori looked just barely fit for TV at this point.

*

MD: Our first look at Hori. It’s funny. The way they shot her at first , in the corner, by herself, with her robe, I was thinking that she didn’t look all that big, but when she was up next to Komine, she was giant. They also had this way of shooting up from the floor that made her seem all the larger once things got going. Komine was, apparently, injury prone and she had her hand taped up here. It’s pretty clear right from the get go that they have something with Hori. Though obviously green, she moved well, could take things like monkey flips, was clearly strong enough to do any physical feat she wanted to with Komine, whether it be a sort of head between the legs back body drop or just tossing her about by her hair. This went five minutes but it was a very full five minutes, maybe even seeming clipped. Komine would get her with mean shots and tight holds, but Hori would just sort of power out and run right through her. Komine did get the win with a sort of flowing cross body where she ended up almost vertical by the time they landed. My biggest surprise is that they weren’t talking about Monster Ripper the whole time. If I was booking this, I would be building Hori to face Ripper.

28. 1979.04.XX1 - 02 Chino Sato vs. Rimi Yokota

K: This match had more of a ‘traditional’ babyface-heel dynamic than Black Pair matches. Chino doesn’t really cheat, well except a few moments of competitive feistiness, but the match is laid out so that Rimi gets some shine only for Chino to take over and go into a long heat section where Rimi still gets to do cooler stuff. For example Chino goes for a Boston Crab a couple of times but Rimi just forces her head forward to roll out of it both times before Chino can lock it in, but she doesn’t give up and gets it on the third attempt. There was a cool bit of camera work where they show Rimi dragging her body over the mat while in the Indian Deathlock to try and get to the ropes, only for Chino to pull her back, but just out of shot so you don’t see it coming until suddenly Rimi starts magically moving in the opposite direction. The moment I enjoyed the most was when Chino was trying to work on Rimi’s leg, but Rimi counters by taking Chino down with a headscissors while her back is still on the mat. It was pretty simple but it made Rimi look more intelligent than necessarily athletically impressive as I didn’t even consider that counter as an option until she did it.

There was a bit of an odd moment where Chino locked in a Figure Four really close to the ropes, like, Rimi actually gets her hand to them, then lets go, and Chino then rolls over so they’re in the middle of the ring now. It would have been find if Chino had forced Rimi off the ropes because merely touching the ropes isn’t considered a rope break in AJW, you need to keep a hold of them, but instead it just looked like Rimi let go for no reason. It’s made more odd by this little section ending by Rimi forcibly rolling back to where she was to start with, grabbing the ropes again and so forcing a break.

Matt’s done his write-up for this match before me so I’ve already seen his comments on the leg-selling. I don’t agree with him on this one. I thought Rimi sold the leg appropriately for the situation. She didn’t come across to me like her leg was perfectly fine. She shakes it about several times while she’s in her comeback. At 12:20 in the YouTube video for a quick example. I also interpreted her favouring one side being part of her selling her right leg (she seems to a have a very slight limp on the one Sato had been working over) rather than just selling her side. We’re getting into very nitty gritty here but I just felt the need to justify myself a bit here. The other thing I’ll say is I wouldn’t expect Rimi to be outright limping on one leg kind of selling, for one thing she is Chino’s senior and in kayfabe definitely the better wrestler, so it feels right that she sell just about enough to register that the legwork has had an effect on her, but not enough to severely impact on her, or stop her winning.

The finish is a great example to me of what makes Rimi Yokota so special. She counters Chino’s rolling headbutt into a sunset flip pin, and it looked perfect. The timing on it is exquisite. Most wrestlers could never make that spot look good but Yokota does this kind of thing time and time again. Of course I know what she turns into to, but even here you can see she’s a special talent.

***

MD: I was not expecting this out of Sato after her being sort of a plucky rookie the last time we saw her. Yokota rushed in early, but Sato took over very quickly and focused for minutes and minutes on the leg. Lots of brutal looking, varied offense, including a series of damaging holds and moves while Yokota was in a cross-toehold. The best of that might have been these bounding splashes down onto the hold. It was brutal and the selling in the moment and immediately thereafter by Yokota was good.

Of course, once she had her comeback, the leg was perfectly fine. In fact, the big issue was her side after she missed a splash. Sato was quick to just crush her over and over with power bombs. There was some talk about a 6 on 6 series of Americans vs Japanese where you’d have to qualify and could score different points with different outcomes but I don’t see immediate sign of that in the match list, but who knows. This went fifteen and was good as segments in a bubble and if you learn to swallow your thoughts about consequence. Sato did move on from the leg and maybe that was her folly. Finish had Sato doing these roll through headbutts only to get caught on the second and sunset flipped. She decked the ref post-match for good measure. Yokota was very sympathetic here (maybe for the first time as she had leaned more aggressive in previous matches), but Sato absolutely made an impression.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Komine! Hagiwara! Sato! Akagi!

