70s Joshi on Wednesday: Jackie! Maki!

21. 1979.02.27 - Jackie Sato vs. Maki Ueda (WWWA Singles Title, Loser Must Retire)

K: It’s hard to know where to start in writing about this match. The levels of spectacle are so much higher than anything else we’ve covered before, in fact I’m not sure the big 80s shows ever got as extravagant as this just in terms of the presentation. It certainly does get you in the mood to watch something momentous. It’s hard to review the match itself because we only see about half of it (they went 48:07). It looks like the match was broadcast on two separate episodes because in the middle of the video we have there’s a closing credits crawl, and once that’s done we pick up sometime later in the bout.

This match came about on relatively short notice due to Maki Ueda’s decision to retire from wrestling (contrary to some Western fans on the internet, she was not forced to retire, for one thing she was only 20 year old at the time). The closest thing we’ve got to an explanation were these comments from Maki in an interview:

“I was paid 300,000 Yen* a month, the same as when I was a newcomer. At the time, I thought I was getting paid more than the average office worker. I was a child myself, so I just did as I was told… I was more masculine on the inside, and Jackie was more feminine. The issue that led to my retirement was Jackie's romantic relationship. When I was away on an expedition, Jackie wanted to go back to Tokyo. I thought she was the kind of woman who could keep work and love separate..."

*Note, adjusting for inflation, 300,000 Yen would be around $6,400 in 2024.

It takes the wrestlers a long time to make their entrances as the crowd is spilling out into the walkway area. Jackie in particular looks like she’s in danger of being crushed at one point. The match itself is quite basic when you just write down the moves they did, and there are some points where it feels like they’re stretching things out for time rather than building to something. But leaving it at that wouldn’t do it justice at all, as the biggest achievement is how they take an already hot crowd, calm things down ever so slightly to build them right back up again in a few key moments so that they’re almost blowing the roof off in the finishing stretch.

What they do establish early on is that Maki is the faster of the two and is able to gain the advantage a few times with some nifty movements through holds. But Jackie has more power and generally just manhandles herself back into an advantageous position, sometimes when Jackie takes back control it feels like she’s ‘restraining’ Maki almost. Things really move into the highest gear when Maki goes to the top rope to hit her splash (part of the Beauty Special) but Jackie moves out of the way. Jackie then goes up top to hit her own splash but… the same thing happens. It’s not exactly groundbreaking stuff but in context it really put over that they felt the need to go for something big to get the win.

I find the finish kinda touching. I don’t know if this was the intention behind it, or if there even was any thought put into it, but after moving up the escalation ladder in the finishing stretch, the finish itself was just about the softest way you can win a big match I’ve ever seen. Jackie goes for a Boston Crab, but Maki grabs hold of her ankle to block it. As Jackie is trying to turn Maki over onto her front, she seems to realise in the moment that she can just move forward, keep Maki on her back and she’ll have her in a pinning predicament. She goes for it and Maki just about gets her shoulder up at 2, but Jackie pushes forward more to get her shoulder back down and gets the 3 count when they’re virtually face to face. I can’t think of more ‘gentle’ way to pin someone in a wrestling match. And once Jackie has the 3 she just lets go and walks off.

The fans are screaming the house down, the camera cuts to some of them in tears at what they’ve just witnessed. I’m not going to give this a rating because it’s too incomplete, but it’s definitely something fans should watch just to have seen it.

MD: I can fully understand if this is the only match of the 70s a lot of people watch. I consider ourselves (and anyone going through this footage with us) fortunate to watch everything we have going up to this, for the sake of both familiarity and contrast. This is like nothing we’ve seen so far. In the last match, Sato felt like a star, but this is the first time that, from the text itself, the Beauty Pair really feel like superstars. They come out together and the crowd is abuzz, absolutely mobbing them, and it doesn’t stop until the very end.

We get about twenty five of a longer match, but you very much get the sense of it, I think. This feels momentous; watching this is watching history unfold. Maki is the aggressor for most of the match and maybe has a technical or speed advantage, but Jackie comes off as the stronger of the two. What drives this more than anything else, is that each wrestler is desperately trying to win. The stakes are clear, their hearts are bared open for the world to see, and everything is both a struggle, and entirely honed in on victory. That means all of the transitions are based on mistakes or opportunities, logical, competitive, compelling.

That said, it’s all still rough around the edges. The style hasn’t fully coalesced. The narratives are not as clear as they could possibly be. There are moments which, were it not for how hard both women were pushing, might feel haphazard or not fully capitalized on. They fill those gaps with grit and effort and energy. There is a moment where Jackie finishes a move and instead of letting it settle in, immediately rushes towards the top rope. In so many other matches, it would have felt like the wrestler rushing to get the next spot in, but here it felt like her trying to seize any advantage possible on the way towards hopeful victory. It’s the same with the finish. Jackie gets a double leg and goes for a crab. Maki blocks it. Jackie presses down for a pin. The ref counts two but a shoulder goes up, whether intentional or otherwise. She presses down again and gets the heartbreaking three. On one level, it’s not a complex or deeply thought out finish. It felt like happenstance, chance. On the other, it fit entirely with the mood of the match where they were constantly desperate to snatch whatever win they could. Jackie was just able to press the shoulders down for three seconds. That tiny action was all that stood between two women and a dream.

