I have a couple neat things to share!
The first is that DDT did a street wrestling tournament. Several of the matches are available on youtube! There are a couple more in addition to the two matches linked in that tweet. I didn’t have time to watch these shows, but the last match linked here has Suzu Suzuki in it, so I wanted to give a special shout out to her match. Warning, these are more hardcore than normal wrestling, so they might get a little intense. They all have Japanese commentary!
DDT also did a show on a train, which I have not yet watched, but have been meaning to! I don’t have a link to this one for free, but it’s on Wrestle Universe. This show has very notable commentary, because they brought in TJPW’s biggest train enthusiast, Raku!
Another highlight from DDT is that Yoshihiko (the wrestler who’s a blow-up doll) now has a twitter account! It’s a 25th anniversary thing for DDT, so his account is only for this year. I’ve been enjoying learning new Yoshihiko lore, like apparently he’s a Lady Gaga fan? It’s been fun reading practice, haha.
I also finished the translation for TJPW’s April 10 Inspiration show (recap here)! Inspiration is TJPW’s experimental show, so they do a lot of matches that are pretty different from their usual fare, and the main highlight of this one was Marika Kobashi getting to team up with her favorite wrestler, Abdullah Kobayashi, vs SAKI and Antonio Honda.
It was a pretty fun match because Abdullah is a large wrestler from Big Japan Pro Wrestling (it only just occurred to me that I didn’t even think about including BJW in the intro post haha) with deathmatch scars all over him, and Marika is a young fashion-obsessed wrestler with a ギャル gimmick, so on the surface, they couldn’t be more different. But as the recap mentions, Marika first met him when she was in elementary school, then saw him wrestling in a shopping district when she was in junior high, and she ended up joining TJPW because she admired him.
They have a fun tag match, which ends with Marika pinning Honda! After the match, Abdullah suggests they have a singles match, and so they have a match with a three minute time limit. Unsurprisingly, this match ends in a draw. Afterward, Abdullah tells her that graduation means she’s coming back, right? So they’ll just have to continue this years from now.
Marika clarifies that she’s graduating, but not retiring (I’m happy to hear this!), and when she comes back, she’ll have grown up more, gotten stronger, and “かっこいいレディになって”, become a cool lady. She says she’s going to crush him, so he can’t retire yet.
I had a long conversation with my friends over the term “graduation” vs “retirement”, and what it meant to graduate without retiring, haha. Marika was a little unclear on what exactly her future plans are with wrestling, though it does seem like she’s taking a long break, hence having a whole formal ceremony. It occurred to me that maybe her statement about becoming a レディ was meant to contrast with her ギャル fashion gimmick, saying that she will no longer be a “gal wrestler” when she comes back, but instead something different in a new phase of her life.
The other match covered in the recap was Rika Tatsumi vs Suzume, which was the main event of the show. This match is a lot more straightforward. For Suzume, Rika was the person who inspired her to become a wrestler. I loved how Suzume described her: “私は成長できたかもしれないけど、やっぱり私にとって、リカさんはずっと変わらずあこがれで、この世界に入った理由で、私の原点です”. She said that even though she’s grown up a bit as a wrestler, she still admires Rika, who was her reason for entering this world, her starting point.
The match itself was fun, though poor Suzume lost one of the wings on her costume, haha. She commented that she will grow stronger wings.
Suzume has been sort of on the cusp of breaking into the TJPW midcard for a while now, so it’s exciting to see how far she’s come. She debuted about when I started watching TJPW, so I think I’ll always have a fondness for her.