Meiko Satomura vs. Kana Kana Pro 2/25/14 - EPIC
(Previously published in SLL's All-Request Friday Night)
One of the most unusual and fascinating matches of last year, played under blue lights with Kana in one of the trippier wrestler get-ups this side of Alebrije and some dude jamming on a traditional Japanese string instrument throughout the whole match. Seriously, what's it's closest relative? That Jarrett/Mantell match with the percussion orchestra? Kana should be NXT's next hire as a dual worker/producer. I wanna see the weird shit she and Jimmy Jacobs come up with together.
First part of the match has the girls trying to match the trippy setting with equally trippy matwork. Meiko with the reverse figure four breaker? Kana chains the stretch muffler into an ankle lock? Is everything about this match delightfully weird? Eventually, we transition into the "Meiko killing the fuck out of people" phase of the match. Meiko, as always, is great at dishing out a beating, and Kana is great at eating a beating and sneaking in comebacks and hope spots, including a really big German suplex.
Uh oh, the music is getting intense! Their health bars must be low! Seriously, they've both been kicked to shit by this point in the match - even though Meiko has been the big aggressor, Kana has chipped away at her enough that you buy her being worn down, too. Meiko with the cartwheel that ends with her kicking a downed Kana in the head, because Meiko even makes cartwheels devastating. I am glancing at the index of nominees for PWO's Greatest Wrestler Ever project, and I'm noticing Meiko hasn't been nominated. I should probably amend that when I'm done writing this up. I have no idea what my ballot for something like that would like right now, but pretty much single-handedly making an otherwise dead genre of wrestling still somewhat worthwhile for 15 years seems like a resume worth considering for something like that.
They start fighting over sleepers. Manzerman is thrilled, I'm sure. In all seriousness, though, it's really well-done, the sleepers are impressively varied, and most of all, this is the rare three-act match where all three acts are very different from each other, but all seem to fit together regardless. In summary, you want all this.
Meiko Satomura vs. Akira Hokuto GAEA 4/29/01 - EPIC
Fair warning, the quality of that link is shit, but it was all I could find. I came from a tape trading era where you kinda had to take what you could get video quality-wise, so this was watchable enough for me. I actually used to have this in better quality on VHS, but my wrestling stuff was, surprisingly, amongst the first to go when I began to purge my physical media some years back, and even if I hadn't, my VCRs have bitten the dust.
That said, so long as I could find this in at least somewhat watchable quality, I kinda had to open with it (well, open as my first original review for this project, anyway), because it's really Meiko's signature match from this period, and if you really want to understand why I'm doing a Complete and Accurate Meiko, you have to understand this period. See, in 2001, the smart fans I paid attention to considered joshi to be good. Very, very good. The stuff GAEA was doing in the late 90's through about 2002 was some of the most praised wrestling in the corners I was following...hell maybe the most praised. And joshi fandom wasn't some weird superniche like it is today. The people who thought GAEA fans were contrarian fools didn't feel that way because joshi was obviously garbage. They felt that way because AJW was obviously better, and everybody knows Momoe Nakanishi was the real future of joshi. GAEA fans, of course, disagreed. Momoe was an overrated hack with bad skin who only got popular because her fans could fantasize about abusing her since she was so good at taking a beating (I'm paraphrasing here, the actual reviews of the time were much more entertaining). The real future of joshi, they contended, was Meiko Satomura.
Actually, the real furture of joshi was no one, because two years after this match, all of of this was gone.
In my near 25 years of wrestling fandom, joshi's near-overnight, near-universally accepted de-evolution into utter crap is one of the most bizarre developments I've ever seen, and yet, it really never gets discussed. I guess I understand why. I mean, it's not like it's something I really noticed at the time. I didn't wake up one day and go "well, joshi sucks now, I'm gonna have some coffee". I just bought some GAEA shows from Jeff Lynch and thought "hmmm, these weren't as good as they looked on paper". I was kinda taking a chance on them, since they weren't getting talked up as much online by that point, but hey, they're not gonna knock one out of the park every night...or every month...or a fucking year, wait, what? So it's not like it was an immediate realization, and by the time it dawned on us that this thing we all used to think was amazing was now lousy, we had become too disinterested in it to investigate further.
