It’s fitting that as I write this, Mizuki and Miu Watanabe are building to Ittenyon by debating whether Miu is a princess or a monster. While I’m not brave enough to say it to the champ’s face, the truth is I’d argue she graduated to monsterhood with this match. Sure, beating Miyu Yamashita to win the Princess of Princess Title was huge. It’s Miyu in a Tokyo Joshi main event. If you come out in one piece, you’re doing pretty well. However, while Miu vs Miyu was a battle of two different types of power, Shoko Nakajima represented a very different challenge. On the first defence of her new belt, Watanabe had to contend with the best pure wrestler in the company, and as Yamashita knows better than anyone, that’s a banana skin that it’s all too easy to slip on.
Something Nakajima seemed very aware of. There was a sense here that she was putting Miu through her paces. Not the way you would a rookie, Watanabe is long past that point. No, this was Shoko realising that if she stayed calm and rooted this in wrestling rather than a pissing contest, she should be able to last the distance and wear the upstart down. It’s exemplified by that early shifting of her weight onto Miu’s ankle to escape a waistlock. She didn’t have to confront Watanabe’s power head-on. Shoko is talented and skilled enough to force a less experienced competitor into wrestling her, and when that happened, in theory, it should have been her fight to lose.
Yet, that’s not what went down. This match didn’t suddenly try to sell us on the idea that Miu was Shoko’s equal, but it did show that she could keep up. She’s no slouch herself, and when she couldn’t get there through talent, she could brute force it. The moment of the match for me is when Nakajima falls back on one of the oldest tricks in the book, using a monkey flip to catapult Miu across the ring, only for Watanabe to do it straight back to her, matching her beat for beat. The deeper into the weeds they went, the more it became apparent that Shoko wasn’t going to be able to tie the champ up and wear her down, and the second she switched it up, moving to higher impact offence, she was playing into Miu’s hands. The monster began to rear it’s head, rising up and unleashing a torrent towards the challenger. There were no big dramatic nearfalls or final flurries. When Miu turned it on, Shoko had nowhere else to go.
That ability to overwhelm someone as talented as Nakajima is what turned Miu Watanabe from a smiling, energetic idol into a champion entrusted with carrying this promotion on her back. She deserves all the credit in the world for that, but it also needs to be noted how much Shoko gave her here. Nakajima’s work made everything Miu did in the back half of this match feel impactful, and when the action finally turned in her favour, it was the most earned comeback of the year. I’m not going to stand here and tell Miu she’s not a princess, she can be anything she damn wants as far as I’m concerned, but the monster is there too, and, on this day, it was Shoko Nakajima who brought it out.
Ramblings About Wrestling 
Phenomenal match that would probably appear on my Mount Rushmore of TJPW.