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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70's Joshi on Wednesday: Akagi! Ikeshita! Kumi! Fujimi!

8. 1978.09.XX - 02 Mariko Akagi & Yumi Ikeshita vs. Nancy Kumi & Victoria Fujimi (2/3 Falls, probably September)

K: Nancy Kumi and Victoria Fujimi are the ‘Golden Pair’ and would have been WWWA Tag Team Champions shortly before this match. They had some acclaimed matches with Queen Angels (Lucy Kayama & Tomi Aoyama) earlier in 1978, you can see about 3 and a half minutes of one of them in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRFTRPDFG_U&t=1154s It’s not enough footage to meaningfully assess so it’s not been given its own entry here, but it’s interesting to have a look at for historical reasons.

Mariko Akagi is also a significant name. She debuts in 1970, had two WWWA Singles Title reigns and appears to have been regarded as one of the best/most influential workers of the era. She’s called the “Queen of the Ring” in the Beauty Pair movie and is depicted (in kayfabe) as having recruited Jackie Sato into AJW. But, as is becoming a theme of this project, this is just the first of two matches we have of her before she retires in 1979. There’s a few more very brief clips out there of wrestling but that’s it. This match is the best evidence we have to see if her reputation is deserved.

Here we go then. Akagi and Ikeshita are both behaving like rotten hooligans from the start storming the ring with chairs, and when the referee appears to calm things down to start the introductions they jump Golden Pair and the match just starts. The first 9 minutes just Golden Pair getting demolished in all kinds of villainous ways. Ikeshita is her usual self, relentless cheating. Akagi is cheating as well but she feels less outright evil and displays more of a ‘determined to win at all costs’ kind of heeling whereas Ikeshita is just being cruel coz she enjoys it. That’s how I read it anyway. I also see a bit of Jaguar Yokota in how Akagi moves around the ring with such constant energy and motion. I really liked all of this, the flaw though is when Nancy eventually manages to get the hot tag they’d been building to it feels way too easy. Like Ikeshita just lost focus for no real reason and suddenly she was able to tag in Victoria.
 
But leaving that aside, the hot tag is really fun from the off when Ikeshita grabs Victoria by the arm apparently to lock in some kind of hold, but Victoria uses both Ikeshita AND the referee as a base when she flips around out of it and hits Ikeshita with a judo throw. Now that is a spot someone needs to steal. You can’t exactly be mad at Victoria for using the ref like that coz he’d already made a bunch of bad calls not spotting Golden Pair’s tags coz he wasn’t looking, yet letting the heels get away with coming in and out without tagging. Victoria follows this up with a really awesome gutbuster (actually Ikeshita bumps for it incredibly).

Skipping ahead a bit, the heels get back control when Victoria tags Nancy back in (Nancy is clearly the weak line), and when Nancy’s on the mat Akagi does a jumping footstomp TO THE FACE. She doesn’t get much high on it thankfully but still that looked nasty and not a move I remember anyone doing. Funnily enough Nancy manages to tag Victoria because Ikeshita AGAIN seems to lose focus and lets her get away and tag. Unless they’re trying to get over Ikeshita as an absent-minded heel it’s a bit weird that’s happened twice. Here Victoria does a spinkick which Ikeshita ducks, but Victoria quickly follows it up with a second one to the head and takes her down. Interesting because Meiko Satomura has a very similar spot (albeit her opponent is usually on a knee rather than standing in her version).

Annoyingly, the camera is focused on Nancy Kumi on the outside nursing a hurt knee and totally misses the move which gets Victoria a pinfall on Akagi to take the 1st fall.

The 2nd fall is quite short. I’ll note that Akagi hits some really good looking moves in this, her dropkick is very good and I also spotted she did the knee-drop from the top rope. That move seems to have a bit of lineage in AJW with only one wrestler really doing it at a time. The lineage I believe goes like this: Mariko Akagi > Mimi Hagiwara > Noriyo Tateno > Takako Inoue. I mention this because one of the quirks of AJW is that the wrestlers weren’t supposed to copy their senior’s signature moves, but they were allowed to ‘inherit’ them after that wrestler retires. That convention is part of the reason why so many AJW wrestlers invented their own moves. They had to!

Before the 3rd fall Akagi is very angry for some reason, so angry that she starts throwing water at the crowd and gets some loud boos. The heels pretty much just pick up where they left off. Nancy is getting dominated by the pair of them for a good while until, you’ll never believe this, Yumi Ikeshita snapmares her towards her own corner and loses control of her allowing Victoria to be tagged in. If I were Akagi I’d be fuming. The match ends pretty soon after when they all start fighting outside and it ends in a double countout.

It’s definitely a good match with lots of cool stuff, but also a bunch of structural flaws and a flat finish.

***1/4

MD: Akagi and Ikeshita really stood out here. I’m pretty sure we’re still in Hawaii thanks to the flowers in the ring and the talks of rainbows. The Golden Pair of Kumi and Fujimi (with her gi) get announced but then Akagi and Ikeshita (who had made it to the ring first brandishing chairs) immediately swarmed and it’s ten minutes of pure heat after that. We’re in southern tag land. Fujimi would get hope spots with missed spinkicks. Kumi would try to punch from underneath. They even managed a hot tag only to get cut off when Kumi missed a dropkick. The babyface on the apron would try to get in and the ref would get drawn to stop her causing doubleteams and illegal switches, but the heels were so good at taking advantage that they held the heat instead of it going onto the ref. They played hide the object. They choked with a rope. They went after the eyes again and again. Maybe the most striking visual for me was the utilization of hair-pulling not as an end unto itself but as a means to get the hair away from the eyes so that they could be targeted. There weren’t many moves in the first fall, though Ikeshita threw some nasty headbutts. When the real hot tag did finally come, Kumi wiped out again, this time hurting her knee and it was up to Fujimi to fight until she was recovered. This time, her first spin kick was missed but she hit a second and soon managed a clutch pin.

The second fall, however, was all Akagi and Ikeshita. Ikeshita had power moves, a high fallaway slam, a gutwrench slam, standing headbutts off the top, and the arm hook ‘rana to pick up the fall. Akagi had a lot of fast firebrand offense off the ropes. In between falls, she spiked a water bottle while Ikeshita shouted on the mic. Fujimi’s leg was bandaged up in between falls and she was able to come back with Fujimi in the last fall, but things devolved into pure chaos on the outside and everyone got counted out. This particular version of the Black Pair was a blast and I wish we had thirty more matches with them as a unit. Ah well, getting used to that sort of disappointment is a necessary part of this project.

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