March 4, 2023/Reiwa 5 I watched this match because I saw the Shu Pro tweet featuring a BBM article where Giulia superfan, Hideki Suzuki, said this match had the potential to be Reiwa’s Akira Hokuto vs Shinobu Kandori. Hokuto vs Kandori from 1993’s AJW All Star Dreamslam and AJW St. Battle were legendary matches from…
Author: noahssavior
LCO (Akira Hokuto, Mima Shimoda, & Etsuko Mita) vs Eagle Sawai, Harley Saito, & Miki Handa: Hateration
January 24, 1993/Heisei 4 Current joshi wrestling across the board is great and one promotion is arguably the best Japanese promotion of the pandemic era in regardless of gender. Stardom’s change in house style was enough to finally impress enough Tokyo Sports writers that a women’s match was nominated for the publication’s Match of the…
Here We Go Again: My Research On Joshi Candidates for GWE 2026
Hey y’all, it’s been a very long time since I’ve sat down and seriously watched wrestling for reviewing purposes. My dive down the “hardcore wrestling fan” hole started with me writing show reviews on my tumblr in 2016 in an attempt to, “…improve my writing and do more than just put a star rating into…
Liking Crush Gals is Female Behavior
It’s that magical time of year in Japanese wrestling when the Tokyo Sports Pro Wrestling Awards are announced. In my wrestling circle it’s never a real topic of conversation because we all know the drill, these awards are more about narratives being told instead of actual wrestling merit. Yes, great matches and wrestlers do get…
BeruBara Tag Boom: The 1940s-1960s
https://ko-fi.com/noahs_savior Disclaimer: Most of the information about the history of joshi wrestling is only available in Japanese, I only have a beginner’s understanding of Japanese and have used the help of machine translations for some information I’ve gathered through the last couple of years of learning about this time period in wrestling. What I’ve found…
Akira Hokuto vs Shinobu Kandori II: a company did not buy the following hyperbole
December 6, 1993/Heisei 4 This match is the second singles encounter between Akira Hokuto and Shinobu Kandori in the ongoing Hokuto vs LLPW feud. Both this and their first match in April of the same year received high praise from domestic and international audiences and either one are often included in lists of the best…
BeruBara Tag Boom: The Takarazuka Revue
What is a Revue? The revue style of musical theater has its origins in medieval France as a form of public entertainment at fairs and would eventually become the early “modern” revue popularized by the Cogniard Brothers at the Théâtre de la Porte Saint-Martin and shows, at the then new, Folies-Bergère in the early to…
BeruBara Tag Boom: Pre-War Girls Magazines and Post-War Shoujo Manga
[Passionate Friendship by Deborah Shamoon goes in-depth on the topic that I’m covering today. A small database of early Shoujo Gahou By the start of the Taisho era in 1912, Japan had made great strides in industrializing and becoming a modern country with a strong military force that had already taken control of Taiwan and…
BeruBara Tag Boom: S-Relationships
The Emergence of Girls’ Higher Education During eighteenth-century Japan one of the changes that worried the lords and members of high-level samurai was the shift from the traditional agrarian economy that Japan had known for centuries and had built its identity around was starting to see an intrusion from a new and burgeoning money economy…
BeruBara Tag Boom: Introduction
A series focused on how a musical based on a popular manga influenced Japanese women’s wrestling over the next decade. In February of 1976, a brand new tag team made their debut for All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling and on the same night won the WWWA tag titles from Mach Fumiake and Mariko Akagi. After that…
I say, you say, Heisei 