Post-match, both women are interviewed and provided gifts. Maki manages to look up with a smile that melts the commentators and the crying crowd. Then they force themselves to sing in the middle of the ring. Maki was right around twenty years old. I have a kid around that age. I work with people just a few years older just starting their professional lives and here she was ending this chapter of hers. I think back to what I was doing at that age, and the weight of putting on a match like this, of retiring, of standing in that ring and singing in front of a crowd screaming and crying for you after all that… what a weight on her shoulders. As for the footage in general, I’m curious to see how things develop from here, because this felt like a sharp turn towards bigger and grander things.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Charito! Kumano! Marina! Lucy! Maki! Tomi!

19. 1979.01.XX3 - 01 Charito Silver, Mami Kumano & Marina Figueroa vs. Lucy Kayama, Maki Ueda & Tomi Aoyama (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62xZh3Dq-DY&ab_channel=kadaveri)

K: The first few minutes of this were incredibly one-sided. We had Lucy in the ring for a minute or so and the closest thing she did to displaying any agency was reaching out to tag in Tomi, who then just got beat up by the heels, who were making lots of quick tags. I guess if it was trying to achieve anything it made Maki Ueda look better than them as when she was tagged in she was able to actually fight back. Marina Figueroa has a very weird but cool-looking standing splash. It looked a bit like Rob Van Dam’s Five Star except if it was done just standing in the ring. After dominating almost all of the fall, the heels lose control of things and the Queen Angels duo get to hit some offense. There’s a wild transition where Mami Kumano tries to hit Tomi Aoyama with a powerbomb, but Tomi just twists sideways out of it, lands of her feet and hits a snap dropkick. It’s the kind of thing you’d think a current day wrestler would copy if any of them watched this stuff. The running Queen Special is a cool tag team move. And then Maki Ueda hits the Beauty Special, a Romero Special (they sure do love their Special moves eh) and then gets the pin with a vertical suplex, which written down looks kinda funny but it worked. I think this would have been better though if the babyfaces weren’t so totally dominated, or if you’re gonna do that then let the heels take the 1st fall.

The 2nd fall is really different. The heels are pissed that they dropped that 1st fall and get way more vicious, right from the start people are being choked with nunchucks and there’s a wrench being passed around as a weapon. They chaos gets a bit hard to follow at times so it’s hard to single any wrestler/moments out or describe what I feel they were going for, if anything. Queen Angels have had their stats boosted anyway as they’re now fighting with the heels pretty evenly. Tomi & Mami have a punch-out on the outside which was pretty fun and mean-looking. Amidst all this chaos there’s a countout, but Lucy’s the only one in the ring so she gets her hand raised and… oh wow the babyface team won 2 straight falls. Quite the result considering how this started out. This was an entertaining match with some cool little moments but the structure didn’t make the most of things. 

**3/4

MD: Similar to the last match in the team make-ups in some ways. This time we just have Figueroa in for Ikeshita and both Queen Angels in with one of the Beauty Pair. I think the Golden Pair were on commentary. They’re showing the crowd a bit more and I wonder if the make-up of these crowds are shifting a bit, younger, more female? I can’t tell for sure though. There are also a lot of tight camera angles which was funniest at the middle of the first fall when Kumano comes in from off screen with a chair. The fall itself was solid with very focused Black Army control in the corner, the Mexican contingent working like a well oiled machine and Kumano just stomping on throats and asserting herself (including with her driving meteora). They cycled through the babyfaces with hope spots but got cut off until the end when they finally had an advantage but Kumano came over and crushed them all with steel. On the reset, Kumano was crushing Tomi with power bombs until she somehow flipped to her feet in a way I’m not sure i’ve ever seen and the babyfaces rode that momentum to eventual victory after some Queen Angels double teams and a Maki suplex. 

For the second falls, Kumano almost immediately dragged Maki around the ring throat first with a wrench and then the Army went into using the object at will as the ref tried to hold the babyfaces back like they were tecnicos. That meant that Kumano could do her dangling chokehold (weapon assisted this time) at will and, before long, some glorious chaos, including Maki getting tossed into the announcer’s desk and Kumano dragging people around the arena. Tomi mounted a comeback once they made it back to the ring but got dragged down quickly, with Silver and Figueroa just solidly teaming up to clubber her. Maki came in with a victory roll out of nowhere though and everything built to the Queen Angels hitting successive Queen Rocket planchas, some satisfying revenge shots into tables, and the heels getting counted out. I probably preferred the previous trios since it was a little more focused and contained but there was still a lot to like here.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Lucy! Maki!

16. 1979.01.XX2 - 04 Lucy Kayama vs. Maki Ueda

K: I did enjoy this, but it’s not a great sign that after watching this 20 minute match I don’t feel like I have that much to say about it. The match was mostly holds and targeting limbs, but there was a slight lack of urgency about the whole thing that kept it from being an overall good match for me. Lucy was able to take the advantage pretty early on, which is a bit surprising when she’s very much the underdog in this match as she has less than half the experience Maki does. Lucy’s work on top was mostly attacking Maki’s arm, but it doesn’t really lead to anything as Maki has enough of that after a few minutes and takes over, and she switches to attacking Lucy’s leg. I did enjoy when Lucy tried to escape one of Maki's holds and almost succeeded until Maki grabbed her by the ankle, leaving Lucy hopping on one foot trying to get away. It was slightly comical without being too ridiculous. This is probably the best segment of the match. It’s unfortunate that this also doesn’t end up leading to anything as Lucy just gets back on offense and the match just resets. We go to the time-limit draw soon after but it didn’t feel like either of them particularly wanted to win anyway. Again this was enjoyable, but it could have been so much better by just linking things up and putting a bit more conviction into trying to get the win.

