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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

**3/4

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

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

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70s Joshi on Wednesday: Ripper! Fujimi! Tsumaki!

17. 1979.01.XX2 - 05 Masumi Tsumaki & Victoria Fujimi vs. Monster Ripper

K: I believe Masumi Tsumaki is Victoria Fujimi’s sister. There’s not much information about her. She’s better known as a masked wrestler called ‘Silver Satan’ who tagged with Mariko Akagi as Silver Pair. They both retired together later in 1979.

We get a bit of stalling to start this off including Yumi Ikeshita punching the referee to a little chuckle from the crowd, perhaps a foreshadow of what’s to come? Victoria is the smaller of the two, she tries to use her speed to keep out of the way of Monster’s attacks, which works the first couple of times but once Monster lands a hit then she’s knocked down easily. When Masumi she actually tries a takedown, and despite her being a bit bigger than Victoria that approach has even less success.

There’s an odd moment where Black Pair on the outside trap Victoria’s feet over the ropes, and then Monster comes over and after a senton just keeps picking Victoria up by the head and just dropping her. There’s something really ‘primitive’ about her offense, it sometimes feels like she’s just making it up as she goes along with her brute strength rather than actually having moves. I read the purpose behind these Monster Ripper matches as putting her in different situations where various members of the roster have to come up with a way to take her down, and thus far we’re seeing none of them succeed, or at least never for very long. She just seems unbeatable as she’s so much more powerful than anyone else.
The match does drag a bit in the middle where they start getting repetitive with the ‘Monster is too strong for this to work’ spots that it gets a bit redundant. Things heat up some more when the sisters start double teaming her and have things spill to the outside. We get to see Mariko Akagi throw some shots when the brawling starts, which was nice. But Monster just bashes everything in her path and soon gets the win.

**


MD: This was 2-on-1 but the rest of the Black Army (or Black Trio) were out there and so were a bunch of red-jacketed allies of Tsumaki and Fujimi. They seemed to call Victoria and Masumi the “Tsukisaki Sisters," which Kadaveri has maybe explained. This more or less had tag rules though it got more chaotic as it went and started with Fujimi and Ripper. Victoria went through her legs a couple of times but quickly got caught and all it took was one shot and one toss.

A couple of normative things. At first the Black Army would only interfere when Ripper already had a clear advantage and basically just to set up Ripper jumping on her opponents by holding them in the ropes for leverage. Then they’d interfere when Fujimi and Tsumaki were trying to get an advantage with a double team (like a double crab). Then finally, they’d just do it when one of them had gotten over on Ripper, like when Fujimi had been able to get a toehold on. Likewise, Ripper had a tendency to more and more hide chokes behind the refs back.

In general, Ripper looked more developed than she had previously, but she still had a ways to go. At one point, Tsumaki ran in trying to pick a leg and Ripper just lifted her up into an over the shoulder backbreaker. But later on, she didn’t seem sure what to do so she just did it again. On the other hand, at one point, she jammed them on a snap mare attempt and it looked like the most foreboding thing imaginable. She’d just crash down with vertical Earthquake splashes again and again too. The amount of chaos that ensued here, with a half dozen people getting involved on the outside and Ripper just fighting off everyone like she was King Kong felt like an escalation from what we had seen so far. Just a new level of chaos. In the end though, this was inevitable and Ripper just slammed one on top of the other and pinned both.

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