Nonoka Seto had 83 wrestling matches. Between her first match and her last, there was just under two years, and it was spent entirely in the world of ChocoPro.
All of which would make it easy to dismiss her time as a wrestler. Not even necessarily in a mean way. The people who write the history of wrestling, at least those who do so in English, probably don’t know who she is. They tend to other priorities. Stuff like how many people sat in some seats, or whether such-and-such a match is the 4th or 5th greatest of all time. You know, the ‘important things’. Thankfully, I do know who Nonoka is, and had the pleasure of watching her career play out in real time.
With that in mind, when I started writing this, I had a quick battle with the Twitter search engine to find the first time I’d mentioned Nonoka online. As far as I could find, it was an excited tweet about her using a neck cravat to throw Mei across the ring in an exhibition. That was followed up by my delight at watching her sprint out of the room after the announcement of her debut match. All of this is to say that Nonoka was always likely to be a favourite of mine. She perhaps wasn’t the obvious future star that her sister, Miya Yotsuba, was, but she was interesting. Like her close friend Hiyori Yawata, Nonoka felt like a very specific brand of Darejyo wrestler, and that’s always going to be a good thing in my world.
By which I mean that Nonoka doesn’t scream classic wrestler. She was never particularly fast or strong, and was something of a self-confessed crybaby. And yet, Darejyo and Nonoka figured out how to make that work for her. Like Marvelous’s Ayame Sora, she came through next to the golden girl (with the double whammy of it being her sister), and was smart enough to realise she didn’t have to try and keep up with her. Instead, she found her own way, carving out a spot for herself as part of the Doukies. She managed to harness her own likeability, using the fact her emotions were always bubbling away under the surface to her advantage and becoming the kind of wrestler you can’t help but cheer for. Whether she was fighting back tears or celebrating winning her first title before she’d won her first match (a 24/7 belt that changed hands during janken), you always knew how Nonoka was feeling.
That was also the key to the Nonoka match that I will hold closest to my heart. Her vs Hiyori just before she went on hiatus is the kind of wrestling that reminds me why I love this stuff. It’s perhaps not something you would cut up into GIFs to catch people’s eye on Twitter, but it was perfect. Two close friends getting a chance to main event in the company they love, the roster clustered in with the fans at the window, roaring them on as they did so. Nonoka wrestled that entire match like someone who was moving to hold down the emotions, which made it feel more rooted in reality that most of this dumb sport. As someone whose taste in wrestling is almost entirely fuelled by how it makes me feel, it was everything I could have wanted.
And that’s why it doesn’t matter how many matches Nonoka had. In fact, the brevity of her career adds to the beauty of it. Like Hiyori, she found wrestling for a few years, and then life took her somewhere else. Maybe she’ll find it again someday (with her sister still being around, it will be hard for her to vanish entirely), but if she doesn’t, that’s cool. Nonoka Seto spent a few years as a wrestler, and she was good at it, and I’m glad I got to watch her.
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