**3/4

MD: A twenty minute draw, this might be the most complete singles match we’ve seen so far. It was hold based, certainly full of action, but everything still had room to breathe. There were momentum shifts but they never felt capricious or meaningless. Maki charged in early to get the immediate advantage but things went even with a test of strength and Lucy took over with her short elbow smashes, followed by a rolling guillotine (and subsequent roll back DDT). She shifted to the arm and they worked holds accordingly until Maki was able to stand up out of an arm puller and take over. She did some stuff out of a body scissors (including the lifting butt slams and rolling with it) before taking over onto the leg after Lucy came back in. Lots of legwork here which was dropped right when Lucy took back over, hitting a double arm backbreaker and atomic drop specifically using her legs. I need to just learn to be ok with it but it feels like an almost personal shot when the comeback offense involves the limb that’s just been damaged. That feels degrees worse than just dropping it. They’re all young but there should be an instinct away from that specific impulse. It was made worse because Lucy’s selling on the outside had been so good. Things break down into a pretty hot back-and-forth finishing stretch with the two of them spilling back outside and Maki finally getting on a tapatia as the bell rings. I’ve got my nitpicks but overall this would have stood up well against a lot of similar twenty minute draws elsewhere in the world at the time.   

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: New Footage Wednesday? Beauty Pair vs Queen Angels!

1978.12.XX - Jackie Sato & Maki Ueda vs. Lucy Kayama & Tomi Aoyama (WWWA Tag Team Titles)

K: Queen Angels are the defending champions here. To call this "action-packed" would be an understatement. The match begins virtually immediately with Tomi throwing Jackie straight out of the ring and then beating her up on the outside as the crowd screams their heads off. If the purpose was to establish that although this may be a babyface vs. babyface match, they're not any less determined to crush their opponents, well that opening certainly achieved that. It fits with the pace they're going at each other that the 1st fall is over pretty quickly (I didn't detect any clipping anyway). A difference in this era to now is that the referee doesn't stop a pinfall count just because someone TRIES to break it up, as happened here, you need to actually break it up.

The 2nd fall opens with Beauty Pair trying to keep Lucy in their corner for a bit. When Jackie tags out, Lucy takes the chance to escape and just gets out of the ring and legs it into the crowd. Maki is like 'oh no you don't, come back you here you little shit' and charges after her into the crowd and a brawl starts. I thought that was a cool way to get Lucy out of trouble, even if she didn't come out of it looking that good, but this is corrected somewhat by her taking control of Maki once they're back in the ring with some nice moves. This little period is about a close to a cooldown as we've got so far, but then Lucy tags in Tomi, who then hits Maki with a holy shit level Giant Swing. The speed of it was up there with Kyoko Inoue's version.

The description I'd heard of Beauty Pair is that Maki was usually the big seller and Jackie the hot tag, but it didn't really seem that way from the footage. This match however does very much fit that description and this is the first time I've watched it, so maybe it's more the footage I'd seen till now was unrepresentative. When Jackie manages to tag in things really fire up again. We get a cool little sequence where Jackie bodyslams Lucy and holds her down as Maki is getting to the top turnbuckle to do a frogsplash on here. But then, with perfect timing, Tomi hits Jackie with a dropkick that sends her flying over the top rope to the outside (2nd time Tomi's done that to Jackie), and with Lucy no longer being held down, she's able to move out of the way of Maki's frogsplash just in time. The timing to by all involved to pull that off without any hesitations/making it looking pre-planned was excellent. That this is also the transition that leads directly to the finish of the 2nd fall is a good choice.

To the 3rd fall now. Very early on and we get another moment I liked a lot. Jackie does a snapmare variant on Tomi, it works the 1st time, and then she goes for it again but this time Tomi rotates through landing on her feet and attempts a go-behind, but Jackie blocks it with a guillotine, but then Tomi counters that with a bear hug! Just something I don’t remember seeing before and was an interesting/believable bit of jockeying for position. I won’t go to play-by-play for the rest but this Jackie vs. Tomi section was one my personal highlights in that they switch to grappling and reversing basic holds in pretty interesting ways, it serves to cool things down for when the more spectacular spots are coming but it’s still engaging in its own right.

Things get way too hectic towards the end now for me to go into much detail without play-by-playing everything. The important bits are the dynamic between Jackie and Tomi gets more heated, at one point Jackie gets pissed at Tomi breaking up a pinfall and just drags her to the outside and lays a beatdown on her over the announcers desk. She gets her comeuppance a bit later though when, for the 3rd time of the match, she gets thrown over the top rope to the outside, by Lucy this time, and then Tomi follows it up with an Undertaker style dive OVER THE TOP ROPE straight onto her. It was pretty astonishing to watch that in a match from 1978, when it’s very rare now for women to do dives over the top rather than between the ropes. And not even a rotated one either, just straight up and over. What’s also cool is they make it matter, because that’s the finish. Jackie is so hurt from the over the top rope dive that she cannot get up to return to the ring. Queen Angels retain the titles.

This was a blast. I might rate it higher if the awful video quality wasn’t lessening my enjoyment somewhat. But it is what it is.