To this day, I still don't really understand how it all fell apart, and maybe this project will help make that clear, but regardless, I think the framework you need to fully appreciate Meiko's career is that of the career she was supposed to have. Like I said, this was probably Meiko's signature match pre-genre collapse, and on rewatch, I'm not sure it should be. Akira Hokuto is really the better half of this match, and what problems I have here, I mostly attribute to Meiko's performance. The first half of the match is built around Hokuto ripping up Meiko's arm and Meiko finding openings to kick the shit out of Hokuto when she could. She sold the armwork well when it was being worked over, but when she made her comeback, she quickly dropped it for some big throws, and none of it really figured into the rest of the match, which was mostly just bomb throwing. It's the kind of match layout that a lot of mediocre indy dudes would do and you'd instantly forget about afterwords because all they cared about was getting their shit in. This is a match that got MOTYC plaudits at the time because Meiko came into it with the eye of the tiger and Hokuto was on a bit of a post-prime hot streak that year as I recall, and from early on, they did a great job establishing the feisty young ace-to-be of the company standing up to the legend who was repping for Mayumi Ozaki's goon squad that was running roughshod over GAEA at the time. You buy into the match because you buy into Meiko and Hokuto, and despite a few awkward moments along the way, they reward your faith in them.
I have to talk about the finish, because it is pretty distinct. It's something that stood out enough to me to 2001 to help me call this MOTY, but in 2015, it looks wrong enough to me that I wouldn't even call this a MOTYC. Basically, after a lot of big moves back and forth, Hokuto drops Meiko with the Northern Lights Bomb, but she's too out of it to get up, so the ref lays the ten count on both of them. Lo and behold, Meiko is able to stagger to her feet, and Hokuto isn't, so Meiko Rocky II's her way to victory. On paper, I do think that's a really cool idea: Meiko survived Akira Hokuto, and Hokuto wore herself out trying to take down the sparky young up-and-comer. In practice, watching events unfold leading to that finish, I have a really hard time believing that Hokuto had nothing left in the tank after dropping the Northern Lights Bomb, or at the very least, that she had less than Meiko. That really felt like stretching my suspension of disbelief a bit too far, and that's a shame, because most of the rest of this match is really easy to get wrapped up in.
In retrospect, maybe there were better Meiko matches from this period to highlight here, but I don't mind going with this one to make my point. Just the way they took this wonky match structure that shouldn't work at all and somehow made it awesome just by having really strong characters and a great story and absolute conviction in their performances is really admirable and amazing to watch even with it's flaws. Even if you watch this and don't see that Meiko had "it" here, I'd like to think you'd see why people like me thought she had "it", and why we were sure she was the future.
The future never showed up, but Meiko Satomura is still here. And that's why I'm doing this.
Mike over at Wrestling KO said this may have been one of the twenty best puro matches of 2014. I'd need to think hard before committing to that claim, but it doesn't seem outlandish. Honestly, this tip-toed right up to EPIC status before a flat finish stopped me from going all the way. They didn't create the kind of atmosphere that helped push Satmoura/Hokuto past it's flaws and limitations, but they did at least make up for it somewhat by being a more technically sound match, and damn entertaining in it's own right.
Consider Ayako Hamada, who made one of the more drastic career transitions post-genre collapse. Late 90's/early 00's Hamada was the spunky young star of ARSION, positioned opposite veteran badasses like Lioness Asuka and Aja Kong, and was generally considered one of the premier PYTs of joshidom. Today, Hamada is a straight up hoss, and I gotta say, as cute as she used to be, I like her way better now that she's mauling people like Little Miss Hashimoto. This also means that Meiko doesn't just get to murder the fuck out of her problems like she would with someone like Kana. She's the smaller, faster, more technically sound one this time, and she has to use those things to her advantage. Not that she doesn't bust out things like the cartwheel kneedrop, because she does. Nor for that matter, is it like Hamada doesn't bust out a pair of moonsaults, one of which goes from the top rope to the floor, because she does. It's just that this is mostly about Hamada as a violent slugger and Meiko trying to outmaneuver her. Look at Meiko's frequent use of the sleeper here. It's a quick and easy way to try and slow down a woman who - left to her own devices - was double stomping the shit out of her knee. It comes into play again at the end when Hamada kicks out of the Death Valley Driver, so Meiko slaps on a sleeper again for a moment, then...just releases it and hits another DVD for the win? That's it? Well, it's more believable than the ending to Meiko/Hokuto, but still, kinda lame. Honestly, if they were going in that direction, they probably should've just had her go out in the sleeper. Still, very well put together, very well executed match.
Labels: Akira Hokuto, Ayako Hamada, Gaea, Joshi, Kana, Kana Produce, Meiko Satomura, Sendai Girls' Pro Wrestling
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