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…
Tag: Showa Era
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…
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: 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…
The BeruBara Tag Boom: Prologue
Hey y’all, as I’ve mentioned earlier this year on twitter, I have been doing research on a subject I feel is neglected in wrestling discussion and has been for decades, and that’s the popularity and importance of the Beauty Pair and the entire boom period AJW had in the late 70s. Discussion online about joshi…
Maki Ueda vs Jackie Sato: Beauty Pair at Budokan
February 29, 1979/Showa 54 Over the course of the corona virus pandemic I took a step back from watching pro wrestling, both old and new, as my go-to promotions weren’t holding my interest and following the tragic passing of Hana Kimura I had lost most of my passion for the sport and totally stopped watching….
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…
I say, you say, Heisei 