***3/4

MD: You have to love that this pops up just when we’re only a match or two off from when we would have covered this organically. Because we’ve been match to match and covering every full encounter we could find, when something like this pops up, which really does feel like a special match, there’s a decent amount of familiarity to it for me. That’s a lot of the point in this sort of immersion. It’s almost like immersing yourself in the language. You just get a better sense of the norms and can appreciate something like this more.

It was face vs face, but absolutely non-stop competition. The stakes felt huge. Passions were inflamed. The Queen Angels ambushed right from the get go and then, with Jackie out of the way, controlled on Maki until Jackie could recover enough to roll in and throw a dropkick. They got quick revenge and Jackie ended it with a downright sick looking reverse suplex (1978 vintage) on Lucy. The second fall was just as brisk and impactful as the first. Things spilled to the outside early and that’s where the Queen Angels seemed to have their best advantage. They were able to take over for a bit but the Beauty Pair had what felt like an unlikely comeback (including Jackie just mowing people down with big kicks), at least until they ran a great spot where the Pair had Lucy set up for a top rope splash only for Tomi to come flying in from off the screen with a dropkick sending Jackie into the ropes and causing Maki to faceplant. Just perfect chaos to end the fall (shortly thereafter with a Lucy gutwrench).

The third fall started with the spot mentioned above and I loved it as well; just a great sense of struggle. Nothing was easy. Everything was worked for. Sometimes it wasn’t pretty but there was a never-ending sense of scrappiness in this one, while still having just enough form to be coherent. Tomi locked in an modified Romero Special early and Maki snapped on a nicer one later. A giant swing in the second fall was followed up by an airplane spin in the third, etc. The Angels’ Queen Rocket plancha was built up early by the commentary and it really did feel like Kidman’s Shooting Star Press or Muta’s (1989) Moonsault, just the thing everyone wanted to see all the time, as if you wouldn’t go home satisfied if you didn’t see it. That sense of anticipation was paid off as they hit it and won by countout. I’m not saying this felt like a dream match but it definitely felt like a big deal, like two top teams facing off for the biggest prize and then having a match that lived up to that level of expectation.

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Enter Monster Ripper! Kumano! Beauty Pair!

10. 1979.01.04 - Jackie Sato & Maki Ueda vs. Mami Kumano & Monster Ripper

K: This is the last match Beauty Pair ever had a tag team. It is also the debut of Monster Ripper, aka Rhonda Sing or Bertha Faye in her unfortunate WWF gimmick. Rhonda grew up in Calgary and was a big fan of Stampede Wrestling growing up. She had contacted Stampede about being trained but was turned down (the Harts didn’t train women at the time). A trip to Hawaii in 1978 re-ignited her ambitions when she saw AJW for the first time, as she recalls in an interview in SLAM Magazine in 2001:

“I was actually in Hawaii on vacation and zapping through the channels, I stumbled on Japanese women’s wrestling. They were hitting each other with chairs and everything! It was an all-girl company, and I thought it was the coolest thing. It sparked my interest. This was definitely what I wanted to do” https://slamwrestling.net/index.php/2001/01/09/slam-wrestling-canadian-hall-of-fame-rhonda-sing-monster-ripper/

 A friend later gave her a wrestling magazine which contained contact details for Mildred Burke’s training facility in California. AJW’s scouts soon noticed her and asked to bring her over to Japan to be their new foreign monster heel.

The match starts with Mami Kumano squaring off with Jackie Sato, a pairing the Korakuen faithful would have seen very times by this point. The immediately establish Monster as the Immovable Object when Mami throws Jackie into her, and Jackie just bounces off her like she hit a brick wall. So the crowd is especially fearful when Monster tags in, I like how she does the Irish Whip here, it just looks really rough and forceful. They actually get the crowded even more heated (and they were hot from the start) just by how violent those Irish Whips look and how Jackie is selling them like she’s being launched out of control. Monster brings an extra dynamic to things because while Mami is getting heat with her cheating, Monster is like a big raging beast on a rampage creating a sense of terror in the fans of Beauty Pair that their favourites might get seriously injured in this. Mami doesn’t have the physical credibility to pull that off.

The 1st fall is fantastic stuff. The 2nd fall struggles a bit to keep the momentum going. Monster’s lack of offense gets a bit more apparent here as she’s in the ring longer, and just doing her big body blocks gets a bit repetitive. Mami shows how she’s contributing to things the most in this moment where she gets in and builds the heat right back up again dragging Jackie out of the ring from the outside, and later when Maki is in for the save I noticed how Mami fed on the apron so Maki could knock her off for a nice pop. The crowd are really into Beauty Pair when they start working together to fight off the heels, so by the end of the 2nd fall the heat has really been built back up again for Jackie to unload some cool throws and big backdrops to pull things back.

They don’t give things a chance to die down in the 3rd fall like they did in the 2nd. Jackie grabs Mami right from the start and hits her with a couple of proto-slingblades. Monster unfortunately looks a bit lost in this part for a moment, just kinda wandering around the ring before she clocks what she’s supposed to do and goes to save her partner. Mami helps though, coming into the ring with a trashcan, hitting everyone including the referee to keep the carnage hot. There’s another moment here where Monster looks like she’s not sure what she’s supposed to do and you can very clearly see Mami pat her on the back, point and say something before Monster picks up her opponent and puts her in a bearhug. While outside of kayfabe that may literally have been what was happening, this time it didn’t detract from the match so much as it still works to see Mami as the brains of this team and Monster is, well she’s just a monster. Plus this set up allows Mami to go and deploy her signature hanging off the apron move, which kicks us into the super-hot finishing stretch where Beauty Pair’s teamwork just dissipates (in part due to Jackie getting attacked on the outside by what appeared to be a member of Silver Pair) and they are overwhelmed by the repeated double-teaming and lose to a horrified crowd.