13. 1979.01.XX2 - 01 Hiroko Komine vs. Mimi Hagiwara

K: This is our first look at Hiroko Komine, who (along with Mimi) is from the AJW class of 1978. Hiroko would quit after another year, I was going to say that there’s almost no information on her but just this March she was interviewed on Jaguar Yokota’s YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_JoKLR4Q5s The gist of it is she was constantly injured while wrestling. She tells a story of going to hospital thinking she had a sprain only to be told she has a bone fracture but it was already broken so long ago it’d already hardened so there wasn’t much they could do. No wonder she didn’t last long.

I’m also just noticing how very thin Mimi is here. In 1983 she did an interview where she claimed she’d put on 11kg since she’d started wrestling so she could compete better, the reason may be a little kayfabed but looking at her here she probably wasn’t exaggerating the weight gain.

To the match, pretty early on Hiroko establishes herself as being on the heel-side of things, but it’s a bit “box-ticky.” She does the standard tropes of stomping on Mimi she’s in the ropes and scrunching up her face, but the aura of malice isn’t there. When Mimi gets a comeback going it’s a bit abrupt as just pulls Hiroko up while in a body scissors and slams her down to break it. It doesn’t get any reaction but I guess the quicker things got changed up the better, as alongside being more charismatic Mimi is actually a bit better on offense (though neither are ‘good’), her neckbreaker drop early into this section had a nice execution to it even if she’s still a bit rough.

Things improve when Hiroko starts to get back into things, but rather than the generic heel offense she goes for running elbows and some decent-looking dropkicks. Mimi manages to counter snapmare-attempt into a backslide and gets the pin. This wasn’t much. But it’s also just a rookie opener which nobody thought we’d be watching back 45 years later, so it’s fine for what it is and there’s not much else to say about it.

*1/4

MD: If I’m reading the poorly translated commentary right, they were making fun of Hagiwara for wrestling 300 times in 78 and only winning about twenty times and said that Komine was rookie of the year. This went less than seven minutes. They were pretty even to start with rapid succession alternating armdrags, but Komine took over. She was competently mean but didn’t stand out, using eyerakes, standing hairpulls, and front facelocks that she rolled back with. Hagiwara pulled her hair out of a bodyscissors to takeover with her neckbreakers and a nice gutwrench of sorts before they went into finishing stretch with dropkicks and cross chops and body presses (some missed) and finishing things with a few pin attempts and a Hagiwara backslide. Competent for the experience level is the phrase that I’d use but Hagiwara seemed a bit more confident than the last time we saw her.

14. 1979.01.XX2 - 02 Chino Sato vs. Mariko Akagi

K: Chino Sato is from the AJW Class of 1978. She retired in 1981 and I believe her retirement ceremony was the first to have the ‘When A Child Is Born’ instrumental playing while her career achievements were read out, which would become the standard format from then on.

Chino gets a bit more offense in this than you’d expect considering the gulf in status, but her offense also isn’t very good and it comes across like Mariko is just humouring her more than she’s a genuine threat. Mariko a couple of times just brushes her off and decides it’s her turn to take over and imposes herself far more convincingly. It’s fitting then that the finishing run is Chino hitting a bunch of offense, the first move of which she totally misses (unintentionally), there’s a Giant Swing which she tries a splash but Mariko moves out of the way, then just puts her in a Figure 4, Chino submits and that’s the end of that.

This has some value in that it’s a rare look at Mariko Akagi in action just before she retires, and it does look believable from the footage that she really was the best worker of her era. But it’s also just a veteran vs. rookie squash low on the card (and one of the less good rookies at that), and a match like that is always going to have a low ceiling.

*1/2

MD: My last impression of Akagi was that she was a fiery and unrelenting heel. Here things seemed to be nice and calm right at the start but then she came charging in with kicks. She had amazing snap on everything she did, especially her headlock takeovers and snap mares. Really, everything though. She’d bound to the top rope at a moment’s notice to leap off with a twisting body press and the way she locked in the figure four at the end, right after eating a giant swing, was absolutely flawless. In comparison, Sato was a bit of a clutz, well meaning but stumbling all over the place. She was presented as gutsy, charging right in and kicking out of move after move when she probably should have stayed down and she had a late flurry full of power bombs and that giant swing (that probably made her more dizzy than Akagi). She was a work in progress. Akagi came off, especially in comparison, like a surgeon in there. These two were quite short and much more focused and direct than the longer tags we’ve been seeing with a lot of momentum shifts and I found them refreshing but I’d like to have a mixing of things moving forward.

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