Welcome to Count 2.99!
The active Japanese female wrestler with the longest career is ...
Jaguar made her debut in 1977
It's fair to call her a living legend, right?
There are a few others who started not too long afterwards who still wrestle occasionally, or who are semi-retired.
But the best-known longtime joshi wrestlers who still regularly wrestle today include...
Nagayo was in a famous tag team called Crush Gals with her partner Lioness Asuka.
Nagayo is still wrestling to this day.
There are a lot of other early big-name joshi wrestlers who've since retired, like...
Then from that early generation who's still wrestling, there's...
Then someone who retired a few days ago...
Lots of big names from that generation, right?
Nowadays, joshi wrestling is focused around Meiko Satomura, Nanae Takahashi and others like them.
And that brings us to the current generation, with wrestlers like Io Shirai.
One federation absolutely must be mentioned when discussing women's wrestling in Japan:
(Zen Nihon Joshi Puroresu, also known as "ZenJo").
All Japan was the first joshi federation, and a lot of other federations would later split off from it.
Today's joshi federations all have common roots in All Japan. So again, no history of Japanese women's pro wrestling is complete without ZenJo.
It's the biggest company there's been in joshi wrestling.
Well, for example, from All Japan there was Chigusa Nagayo who then went on to found Gaea Japan...
Kyoko Inoue from All Japan founded NEO Ladies.
There was Arision (founded by Aja Kong) too.
The current federation Stardom also has roots in All Japan, by way of Nanae Takahashi, who worked for them, too.
Wrestlers from All Japan would split off to start new joshi federations like this.
The branching kept going. For instance, Meiko Satomura came up in Gaea Japan,
and then she went on to found Sendai Girls.
Wrestlers from Arision and JD left and started Pro Wrestling Wave.
Stardom and OZ Academy were also founded by wrestlers who started out in All Japan and JWP and so on.
Joshi federations branched off from each other like that. They split, came back together, recombined with each other...
...eventually bringing us to the joshi federations that are active today.
There are several classic matches that must be mentioned when discussing joshi wrestling.
The first of those is...
This was a hair vs. hair match - the loser had to shave her head.
That stipulation packs a particular punch in women's wrestling.
This match caused quite a stir in Japan at the time, and its impact is still felt to this day.
The second must-see match is...
This one was a steel cage match - another type of match that you don't often see in joshi wrestling.
It's not typical joshi wrestling. It brought a whole new level of brutality.
It has a real shocker of an ending, too.
Please check it out and see it for yourself.
The third match I want to recommend is ...
There was really nothing quite like this match in joshi, either.
Well, it's a street fight, right?
It's super brutal.
A more recent match, Yoshiko vs. Act Yasukawa, is well-known for being shocking and dangerous.
Hokuto vs. Kandori was even more hardcore than that.
You really should watch it.
My first pick is Meiko Satomura.
These past few years, you'd often hear Satomura described as the "yokozuna of joshi wrestling." (Yokozuna: The highest rank in sumo wrestling.)
She's a top practitioner of strong style, and she's very physically powerful.
If I could only name one more... Nanae Takahashi.
Nanae Takahashi is another wrestler who's often called a "joshi yokozuna." She's another strong style wrestler.
Any wrestler who could beat both Satomura and Takahashi would be well on track to be the next big joshi star.
And it turns out Io Shirai has done just that.
To pick a wrestler from the next generation, Chihiro Hashimoto.
Hashimoto wrestles for Satomura's federation, and she's actually beaten Satomura, too.
We can definitely expect big things in her future.
For my Wrestler of the Month, I went with ...
Manami Toyota
Toyota retired earlier this month.
For the last match of her career, she wrestled fifty other wrestlers.
It was crazy! The match ended up going on for more than an hour, and she just kept fighting.
It was definitely a match fitting of Manami Toyota.
Toyota's influenced countless other wrestlers throughout her very long career.
A lot of wrestlers now use moves that Toyota originally pioneered.
She's hands-down one of the history makers in joshi wrestling. That's why I chose her this month.
Kagetsu ( 花月 )