This was brilliant stuff. Hot crowd, well-structured, tragic story, the only downside really is someone in literally her first match ever looking a big green.

****

MD: We’re no longer in Hawaii. This was if not the debut for Rhonda Sing as Monster Ripper here, it’s very close to the debut and she’s debuted as a force. She was billed as Chinese-Canadian, 17 years old, 120 kg and trained by that old World Champion Mildred Burke. From what we’ve seen of Mami so far, she was definitely a force to be reckoned with, but the crowd buzzes way more the first few times they see Ripper in there. She’s treated as this amazing obstacle that the Beauty Pair somehow have to surmount. Kumano is definitely directing traffic, and quite good at it. She tossed Sato into Ripper to start and when she’d see Ripper throwing some odd looking stomps (like a bear just flailing), she’d quickly come in to control the violence. In later years, I always attributed the heels getting to do whatever they wanted to the refs being afraid of them and their superior numbers but here there’s more of a tecnico/rudo feel where the ref might halfheartedly try to stop the heel double team but he’ll drop everything to ensure that the other Beauty Pair member doesn’t get in the ring. At this point, it felt like they were playing by a different set of norms.

The answer to the question of how they could deal with Ripper was that they couldn’t. They could get an advantage on Kumano though. They just couldn’t keep it because Rhonda would come in and slowly walk over to stop whatever they were doing, to the point of just sitting on Sato a few times to win the first fall. And when Sato even got close to getting an edge on her in the ropes, Kumano would walk over to whack her in the head with a wrench. Because of course she would. However, the Beauty Pair were tag team specialists (maybe in the first generation of them with the High Flyers and…. Well, probably not the Jet Set) and they eventually cracked the code: double teams. All it took was a ducked clothesline to take Kumano out long enough to isolate Ripper. Once she was out of the way they could fight a fair fight against Kumano. That meant Sato’s insane belly to back suplexs where she flipped Kumano right onto her face over and over again. They really got to shine at the start of the third fall, with Sato’s slingblades and Ueda’s big splash but Kumano came in with a bucket and took out the ref and everyone else. That let Kumano do her signature dangling hangman’s choke and really things devolved into chaos from there. It went back and forth with a huge double suplex and Sato fireman’s carry drop on Ripper and Kumano hitting her Calf Branding-esque meteora for a near-fall. They finally ended it with Jackie being pulled off the apron and attacked by interlopers while the Black Pair (as this was the current incarnation of that multifaceted group) hit a brutal finisher, Kumano hanging up Ueda in the tree of woe and pulling her up while Ripper leapfrogged over her to squash Ueda in the corner. Hell of a thing. Anyway, I’m not sure Sing entirely knew what she was doing in there but she was used smartly and the big comeback spots were built to matter and pop the crowd big. Overall, it was one of the most effective debuts for a monster I’ve seen in a while.

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70's Joshi on Wednesday: Sato! Ueda! Romero! Kumano!

4. 1978.06.XX - Chabela Romero/Mami Kumano vs. Jackie Sato/Maki Ueda (2/3 Falls, Date Approximate guess based on when Romero was in Japan)

MD: It’s amazing how much they fit into thirteen minutes over two falls here. It’s not even that it’s a sprint. I wouldn’t call it that. It’s just so dense. It’s not even back and forth. There are momentum shifts. It’s just that whatever team that is on offense is filling their time with a ton of stuff. To start, it was the heels controlling on Maki. They had some double teams but the best part of the early going was when they were yanking her arm out of her socket; Romero was especially good there. Eventually Sato made it in but things would frequently spill to the floor and it became like a lumberjack or handicap match with everyone getting involved.

The end of the first fall was full of interesting stuff. Mami had the flip out powerbomb and an attempt at calf branding. Both of the Beauty Pair would use this sort of slingblade type hair yank down. Maki had a butt butt and I really like her standing vertical suplex which has the hand between the legs to make it almost a hybrid power slam. And then Sato, after leaping off the top with a splash, ended it with this crazy high angle belly to back.

Interestingly, even though Romero got pinned, they let Mami start the second fall; that’s different than France, Houston, or Portland when it comes to two-out-of-three fall matches. The match shifted here as she started to play hide the object with a spike and then actually hung both of the Beauty Pair with the dangling hangman’s choke like she was Brody King trying to murder Darby Allin. Sato and Ueda would fight their way back in and set off a finishing stretch that included a thudding drop out of a belly to back suplex position without going down from Sato and an very unexpected giant swing from Maki, before things spilled out again and Maki slipped in towards the end of the count to score the win. There’s a match in some year in some place where they just kept working and working Maki’s arm until a hot tag, but it wasn’t here. This had a feeling of just being everything and more, a constant battle that shifted from one style of match to another: it was that dogged southern tag and then became a brawl on the floor and back in the ring to be a sprint and then a hide-the-object Memphis heat segment. Just wild stuff.

