Something small that I wanted to mention is that AEW has an official Japanese twitter account now! The account is here. There’s less of an incentive to read the tweets as reading practice because it’s information that is readily available in English, but it’s nice for the Japanese fans.
In other news, I finished the translation for the May 29 TJPW show (recap here)! I was… not actually in time for their next show, haha, but that one was only available as a VOD (hence why I forgot to put it on my schedule 
), so I couldn’t watch it on the date it happened anyway.
The May 29 show was a bit of an odd one. They were missing Itoh, Yuka, and Miyu, who were all in the US. It ended up giving the rookies some nice opportunities, though. The main event was a series of five singles matches, each between a rookie and one of the top wrestlers in the company, with a 10 minute time limit for each match.
Unsurprisingly, none of the rookies were able to win, haha, though Suzume did manage to fight to a time limit draw against Miu Watanabe.
Yuki Arai faced Shoko, and after the match, Shoko said: “練習の成果が出てるというか、やってるものがすごい身についてる気がします.” The last half of this sentence confused me, haha. My best attempt at a translation was: “Her training is showing results, or rather I should say that everything she’s doing makes me really feel like she’s picking it up.”
I was also confused by another one of Shoko’s lines. She said “サイバーファイトフェスは東京女子として全員全力を出し切ることが一番大事。このままの勢いでみんなでかき回したい.” I got this far with my translation: “The most important thing at CyberFight Fest is that we all give it our all as TJPW. I want to keep my momentum going and みんなでかき回したい”. I could not figure out that last part at all, haha.
Kamiyu’s comment in the same tweet also confused me. She said: “デビューして5年経って東京女子の居場所的に誰かを待ち受ける人になれたのかなと思ったらちょっぴりハッピー”. This was my translation, though it took me a bit to wrap my head around the meaning (assuming my translation is roughly correct? ): “It makes me a little happy to think that it has been five years since my debut, and my place in TJPW is now being a person waiting for someone.”
I think Kamiyu was referring to the fact that her role in the company is now being someone whom other wrestlers, like the rookies, seek to eventually reach. But maybe I’m wrong!
Mizuki’s comment was also confusing to me. She said: “みんながみんななりたい自分になれるように頑張って欲しいなとお姉さん目線で思いつつ私もなりたい自分になるので一緒に頑張ろうねと.” I couldn’t figure out what to do with the part in the middle about お姉さん目線 haha. Here was my attempt: “I want everyone to do your best to become the person you want to become, from your big sister’s point of view, and I want to become who I want to be, too, so let’s work hard together!”
The other interesting match featured Rhio, a visiting foreign wrestler from the UK (she’s the first foreigner to wrestle in TJPW since the pandemic). It took me so many tries to read her name correctly (it’s RHIO, not RIHO, hence why it’s written リオ).
Rhio defeated Yuki Aino. I started to copy and paste the Japanese text from her comment on twitter so that I could translate it, then realized what I was doing and laughed. Sure enough, all of her comments were in English, saving me a little work. (Mr. Haku was apparently actually back doing some more work with TJPW, primarily in a backstage capacity, and I’m pretty sure that he was the person translating for her.)
In her backstage comments, Rhio challenged Maki Itoh for the International title! That challenge happened at the VOD show a week later, which I still haven’t seen. The last time Itoh had an International title defense on a VOD show (in pre-pandemic 2020), she ended up dropping the belt to Thunder Rosa, so her losing it here wouldn’t be without precedent…
The other exciting thing that happened during the show was an announcement at the very beginning that CyberFight is launching a new project called “夢プロレス - dream on the ring -”! It appears to be some sort of competition (albeit very small scale) where four women with different backgrounds in the entertainment industry (but no wrestling experience) take on different challenges, and the woman who wins in the end will have the opportunity to achieve her dream of becoming a pro wrestler.
The four candidates are, assuming I romanized their names correctly: former idol and TV personality Wakana Uehara (上原わかな), dancer Emma (エマ), gravure idol Himari Manaka (真中ひまり), and TV personality Risako (凛咲子).
The program is being broadcast on TJPW’s official youtube channel every Friday at 8pm (Japan time), and will follow the candidates as they train for several months. More information about the four and their reasons for wanting to try pro wrestling will be introduced in the program.
I ended up getting curious and checked out the first episode on youtube. To my delight, it has Japanese subtitles! Here it is if anyone wants to try watching it:
I didn’t really try to follow along too closely (it would take me probably 30x longer to watch it if I paused to try to read the subtitles with better comprehension ), but it was fun practice nonetheless.
A good chunk of the video showed the women doing various exercises that I believe are part of basic wrestling training. I appreciated that they labeled each of them in the top corner. Here are the screenshots I took to include on my flashcards for each of those words:
They’re all pretty straightforward, except for 前回り受け身. When I watched the video the first time, I recognized 受け身, which I’d discussed with one of my friends before, because it apparently has a sort of slipperiness to it that’s interesting.
My friend has struggled with translating this word in the past (I haven’t had to deal with it yet myself, though it’s only a matter of time) because it seems to refer both to the act of selling and the act of taking a bump. With the way that kayfabe functions in Japanese wrestling, wrestlers can’t really openly talk about selling their opponents’ moves, but 受け身 sort of lets them get away with talking about it, because it’s essentially referring to the skill of receiving an attack.
Practicing taking bumps is a pretty core aspect of basic wrestling training (both for teaching you how to fall safely and how to make your opponent look good), and you can see in the video above how they basically roll forward and then splay out like they’re dead, haha, which is an important skill to have if you’re trying to make your opponents’ moves look like they did a lot of damage to you.
I googled 前回り受け身 to try to confirm the reading and ideally get a better way to translate it, and most of the websites that google gave me were about judo, because I believe the name for this originated as a judo technique (though I think how it’s practiced in pro wrestling is a little different, for the reasons I mentioned above).
Sure enough, goo informed me that it’s 前回り受け身, and it referred to it as “forward rolling break-fall” in the description. Which, yeah, I guess that’s basically what they’re doing here!
I’m definitely going to try to watch more of these episodes. If I can, I’m going to try to learn at least a few words from each of them. I think no matter who wins the competition at the end, I’ll be sad to see the others lose the opportunity to become wrestlers…