Don't know what either person's name was but this appears to be a fight between a middle aged house wife and teenage school girl. Skillwise they both looked better then the usual girls AJW gets for these sorts of things. Wifeypoo bust the school girls nose open and appears to dominate but it ends in a draw after 3 Rounds. Only 2 mins of highlights aired.
- Commando Bolshoi vs Mitsuo Kobashi
You know, you can't really say you've lived until you've seen a midget female clown take on a skinny butch karate girl, now I can say i've lived. Kobashi throws kicks, a lot of them, not much else. Bolshoi alternates between punching karate girl square in the face, droping her on her head with suplexes and some sweet submission holds. She wins one for the good guys with a rolling cross arm breaker. Went 6 mins, about half aired, really fun actually. A 2nd unnamed Karate girl runs in post match and they put the bare feet to Bolshoi until Plum makes the save leading to...
- Plum Mariko vs Fater Butcher Karate Girl
Ref calls for the bell while Bolshoi & Kobashi continue brawling outside. FBKG gets in a few kicks but Plum catches her on one, locks in a leg bar and gets the immediate tap out win in 25 seconds. Post match Plum kicks her while she's down just because. OK, I gotta investigate this more now. JWP going to war vs an army of martial artist is something i'd 1. never heard of before and 2. must see more of now :)
- Sumiko Saito vs Hikari Fukuoka
Sumiko's someone i've seen a couple of times now and never thought much of either way, just another random girl on the show. Here she really opened my eyes though, turning in a very impressive performance. She was really good working a match around the simple basic stuff but she also had a lot of nice submissions, including a sweet Bryan Danielson like cattle mutilation and busted out a few cool athletic high spots too. Looking over matchlist for other JWP shows from this time i'm guessing she would be JWP's equivilant to a Mika Takahashi or Miori Kamiya. Good solid mid to upper mid card wrestler who would have been very well rememberd had most of her career not taken place during an era when no one was paying attention JWP. Def want to see more of her now after this match. Fukuoka for her part was real good here too, she brought a lot of nice looking flashy highspots, and you could really see the Toyota influence shine through. She doesn't spaz out and go a million miles an hour like her hero does but she was def aping a lot of her stuff move wise. Match went 24 mins and they aired a good chunk, around half. Enjoyed this a lot.
- Devil Masami vs Cuty Suzuki
Boy, every time I see Cuty rocking the all black outfit it just feels to wrong. Anyways, weird match, Devil doesn't squash Cuty at all, she gives her quite a lot of offense actually but for a good majority of things Devil more or less treats it as a joke. Cuty will try something and Devil will just talk shit on her, make faces or brush it off and not give you any sense that she's in trouble. Came across like she was just toying with Cuty and could have taken over and crushed her in seconds had she really wanted to. Cuty is a persistent little spitfire in this though and she keeps coming back and blasting away at Devil trying to beat some respect out of her. Eventually Devil caves in and finally starts looking vulnerable enough to be defeated but meh, I dunno. By that point it was so late in the match that it felt like too little too late. They did enough later on that overall I can still say this was a pretty decent match but yeah, the early portion left a bad taste in my mouth. Devil gets the win in 21 mins after a power bomb, about 10-11 aired.
Random side tangent, gotta say compared to what AJW was doing at the time, JWP's production was just embarisingly low level. On a Zenjo show if they would have to edit matches they'd mostly atleast still keep the flow of the match in tact and do things in such a way that you often wouldn't even know there were edits at all if you weren't paying close attention and they didn't air the match times at the end of the show. JWP on the other hand will just randomly chop shit up, jump around at weird moments and make it a lot harder to get a sense for what the real story of the match is. Everything else about the show from the lighting to the camera angles with little to no close ups just comes across 2nd rate too. I'm not one to usually harp on such things but it's really hard not to notice. There was a moment in the latter parts of the above match whear I thought Devil may have been busted open slightly for a few mins but never could figure it out because they shot everything from so far back.
- Mayumi Ozaki vs Dynamite Kansai
You can feel the tension in the air even before the bell rings. A really violent match, not in terms of brawling & blood and weapons and stuff like their more famous matches but just in the amount of intensity and stiffness they exhibit. They kind of take you on a roller coaster ride in this match though. Kansai brought the stiff kicks, just punting OZ as hard as she possibly could in the back of the skull at times, Ozaki brought it just as hard and wasn't afraid to hop up and boot Kansai in the Jaw. They'd punch each other, thorw elbows, throw each other into the railings, chairs and lots of other things but every time they'd have a brutal exchange like that one or the other would slow it down and grab a hold. Mostly pedestrian stuff, a headlock here, a camel clutch, a leg bar or something to break things up. Gave the match the feeling that chaos could erupt at any moment as you kept hoping for them to stop holding back and go full force. In the later part of the match it looks like they're going for just another rest hold spot but OZ decideds to really crank the fuck out of an armbar and that really picks things up. OZ keeps up working on it and Kansai does an awesome job selling the pain. Even after she makes her comeback she continues holding her arm for quite a while and puts over how much it hurts her to execute moves even if they don't involve the arm directly. Eventually they move away from that to go into the final stretch but by then enough time had passed that it wasn't a big deal. This is one of those cool matches that starts out good but you kind of wonder what the big deal is at first. By the end while I wouldn't call it one of the top matches of the year things just kept getting better and better over time as they built up to the final climax and by then you're loving every minute. Great stuff for sure. OZ wins after a surprise roll up counter to a powerbomb. Went almost 30 mins, aired in full and it just flew by.
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