K: It looks like we come into the match in progress, but from how everyone's positioned it's possible the tape just starts a few seconds after the bell rings or something. A neat thing I'll just note is the Japanese rolling text at the bottom is an advert for wrestler tryouts, giving requirements that applicants must be aged 16-20 years old and at least 160cm (5 feet 3 inches) tall. Part of what makes AJW an unusual company is, at a time when wrestling was mostly an "invitation-only" closed business, they were just openly advertising to millions of fans on TV how to enter the business.

This is our first look at Chabela Romero. She's a veteran Mexican wrestler (debuted 1955) who pops up in this era of AJW every now and then as a foreign heel. It's also the first time we're seeing Mami Kumano, who by this point will probably have taken Shinobu Aso's spot as Yumi Ikeshita's partner in Black Pair (hard to say for sure with the dates being unknown).

Right at the start Mami and Chabela are inflicting a relentless beatdown on Maki Ueda. Lots of double teaming that the referee tries to get a handle on but fails, but he also turns a blind eye to Jackie coming in to even the odds for a moment. Chabela gives us a bit of focus targetting Maki's right arm, and Mami follows along. There's a nice move where she stretches Maki's arm out and then headbutts her on the shoulder. Someone should steal that. The hot tag is a little weird. Chabela has Maki in a kind of hammerlock and is pushing her towards the ropes for Mami to hit her, but Maki turns her over, does a backwards roll towards her corner to tag in Jackie.

Jackie's a real good hot tag. Great dropkick. At this point all hell really breaks loose as they're fighting on the outside and people are getting slammed into tables. It's hard to follow what's going on exactly.  We're soon back in the ring with Mami dropping Jackie with a powerbomb like move, except instead of driving her down she just drops her to the side. Jackie has a really cool thrust kick move, where it looks like she's pushing someone away from her with her boot rather than trying to actually hurt. It looks disdainful. That gets followed up by her great proto-slingblade move, which the commentary call a "neckbreaker." Mami takes it high angle on her neck.

The pacing of this is so constant. Even when Chabela tries to get away for a moment Maki goes chasing her to the outside and we get another outside brawl with people getting choked. It always gets a double countout but they're back in at 18. Jackie does the move Nanae Takahashi would call the 'refrigerator bomb' in the 00s, but here they call it the 'Beauty Special'. Jackie follows this up with a great backdrop suplex that drops Chabela right on her neck to get the pin on the 1st fall.

We get a bit of a rest period in between the falls, which is really the only time in the whole match we get any chance to breathe. Once the bell rings Jackie flies straight at Mami hitting her with suplexes and her neckbreaker, then pins in Maki who unloads in the same way. The tables are turned though when Yumi Ikeshita comes to the outside and does some kind of distraction which allows Mami to whack Maki in the face with a wrench. Jackie is furious and goes to rip her head off but gets knocked down by the wrench as well. All the while Mami is hiding it from the referee in kinda comical ways, but the crowd sound very angry. She keeps changing direction while choking Jackie with the wrench so he can't see even though he's clearly aware something nefarious is going on. When hiding the wrench clearly isn't going to be possible anymore Mami just hands it back to Yumi on the outside and then things get totally deranged as she starts swinging Jackie & Maki one at a time by the neck on the outside in a not exactly safe looking way. Lots of screaming going on throughout all this and Yumi is throwing people around at ringside if they look like they're trying to stop this madness.

Eventually Beauty Pair manage to isolate Mami and double team her a little bit before Jackie hits a really nice backbreaker. Ikeshita tries to run in to interfere (I don't know where Chabela is right now in this chaotic scene) but gets taken out. Maki hits a Giant Swing on Mami of all things before we get another wild brawl on the outside with more throwing people into chairs and over tables who aren't even in the match. Maki Ueda gets the win by countout to give Beauty Pair the 2-0 win in this very hectic match.

My overall thoughts are this is both the pacing and the chaotic nature of this feels like an escalation on what we saw from Jumbo Miyamoto a couple of years earlier. A hotter crowd also helps. You might compare this to the Abdullah The Butcher & The Sheik matches happening in All Japan around the same time, I imagine there is some influence with the hiding the weapons spots. But there's a feeling of things going off the rails here that those matches don't quite reach, and none of those are as frantically paced. The flaw here though is the spots don't always flow together, and it feels like there's a lack of payoff for certain elements. For instance there's never really any comeuppance for using the weapons, and their use doesn't really escalate throughout, they're just thrown in. It's not a bad thing as such, but there's more than could be done with it.

This is the first match we have where I feel there's enough to give a star rating, which I generally do when reviewing things, so here goes:

***1/2

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70's Joshi on Wednesday: Miyamoto! Fumiake! Ueda! Sato! Aso! Ikeshita!

MD: Most weeks we'll try to hit one full match but here, to start off, we have a few due to clipping.

1. 1975.03.19 - Jumbo Miyamoto vs. Mach Fumiake (WWWA Singles Title) (Clipped)

K: This is a historically important match that we only have due to the Samurai TV show ‘AJW Classics’ airing a portion of it in 2003. Jumbo Miyamoto is the current champion, she is a cousin of the Matsunaga Brothers (the owners of AJW) and appears to have been one of AJW’s biggest names since being founded in 1968. Mach Fumiake was already a mainstream celebrity in Japan as she was runner-up in a TV singing contest (a Japanese ‘American Idol’ style show), her wrestling for AJW was a big enough deal that it got them a TV deal with Fuji TV. It’s a massive bit of history because women’s wrestling had been stuck with a stigma of being seedy, getting Mach Fumiake convinced the TV executives that this would be wholesome entertainment for families and hip affluent young people in particular.

