AJW 1990 January - March

AJW 1/4/1990

- (AJW Jr Title) Mima Shimoda (c) vs Kaoru Ito
Only goes like 4 mins, 2 of which aired. Ok enough action that Mima wins easily. If nothing else I atleast always get a kick out of seeing pairings like this, knowing the brutal death feud they'd go into later on in their careers.

- Aja Kong, Bison Kimura & Grizzly Iwamoto vs Madusa, Noriyo Tateno & Kaoru
Whacky shenanigans with Shiro Abe during the introductions. So weird seeing him post Dump, love his act but it just never worked as well with others as it did her. Match itself is just kind of your average Gokumonto vs random baby face squad tag, a lot of brawling and cheating and kickin butt while the good girls make futile come backs hoping not to die a death too bad. The biggest highlight here was actualyl Aja randomly going nuts and beating the shit out of one of the anouncers mid match for no reason. Kaoru hits a dive on Aja but Grizz reverses them and Abe fast counts for the finish.

- Toshiyo Yamada & Etsuko Mita vs Akira Hokuto & Yumiko Hotta
Love matches like this. Starts out merely ok but then slowly builds and builds and by the end they've created something truely great. At 1st they just kind of go back and forth for a while with Hotta & Akira having the slight advantage. Things finally turn awesome once they start building the match around a game of my sleeper is deadlier then yours. Yamada's 1st up  as her & Hotta have heated exchanges every time they go against each other here. Yamada gets her in a sleepr and they work a long section around that with Hotta putting it over huge, one of the best jobs i've seen someone do actually. She near passes out from it and once released, stumbles around and can barely stay on her feet for quite a while after. Mita tries her hand as well at the sleepr game to decent success but Hotta's able to tag out to Hokuto. Akira decides she wants in on this game and after kicking Mita's butt works the hold on her for a while. Hotta not wanting to be left out and having recovered tags back in, tosses Mita aside and bum rushes Yamada. She franticly fights to get the sleeper on Yamada and when she does they'd done such a great job of getting it over in the match that it gets a monster pop from the crowd. Turns into a war of attrition after that as all 4 girls are selling fatigue and desperately trying to win which finally comes after Hokuto puts away weak link Mita with a missile kick. Didn't go in with any kind of high hopes for this. Figured it's be good but not this good. One of the better matches of the year for sure.

- (Vacant 3WA Title) Bull Nakano vs Mitsuko Nishiwaki
Little disapointment as these 2 could probably have a great match but instead they merely had a decent one. Nish attacks to start but Bull side steps her attack and she goes flying outside,  jump cut and back inside she's busted open and getting beaten down. Rest of the match is Bull dominating with Nishiwaki only making small come backs, enough to whear this isn't a total squash but really this was all about getting Nakano's reign off with a blast and putting her over strong as the clear winner.

AJW 1/5/1990

1 match show though we do briefly get highlights of Hotta/Yamada from 11/13/89 which looked really good and some of the undercard stuff, Kyoko (not yet rocking the face paint) vs Miori, Honey Wings vs Suzuka & ??? and Madusa vs I think Noriyo Tateno all of which looked decent too.

- (Kick Boxing) Yumiko Hotta vs Toshiyo Yamada
Pretty clearly a work which is always best when it comes to these things because fuck the bullshit, wrestling does MMA better then MMA. They don't really take full advantage of it though as they kind of hold back on each other for the 1st 5 rounds. Only turning it up here & thear and tossing in a few cool suplexes but never getting overly agressive or coming across like they were trying to win. 6th round they finally start trying to kill each other but too little too late on this one. Yamada wins the judges decision though personally I thought Hotta looked better. Enjoyable enough as far as these things go.

AJW 3/2/1990

Interesting dynamic to this tape. They spend like 10 mins hyping up the new stable alliances of Dream Orca/Tokyo Sweethearts and Fire Jets/Marine Wolves and then naturally of course after establishing those 2 allainces have them fight among themselves instead of each other.

- (AJW Tag Titles) Etsuko Mita & Toshiyo Yamada (c) vs Manami Toyota & Mima Shimoda
Dream Orca vs Tokyo Sweethearts. For the most part a good solid match but not with out it's flaws. They go the distance and this suffers from the same flaws a lot of other time limit draws do. Not so much that it felt like they were killing time, it was never boring as they always kept things moving. But there was no major story to the match, just a lot of back & forth action which never really picked up like you'd hope even for the final stretch. Like, the way they were wrestling at the 25 min mark wasn't much diffrent then how they were going at it at the 7 min mark. The Sweethearts prove to be sore losers and try to keep the fight going attacking DO after the bell.

- Akira Hokuto & Yumiko Hotta vs Suzuka Minami & Mitsuko Nishiwaki
Fire Wolves vs Marine Jets.... no one has cool team names like that anymore. Now all we get is this overplayed hybrid crap. Hi i'm piptiy po, hi i'm ooopty op, hi we're team poop, HUZZAH. So lame, so sad. A slightly better version of the last match. A bit more focused whear each team got to have long control segments as opposed to non stop back & forth. Hokuto/Hotta (who both looked really good, Hokuto's bright ass clown suit aside) early on  in the match and Minami/Nishiwaki in the latter. They weren't going to a draw so the pacing was a little better too. That said they still were going really long, 32+ so there were still a few issues. Seemed kind of like they peaked in the middle as they did what seemed like a normal 18ish min match and then realised "fuck we got way more time to fill" so they sort of restarted from the begining almost before picking things up again big time around the 28-30 min mark and instead of a draw we get a double count out instead.