1979/Showa 54 1979 is a year when AJW had to figure out who they were after the split of Beauty Pair in February. Jackie Sato was tasked with being a singles star and ace of the company, Queen Angels were poised as the new top tag team, and Mami Kumano had replaced Black Pair original,…
Category: Reviews
Akira Hokuto vs Yasha Kurenai: Bad Bitches Take a Seat, They Don’t Stand Up
June 11, 1993/Heisei 4 They stare. Kurenai squats. Hokuto sits. Kurenai attacks Hokuto’s bandaged knee from behind with a wooden sword corner and starts screaming and hitting chokeslam after chokeslam but Hokuto refuses to stay down. The tide changes when Kurenai dives off the tope rope and gets two boots to the gut, someone throws…
Go Shiozaki vs Kazuyuki Fujita: Panem et circenses
March 29, 2020/Reiwa 1 Art is often transformed while still pending completion, — pendent opera interrupta; they go on quietly, in harmony with the changes in the art. The new form of art takes up the monument where it finds it, becomes a part of it, assimilates it to itself, develops it according to its…
The 1969 AJW Roster vs Yakuza Goons: Violence at the Pepsi stand
1969/Showa 44 To get up to speed, our main characters are heading to a spring festival to sell knives and other fine goods at their market stand and to also make a peace deal with their fellow yakuza families. Along the way they pick up a pretty lady who’s stranded on the side of the…
Giulia vs Maya Yukihi: What if JAGUAR challenged Buffalo to a wrestling match for Crystal Bird’s feather?
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…
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…
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…
Nobuhiko Takada vs Shinya Hashimoto: Now for something completely different
April 29, 1996/Heisei 8 During this time of at-home isolation and bountiful free time due to the hospitality & food service industry in my country exploding I actually have time to watch some wrestling in 2020, and for April 1st I decided to review one of my favorite men’s matches from a Japanese promotion. Around…
Jackie Sato vs Rimi Yokota: Beauty ends
February 25, 1981/Showa 56 At quick glance it’s easy to tell that this will be an important title match for the immediate future but this match is also a major changing of the guard for AJW from their first stars to the eventual rise of some of the biggest wrestlers of the new decade. I’ll…
Yumiko Hotta & Manami Toyota vs Tomoko Watanabe & Momoe Nakanishi: fighting Mom & Dad in a garage
March 10, 2001/Heisei 13 In the short couple of years that I’ve been watching joshi wrestling the discussion about AJW for many usually falls off a cliff around the year 1997. The reason being that during the summer of 1997 several women left the AJW roster due to new contracts bringing in less money and…
I say, you say, Heisei 