The first time I saw Mach Fumiake is when she made a special appearance in the legends segment of the Dream Slam 1 show in 1993. It was immediately obvious why she was a huge star in her day. She’s very tall, good looking, has a deep voice and turns out she can sing as well! It’s like someone merged the most marketable qualities of every top Joshi star who followed her into one person. The only thing she’s potentially missing is, was she actually any good in-ring?

We only see about 3 minutes of a 20 minute title match here, so we can’t meaningfully assess them as wrestlers. But we can at least get a flavour of what the AJW main-event style looked like in 1975, and see that there is already evidence of the innovations it later became renowned for. The pace is breakneck. Jumbo opens with a couple of rough snap mares; the move is treated as if 1 alone isn’t going to do much damage, but it’s about getting control of your opponent and unloading a relentless barrage of offense upon them. Mach tries to fend it off by immediately clambering for the ropes, which we can see is already established as a babyface move here (it was considered a heelish move elsewhere at the time, Jack Briscoe escaping a hold by grabbing the rope was a heel turn!). After more exchanging of throws we even get a familiar spot where Mach uses her long legs to put Jumbo into a headscissors, which Jumbo kips up out of and we get a standoff pose-down.

The match soon skips ahead to what looks like the final couple of minutes. Jumbo hits a big vertical suplex (or ‘brainbuster’ as it’s called in Japan) for a 2 count. This gets a big reaction from the crowd like they’re really impressed Mach kicked out of it! I’ll not as well that Mach doesn’t so much kick out and bridges her shoulders up off the mat. The best part of the match by far was Mach’s big boot, she delivers two in a row, and the way she does it is to Irish Whip Jumbo into the ropes, and then hit her with the strike as she runs back at her. The 1st one especially looks like it really knocked Jumbo silly. The finish comes soon after, and unfortunately is a bit weak. Mach hits two butterfly suplexes (or something similar) but struggles to get Jumbo up high for either of them so they don’t have much impact, and then pins Jumbo for a 3 count but Jumbo looked like she’d got her shoulder up at 2 and immediately stands up and yells at the ref. Not really the most decisive way to put over your new top star, but now the era of Mach Fumiake truly begins (if it hasn’t already), just a shame we can’t see any of it. 

MD: We get the opening couple of minutes and then the finishing stretch here, after the announcements and some discussion from the commentators. I had no idea what to expect coming in considering that we’re in the mid-70s. My points of comparison would be IWE, AJPW, NJPW. Jumbo had a clear size advantage though Mach was taller, and they size each other up to start. I was thinking they’d go right into measured matwork maybe? They do not. Jumbo blinks first and charges in with these fevered snap mares. Then Mach returns favor with armdrags. The intensity is jarring relative to what I was expecting given the year and location. They’re just throwing their bodies at one another and whipping the other over though. We come back post clip with a big Jumbo vertical suplex which was very much a finishing move in most places around the world in 75. I never even saw one in the French footage. Mach came back by absolutely taking Jumbo’s head off with a big boot, and then locking in an Octopus hold and finishing it, though not without controversy with a double underhook drop and a butterfly suplex that she barely, barely got her over with. Jumbo pretty clearly kicked out at two but the ref didn’t see it that way and she started attacking everyone post match. The commentary discussed a “Mach Special” for Mach and a Raiden Drop for Jumbo but I’m not sure if that butterfly suplex was the Mach Special or not. The only reference I see online to it is from the script to Mach’s 1975 movie The Great Chase. Anyway, that’s a tangent. Point here is that this set the stage immediately: wild intensity both during and after the match with them absolutely going all out against each other from what we get to see. It feels like a huge shame we don’t have more Mach footage even if only from how she took Jumbo’s face off with that boot.

2. 1976.11.01 - Jumbo Miyamoto vs. Maki Ueda (WWWA Singles Title) (Clipped)

K: At the time of this match Maki Ueda is both the WWWA Singles Champion and a WWWA Tag champion with Jackie Sato as Beauty Pair, a cultural phenomenon rivaled only by the Crush Gals in the mid-80s. We have a decent amount of footage of Maki Ueda from later in her career but this is all we have of her two title reigns.

Similar to the previous match, Jumbo opens with a couple of rough snap mares to establish control, though this time she throws Maki straight out of the ring and lays beatdown on the ringside area throwing her into chairs. It feels like a less-refined version of Las Cachorras Orientales, but it doesn’t feel like it really did enough damage for it to have been worth it. Maki gets back in the ring and Jumbo hits her with two shoves off Irish Whips. Jumbo’s offense comes in twos. After a bit of tossling on the mat which Jumbo gets the better of, we see the move where Jumbo pushes her opponent into the ropes front-first, and then pulls back on the ropes to knock them down to the mat. She does it twice of course. I’ve never liked this move as it’s not very convincing; but it’s a Joshi staple at least by the late 70s, and possibly already was at this point.  
 
