There is a lot to be said for wrestling lifers. They are the glue that holds the whole shebang together. The people who start promotions, who train the next generation and pass on their wisdom to those who, hopefully, will one day take their place. However, I also think there is beauty in those who don’t commit. In those who come in, do everything they need to do, and get out. It’s always sad. I still dream of all the Lulu Pencil matches we never got, including with the person I’m talking about today, but not everything needs to last. Apologies for pulling on a quote scrawled by a thousand teenagers, but maybe it is better to burn out than fade away.
Hiyori Yawata has burned bright. Just a couple of months short of her 2nd anniversary, she hung up her boots in a move that caught me off guard, but, with a second or two of reflection, made perfect sense. Wrestling was always a side quest for her. A world she stumbled into after falling in love with Kyoraku Kyomei (which makes so much sense, by the way). She’s not a Mei Suruga or Mio Momono, someone who has given this thing their entire heart. No, Hiyori is an artist who found a fascinating subject and followed it further than most would dare. In many ways, I think that’s what made her special. She wasn’t restricted by knowledge of what came before. Hiyori spent her career stomping a path through ChocoPro, making demands she had no right to make, and was all the more glorious for it.
It helps, of course, that she found the perfect setting for her art. The beauty of Darejyo is that it gives your Hiyoris of the world a chance. As much as I love Marvelous or Sendai Girls, they don’t produce wrestlers like her. To make it there, you have to commit your life to it. While those in Ichigaya have spoken at length about how hard Yawata worked, she wasn’t about to pack up and move into the Marvelous Dojo, no matter how many dogs they might have. Darejyo lets you decide how deep you want to go. Some people attend those classes for years and never even gesture towards actually debutingr. Then there are those like Hiyori who stumble into something extraordinary. She has become such a symbol of what Darejyo is that in her final match with Emi Sakura, she played the role of its defender, leaving the originator of the idea that any girl can wrestle to fight from the position that maybe that shouldn’t be true.
And I know most people won’t have seen it yet, but her final bow was perfect. I was lucky enough to be inside Ichigaya for it, and despite being mere metres away from Akki, I barely heard a word of his commentary. The Hiyori chants, which had become a way to inspire people to shout for her opponent not that long ago, swung back around in her favour, the room roaring her on as she faced the all-star trio of Suruga, Soy and Yotsuba. They laid a beating on her in a way that made it feel like there was some genuine resentment there, not from any meanness of spirit, but because of their fury that she’s walking about. They might not admit it, but they don’t want her to leave.
Neither do I, but I do think, like Lulu Pencil, it makes it that little more special. Hiyori is becoming a great wrestler, someone who can have those big matches with the likes of Suruga, Sakura, Shoko Nakajima and Rina Yamashita. She’s proven that. If she kept going, would she lose what makes her different? We’ve seen it before. Ask Maki Itoh. Maybe she would be fine, maybe the spark ignited by watching Kyoraku Kyomei and encouraged by ChocoPro was bright enough that she could never just be another wrestler, but there is a part of me that is glad to never know. I don’t need Hiyori main event epics. The beauty of a wrestler like her is in the struggle and the surprise. A Hiyori dropkick means more than something breathtaking because you can see the work that was done to get there. We got to revel in her beautiful weirdness before she went out into the real world, and that is a goddamn pleasure. Because where else could someone like Hiyori have flourished like that?
Plus, wrestling is always going to be here. If that reality hits a bit too hard, Emi Sakura hasn’t actually lost faith in Darejyo, and it got its name for a reason. While I’m sure she’d never hear the end of it, Hiyori could always shuffle through that door again, take her place in the dropkick line and eventually hear those chants one more time. Despite everything I just said, I’ll always be hoping that she does.
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 
Leave a comment