Not related to All Japan Pro Wrestling for
men, which was founded in 1972.
All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling, nicknamed
Zenjo was a joshi puroresu promotion established
in 1968 by Takashi Matsunaga and his brothers.
The group held their first card on June 4
of that year. For many years it had a TV program
on Fuji TV.
The All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling Corporation,
established in 1968, was the successor to
the All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling Association,
which had been formed in August 1955, to oversee
the plethora of women's wrestling promotions
that had sprung up in Japan following a tour
in November, 1954, by Mildred Burke and her
World Women's Wrestling Association. These
promotions included the All Japan Women's
Pro-Wrestling Federation, and the All Japan
Women's Wrestling Club, started in 1948, which
was the first women's wrestling promotion
in Japan. For a time the Club pushed female
wrestling as a legitimate sport, booking sporting
arenas.
By the mid-60s, the Association had fallen
apart, due to infighting between the member
promotions, and female wrestling was relegated
back to being a sideshow act in strip-tease
theaters. In 1967, another attempt to organize
the sport of women's professional wrestling
was made with a new All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling
Association. This time the Fabulous Moolah,
the NWA Women's Champion, came across from
the United States and traded her title with
Yukiko Tomoe, to lend legitimacy to the promotion.
The new Association broke up later that year.
Finally, Takashi Matsunaga, who had been the
promoter for All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling
Federation, formed the All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling
Corporation with his brothers. The promotion
held its first card on June 4, 1968 and got
a television deal with Fuji TV in the same
year.
In the fall of 1970, AJW, which had been contesting
the American Girls' Wrestling Association
Championship since the previous year, hosted
Marie Vagnone, new holder of Mildred Burke's
WWWA World Heavyweight Championship which
had been revived in a WWWA tournament earlier
that year in Los Angeles. On October 15, 1970,
in Tokyo, Vagnone lost the WWWA title to Aiko
Kyo, and AJW had a new world championship
singles belt. The next year, AJW acquired
the WWWA World Tag Team Championship as well,
when Jumbo Miyamoto and Aiko Kyo were made
the first champions on June 30, 1971.
During the early 1970s, AJW's championship
booking was dominated by the traditional trading
between a Japanese face and a foreign heel.
The tag belt, for example, was traded fifty-six
times between 1971 and 1975, each time between
a Japanese team and an American team. This
pattern began to change in 1975 with the new
stardom of Mach Fumiake and the Beauty Pair.
On March 19, 1975, Mach Fumiake won the WWWA
Championship from Jumbo Miyamoto, breaking
the pattern in the singles division. After
that, only three non-Japanese women ever won
the belt, the Canadian Monster Ripper, on
July 31, 1979 and March 15, 1980, the Mexican
La Galactica, on May 7, 1983, and the American
Amazing Kong, on June 4, 2004.
During the 1980s, AJW continued to feature
extraordinarily talented and popular female
wrestlers, including Wrestling Observer Newsletter
Hall of Famers Jaguar Yokota, Devil Masami,
Dump Matsumoto, and the Crush Gals, and Bull
Nakano. The feud between the pop culture sensations,
the Crush Gals, and the heel stable, Gokuaku
Domei, led by Matsumoto, was possibly the
most popular angle in all of Japanese wrestling
during the 1980s, bringing very high ratings
to AJW's weekly television program.
Up until 1986, AJW had been the only major
women's wrestling promotion in Japan. Then,
on August 17, 1986, Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling
was started, by former AJW stars Jackie Sato
and Nancy Kumi, as well as boxer Rumi Kazama
and others. In the 1990s the number of joshi
puroresu promotions kept increasing, until,
by the end of the decade, there were no fewer
than seven operating in Japan.