The match skips ahead with Maki on top, and we get to see what her “Irish Whip into a strike” move is. Hers is some kind of jumping knee attack, but she gets barely any height on the leap; it’s not clear if that’s even what she intended. The camera angle probably didn’t help though. Maki hits a couple of neckbreakers that had some good snap behind them and then puts Jumbo in a sitting Gory Special kind of submission. Amusingly, this is broken up when Shinobu Aso of Black Pair (Beauty Pair’s nemesis) runs in, quickly pushes her over and runs back out before the referee can do anything. The match just keeps going though. So Joshi’s pretty lenient attitude to outside interference is already happening here. She didn’t achieve much though as Maki still gets Jumbo into another submission hold. Jumbo is selling like she’s already a defeated woman here, she just looks kind of pitiful just about reaching the ropes while groaning in pain. Maki pulls her to the outside and tries to get revenge for the earlier beatdown, but this is a mistake as outside brawling is Jumbo’s speciality, and this gives her an opening to whack her head on the announcer’s table a few times to get herself out of trouble and reset things. Jumbo tries to unload some big offense but Maki counters into a sunset flip pinning predicament and gets the win. And that’s the end of Jumbo Miyamoto’s career, we barely knew her. Mariko Akagi gets into the ring and they set up her challenging Maki for the belt on November 30th (Mariko wins the title here, but we have no footage of her reign).

MD: This time I wasn’t surprised when Jumbo rushed Maki at the bell, but I didn’t see Maki’s bump over the top (her stomach hitting the rope off an Irish Whip and it just propelling her up and over) and Jumbo erasing her face on at table at ringside. Unfortunately, this is clipped as well and when we come back, Maki had an advantage, presumably from working on Jumbo’s damaged and taped knee. After a Cobra Twist attempt by Maki (too close to the ropes) they end up back outside and proceed in slamming each other’s face into that table once again. The finish has Maki get a sunset flip off a whip in the corner. This was Jumbo’s retirement match, which was announced to the crowd after it was over, and if there was a fast count in the Mach match, here it was a slow, hesitant one, as if the ref didn’t want to count Jumbo out. The post-match ceremony was pretty emotional, including upcoming challenger Mariko Akagi, who had been commentating, coming in to greet Jumbo and Maki. I’m glad we have these even if it’s hard to judge them on merit given the clipping.

3. 1976.12.08 - Jackie Sato & Maki Ueda vs. Shinobu Aso & Yumi Ikeshita (WWWA Tag Team Titles) (Clipped)

K: Beauty Pair vs. Black Pair was THE feud of 1976-78 and this is the only in-ring footage we have of it. Black Pair here are Yumi Ikeshita and Shinobu Aso. The version of Black Pair Westerners are more familiar with is Yumi Ikeshita and Mami Kumano, Kumano having replaced Aso when she retired in 1978*, but the Ikeshita & Aso pairing is still well remembered in Japan and is the version of Black Pair who Beauty Pair battle in their feature film “Red-Hot Youth.” Speaking of youth; it’s worth pointing out that at the time of this match, Sato & Aso are 19 years old and Ueda & Ikeshita are just 18 years old.

This opens with a good display of the 70s AJW heel style where roughly every 2nd move is dirty. For example Shinobu tags in by grabbing Maki by the hair and doing some double teaming. This is followed up by choking Maki with the ropes and on the ropes with her boot, using the ropes as a weapon to knock her down, and also repeatedly doing this face-scrunching move which looks more like schoolyard bully humiliation than wrestling offense. Plus clawing the eyes. It’s also very vicious and focused in its villainy if not on a particular body part or something. But there’s also something aesthetically pleasing about Yumi Ikeshita’s body slam off an Irish Whip. As much of a nasty cheater as she is, she still shows she can hit some impressive moves when she wants to.

There’s not much else to say about this match as it’s also edited and we don’t get to see much other than Black Pair just beating down on Beauty Pair so it’s quite repetitive. Maki’s bodyslam and piledriver both look pretty nice and Jackie gets to hit a dropkick, but that’s about it. The most noteworthy part may actually be that Maki actually gets a 3 count out of her piledriver, when that move notoriously almost never finishes matches in Joshi. They ought to get lessons from Maki on how to hit it properly.

*Shinobu Aso would make a brief comeback in 1987 with JWP as “The Sniper”. 

MD: Normative things I find interesting here: Maki was announced as Dropkick Ueda. She had a cape. Sato didn’t. In both this and the matches we’d seen previous, the champions were announced first. Here, both teams came out simultaneously from different parts of the arena as the music was playing. Ikeshita was noted as “The Bomb Girl.” Her shoulder was bandaged up as was Maki’s elbow. They also kept cutting to people playing badminton. Just leaving that out there.

This remains about as far from a 70s NWA Title match style as you can get despite the belts presumably being on the line. The second the bell rings, all civility goes by the wayside. There were liberal cuts here, but Aso and Ikeshita went to the eyes early and they stayed there throughout. Early on, there were still breathless momentum shifts with Sato and Ueda staying in it but the story of the match seemed to be Aso and Ikeshita using dirty tactics and frequent double teams to control Sato while Ueda badly wanted in. They had a number of suplexes too, including a nice fall away slam and a tilt-a-whirl. When she got in, it was a bit more familiar to me in the AJPW tag style; she was able to come in hot but quickly got dragged down by the numbers game and stayed that way until Sato had recovered enough to even the odds. Much like the two matches that preceded it, the clipping makes it a little hard to really judge but the tenets of the style seem to come into focus already: unyielding and varied high-impact offense and relentless intensity with no quarter given. As we move into more complex matches, we’ll have a better sense of whether or not it all comes together on a match by match basis and hopefully how it continues to develop towards the end of the decade.

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