It’s ya girl, Alex, back at it again with writing reviews and sharing my general thoughts about Japanese women’s pro wrestling (hereafter to just be called joshi to save time and space) in a more suitable format than off the cuff twitter threads. I’m a former co-host of two short-lived women’s wrestling podcasts from Squared Circle Sirens and the former wrestling review site, Wrestling With Words, and for those reading this wondering what happened with the second podcast the answer is simple: time. Around the time of the last episode of Josy! Joshi! Joshé! I had just picked up a second part-time job, and in fact had to get to job training when recording the final episode that never got released, and between the two jobs with long commutes my spare time and energy were eaten up and I didn’t have much time to write about one of my favorite sports. This spring I got a good full-time job that gives me a 5-day work week compared to the 6 or 7 day work weeks I had been slogging through for the past year and I finally left my second job, the newly acquired personal time has let me get back into reading up on joshi and wrestling in general like I did back when I was an unemployed hermit trying to figure out life after high school.

Now time to bring all of this back into why I decided to go to the blog route, the main part is I know more about editing and formatting a written document than an audio file, so that hopefully means I’ll post more and feel less doubt in my work. Second is that I’ve been feeling the desire to get back into writing reviews and the friends I’ve met through WWW and Square Circled Sirens have always been supportive about what I’ve done and enjoyed what I’ve made. Finally I truly feel that after the little ~4 years that I’ve seriously watched joshi wrestling there still aren’t many female or non-binary voices out there talking and discussing the subject despite the fact that the wrestlers are all women and I feel that that means that certain viewpoints and feelings aren’t being explored, an example is how few fans seem to connect the dots between AJW’s old retirement age with the societal pressure of getting married and raising a family that’s felt in many cultures around the world.

I named this blog ‘I say , you say, Heisei’ because the Heisei era had recently ended this past April and had the thought that going through the period would be a cool project to motivate me into writing again. Eras in Japan change whenever there’s a new emperor so Heisei was the name for Akihito’s reign from January 7, 1989 to April 30, 2019. The almost even thirty year time period gives a good frame for seeing joshi wrestling reach its peak, fall from that peak, and pick the pieces back up and gain popularity again while also seeing the changes in marketing of the top stars and changes in audience demographics. Other plans for the blog is to post expanded thoughts from twitter threads I’ve made about joshi, some opinion pieces, and talking about whatever else I feel like people might be interested in me talking about.