I don’t want to slag off Rina Yamashita. She’s a fantastic wrestler who has been part of some amazing stuff. However, in recent times, she’s been stuck in what I think of as the Hiroyo Matsumoto vortex. She’s old-reliable. A freelancer who pops up in countless promotions and can be trusted to fill a spot anywhere on the card. That’s no bad thing. In fact, it’s a talent in its own right. However, it’s easy to see why someone in that role would slip into a rut. There’s nothing to get your teeth into. You arrive, do your thing, and go home. The matches are rarely bad. They’re just not what you remember.
And yet, wrestling Mei Suruga, this felt like a Yamashita who was locked in. Rina has always been a welcome face in ChocoPro, having popped in over the years to team with Minoru Fujita or fulfil the role of Kaho Hiromi’s big pal. However, it seems that at some point over those visits, something has clicked. ChocoPro doesn’t seem like a natural fit for the ‘Deathmatch Amazon’, but as her rallying the troops promo at the end of the show or the tears in her eyes during her backstage interview suggested, it seems Yamashita has fallen in love with the little promotion from the backroom in Ichigaya. Suddenly, she doesn’t feel like a freelancer, here to fill a spot. She feels like someone who is as committed to the task as anyone else.
Truthfully, this match didn’t hit the beats I expected. Part of that is that I hadn’t considered the idea of Rina winning. I thought this was a classic challenger of the month situation, so it made sense to have Yamashita come in and bully Mei, giving the champion a mountain to overcome on her 10th defence. Instead, this was a match dictated by Suruga. She might have been up against a deathmatch wrestler, but it was Mei who went dirty first, and for a lot of the action, she was the one pushing forward. On her turf, Suruga brought the fight to Rina, bamboozling her with those bright, Surugaist flurries of action.
However, while Yamashita’s strength wasn’t the focal point here, it was still there. It’s a weapon that you can never fully negate. Mei had to unleash to chip away at her challenger, but when Rina was able to hit back, she hit back hard. There was a point in this match when a straightforward Yamashita boot to the head earned a huge reaction from the crowd and Akki on commentary. In a promotion that rarely features something as brutally violent as that, it felt like a turning point in the action. Mei could dance around Rina, finding her way into submissions or fancy pins, but Yamashita always had the power to boot her to the floor.
The longer this went on, the more that mattered. Suruga was diving deeper and deeper into her bag of tricks, working through her various hold, pulling out counters we haven’t seen before, but she couldn’t put Rina down. Whatever it is about ChocoPro that has captured Yamashita’s heart meant she kept coming. And I get it. As someone who had their heart stolen by ChocoPro a long time ago, Rina’s desperation to prove herself as part of it all made perfect sense. She had an answer to everything Mei threw at her, surviving the moves that had seen off countless challengers, so that when the smoke settled, we had a new champion.
When I saw this news on Twitter, I was surprised but intrigued. Having seen the match and Rina’s promo after, I am buzzing. If she can capture that energy and keep it going, I can’t wait to see what she does with that title. Mei Suruga was an incredible champion, and if you’d asked me to predict who was next in line, Rina Yamashita wouldn’t have even crossed my mind. Now she’s there, though? I have a feeling we could be on the verge of something special.
Thanks to their No Pay Wall initiative, all ChocoPro content is available for free on their YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2HtPsU4U7TNSv2mSbPkj0w
Ramblings About Wrestling 