週刊プロレス No. 2125
After last issue’s comment about how it’s not as simple as “put Mutoh on the cover and it’ll sell” anymore, I thought it was kinda funny that this issue’s cover is Mutoh making a silly face mid dragon screw:
拳王’s column is especially interesting in this one, as he talks about Noah vs. DDT. He says DDT isn’t プロレス but an extension of school drama performances, and using the sushi industry as an analogy, DDT is like a school where anyone can learn to roll sushi within half a year, whereas Noah is like a traditional artisan sushi shop where learning to cook rice takes 3 years, and nigiri 8.
Pretty interesting to see pointed comments about what is and isn’t “professional wrestling” in the context of an ultimately good-natured, presumably mostly kayfabe feud between two wings of the same company, instead of the acrimonious industry battle lines being drawn in America right now around the same point.
Yuka Sakazaki’s getting fired up about fighting Miyu - the headline for the interview is 大嫌いで、大好きなあいつ and she says she’s gonna target Miyu’s face.
Over in 全日本, Aoyagi and Miyahara are in shambles ahead of their match with the ツインタワーズ. Aoyagi sees no hope and to try to get him out of his funk Miyahara takes him to Tokyo Tower to show that “see? They’re not so big comparatively” but to no avail and all they can do is look sad on playground equipment:
An interview with Utami Hayashishita starts right out of the gate with an extended metaphor where Saya Kamitani is her tag partner and 本妻, 朱里 is her 浮気相手, AZM is the shoulder she can cry on during domestic disputes, and she’s also got 横恋慕 going on with Maika.
There’s even a little graph:
She also talks about being upstaged for the main event twice. The first time she thought “well, it’s a hair vs. hair match,” but the second time it was just a tag match, and she couldn’t help but think that if Iwatani were the champion it wouldn’t have happened, so it must be her own fault in some way and she drank and cried. She says if her match with 朱里 is made the semimain as well, she’ll cry in front of everyone, after all the wrestlers she respects most are the ones who can show vulnerability as well as strength. (but she wants to show strength as a champion too)
We also check in with the four remaining in the Cinderella Tournament, and it seems like being on the cover put a bit of a target on Maika’s back since the others all mention it as a reason to beat her.
Unagi Sayaka talks at length about wanting to stand out the most, and how she always stood out at school so she got punished more than others, and she quotes her mom telling her:
「悪いことをしたら絶対に悪目立ちするから、いいことをして目立ちなさい」
The topic of Giulia’s column this week is "キャリアを気にするか？” and it’s about 後輩/先輩 relationships in wrestling and how you need to not worry about them too much. She says a match she had with Rina Yamashita helped teach her that because she had a poster of Rina on her wall and she was one of the reasons she got into wrestling, so she was starstruck even as she got beat up, but after the match Rina said 「リングに上がったら憧れって言葉は使うなよ。タイマンなんだよ！」 and she took that to heart. For example, while building matches with Tam she can’t think about like, Tam’s a senpai, she’s gotta be cordial to her.
She also alludes to how since professional wrestling is a 特別なジャンルのスポーツ, even more than winning or losing matches against 先輩 like that, hitting a particular move or anything to leave a strong impression in the audience’s mind can go a long way.
Speaking of Rina, there’s a spotlight on women in deathmatch wrestler, with interviews with Suzu Suzuki and Rina.
Suzu talks about her 7 match series and how 傷 from the matches are memories of each one, and talks about how the idea that 18 year-old girls shouldn’t do deathmatch wrestling and should avoid the wounds and scars that go along with them is a 既成概念 like “women should have long hair and be fair of skin” or “men shouldn’t have long hair or wear skirts” and she wants to break those down, quoting Inoki with 「世間と闘え、常識なんかぶっ壊せ！」
She also talks about how watching Risa Sera is what made her realize women wrestling in deathmatches was possible and is part of what got her into wrestling and she wants to have another deathmatch with her now that she’s gotten all this experience. The interviewer says that Sera said she’d retire at 30 and she’s 29 now, so the clock is ticking.
I thought it was interesting that in Rina’s interview, she doesn’t have that same kind of “I saw it from afar and knew I wanted to get in on that!” type of story with deathmatch or intergender wrestling, it just kind of happened by happenstance when she was offered a mixed tag match and the people involved were too cool for her to pass up and it just developed from there.
The history column is pretty interesting this time around - for the finals of the 1983 precursor to the G1 tournament, apparently everyone thought for sure it was going to be Inoki vs. Andre the Giant with Inoki winning vs. the giant foreigner like always, but what happened instead is a ringout caused Hulk Hogan to go to the finals against Inoki instead of Andre, where he shockingly knocked out Inoki and won the tournament.
The columnist strongly implies that Inoki booked it this way to shock everyone and grab as many headlines as possible.
Here’s a picture I found of the 「舌出し失神事件」:
Here’s some fun Suzu pics:
(warning: BLOOD)
Also, since @fallynleaf asked about it, I skipped ahead just to read Kota Ibushi’s interview in the magazine I just picked up (it’s the one with the Stardom women in Osaka on the cover), about his illness and upcoming match with Tanahashi.
It’s definitely emotional! He says he’s been sidelined for injuries before, but never an illness, so the recuperation was especially taxing. Apparently he just suddenly felt especially weary during training, tried to work through it and then crashed again and had to work through it from there, and around the time of the Dome show he was scheduled to headline, he ran a 40度７分 fever (105°!) and had to be hospitalized to continue recuperating. The name given is the intimidating-looking 誤嚥性肺炎. Scary stuff, especially considering what happened to Brodie Lee so recently. Is COVID not enough that we also gotta have weird out-of-nowhere debilitating lung ailments too??
Anyway, when he was officially removed from the Dome show he cried from a sense of 申し訳ない. From this standpoint, Tanahashi ends up being tied into some extremely powerful mixed emotions for him, being emblematic of what he can’t do in replacing him in the match (and being characteristically perfect in that Tanahashi way) while also taking over and helping Ibushi at such a low point, offering him the return match, and inspiring him (the last line of the column, talking about Ibushi’s perspective on Tanahashi, is a 夢をもらった感じ). He says he’ll try to be at 100% for the match since the best way to repay Tana would be to fight for all he’s got.
A lot that’s hard to read from a dude who was believably talking about how he was going to become God by winning a wrestling match not long ago! And definitely deepens what was already an overtly emotional match.
. I hope he’s able to use the time before the G1 to recuperate a little more…
