Twenty-five years is a long time to do anything, never mind something as physically demanding as wrestling. That’s doubly true when you are Nanae Takahashi, who hasn’t exactly taken it easy. Thankfully, she’s made it this far in one piece and chose to celebrate her 25th Anniversary by putting together one hell of a card. Although, I would question the logic of booking herself against Arisa Nakajima, who, let’s face it, probably wants to hurt her. But hey, what do I know?
Okay, so removing the ten-match limit for these lists has maybe caused me to go a bit overboard. In my defence, April was a hell of a month for wrestling, despite the event I was looking forward to most, GAEAISM, being postponed because of Japan’s COVID issues. Thankfully, plenty of other stuff was there to pick up the slack, and, well, scroll down to see how much I had to talk about.
From shit, occasionally a flower blooms. Is that a saying? I wrote it thinking it was, but now I’m not so sure. Fuck it. It’s there now. Sadly, Yoshiko has had to drop the SEAd title, her recent injury issues getting the better of her. In response, though, Nanae has booked Rina Yamashita vs ASUKA, and that’s one hell of a flower. Throw in a one-day tag tournament, and this show was can’t miss.
Assemble is back! It’s the third show for the joshi collective, although I’ve also seen it being billed as volume 4 because volume 3 was cancelled, which was confusing, so I decided to stick with three. Sorry, none of that is important. What’s important is that we have a whole load of wonderful companies in the same venue, all going out of their way to make me happy. Isn’t that nice of them?
I’ve decided to make a couple of tweaks to my matches of the month round-up. The most obvious one is that this hasn’t been a top ten list for a while, so there is no real need to stick to ten entries. Some months it might be more, some months it might be less, and it’s silly to force myself into a corner for no reason. Secondly, I am going to make a tiny change to the kind of things I write about. There are often brilliant wrestling matches where I have nothing to say. That doesn’t take away from how good they are, but not everything requires analysis beyond saying it rules. On top of that, if they come from one of the promotions I write about regularly, I’ve often reviewed them before. So, rather than stretching myself to come up with something new, I’m adding an honourable mentions list to the bottom of each month, where I’ll round up all the stuff you should watch, but where I have nothing new to add to the conversation.
Apart from that, it’s business as usual! Here are a load of matches from the last month that I loved.
Lot of badasses in that picture. Credit: SEAdLINNNG
The WWE Countdown finally comes to an end as Sareee’s final match in Japan would be with SEAdLINNNG. If anyone has any ideas about how we can stop her going, you better pitch them now because we’re running out of time.
December is a weird month for wrestling as it both feels quiet and busy. We’re building up to the New Year buzz in Japan, but at the same time, everyone is going back and looking at the past twelve months as a whole, picking out their favourite matches and moments. Still, wrestling never sleeps, so there was plenty of stuff to get your teeth into, and these were the ten matches that I particularly enjoyed.
That’s how you get someone hyped for a show. Credit: Assemble
What better way to celebrate the anniversary of Big Egg than to get a load of joshi companies in a building to have a lovely old time. The first Assemble is still one of my shows of the year, so this one had big boots to step into. Let’s see how they did.
A Grow Together review may feel slightly redundant over two weeks after it happened, but it’s only recently aired on Nico, and it’s not often you get to talk about an Aja Kong main event in 2020. Plus, I regularly get people looking at reviews I wrote over a year ago, so I’m sure someone still cares.
Just a smidge of talent in that ring. Credit: Assemble
Joshi Assemble! There was always going to have to be a response from the smaller wrestling companies to the effects of COVID and, in a heartening move, joshi decided the best way to deal with it was together. Assemble might be more of a showcase for the different companies involved rather than an inter-promotional supershow, but it is still easy to get excited about. Throwing matches from Oz Academy, Sendai Girls, Pure-J, SEAdLINNNG, Marvelous and T-Hearts (even if we’re not quite sure what that is yet) together sounds like a jolly good time, no matter how it’s done.
