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[1993-04-24-AJW] Manami Toyota & Yumiko Hotta vs Aja Kong & Kyoko Inoue


Loss

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  • 1 month later...

This is the Toyota show. She puts on a tremendous performance. I'm really impressed with her in '93, far more than '96.

 

You guys have me overly focused on Hotta now, so I paid close attention to her in this match. And surely enough, she took like two bumps and ended up on the upper hand of each exchange she was part of.

 

Aja and Kyoko are game opponents, but Toyota is the one who makes this match. She gets isolated and destroyed for most of it, gets dragged all over the arena and beaten up by Kong, just barely beating the count back in, and then finally mounts a comeback with some awesome stuff.

 

Great match, ending with Toyota pinning Inoue.

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  • 3 months later...

Yeah, this was a blast. I usually struggle to get into a lot of joshi if I'm watching it in isolation, but the yearbooks are great for eliminating that problem.

 

Thought Aja was awesome here; she totally came across as a serious ass stomper. There's this great moment where Hotta puts Kyoko in a Boston Crab and trash talks Aja, so Aja grabs something and just waffles it over her head. Liked all of the Aja/Toyota exchanges as well. Aja is definitely my favourite opponent for Toyota and this has me looking forward to seeing their Dome match again whenever the 94 set drops.

 

The 1/15 JWP tag is still my clear #1 for josh so far, but this might be my #2 or 3.

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  • 1 year later...

After watching this I went and checked what part of Japan Manami Toyota came from. Just like I suspected she was the hometown hero, it had that vibe. This was a total one woman show. Nobody else did anything special. After a fun opening segment Kong killed the momentum with crowd brawling. But then Toyota brought it back at the end and turned it into a good match pretty much single handedly. It was just a throwaway match to the others, but she was going full out.

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  • 6 months later...
  • 1 year later...

While I often wish for Toyota to slow down and let things breathe a little, this was neither here nor there. Action and offense were strong, but it all just kind of fell together and wasn't in any way coherent which resulted in my finding this just good. Also not in love with Kyoko as she seems to be a less athletic & dynamic Toyota with the volume turned down. Not that that's necessarily bad, but you only need so much of that. I liked Kong planting Hotta & Toyota in opposite corners and splashing both. Hotta with a stiff jumping piledriver on Kong was great. They love piledrivers here. More Hotta would've been hotter. Har har.

 

***1/4

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  • 2 months later...

I thought this was awesome with Toyota being the hometown person and Aja looking like the biggest ass kicker in the world. With other aspects of 1993 joshi so far this year on the yearbook, Aja hasn't been featured that much so this was a good showcase for her. The Kyoko vs. Manami sequences are always great and athletic in small doses. I didn't notice Hotta dominating here but I didn't mind it much in the confines of this match where Toyota was beat on so much. The ending felt like a dramatic culmination. One of the joshi highlights so far. ****1/4

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  • 1 year later...

What you guys seemed to like, I didn't. Hometown hero or not, Toyota was obnoxious here. Aja and Kyoko spent the entire first part of the bout targeting her lower back, and when they went for covers what do you think Toyota did? That's right, she bridged out with ease. Bridged with her supposedly damaged lower back, no less. Not only that, she did her dropkick train with no apparent ill effects either, getting all the spring she needed in her legs even though she could barely walk just a minute or two before due to the pain in her back. She also bridged out of a hooked leg later in the bout, which was astounding to me (and not in a positive way, either).

 

Why this stood out to me now when she's pulled the exact same kind of stuff out of the hat regardless of the story the other wrestlers are trying to tell in a given match, I don't know. Maybe all of the criticism I've read of her for doing stuff like this has finally metabolized, or maybe I was just in the wrong mood to watch her tonight. Regardless of the reason, she left a bad, bad taste in my mouth.

 

On the other hand, I loved Aja and Kyoko. They're superb as individuals, and if Aja wasn't already the top singles star in AJW, they would have made an awesome full-time tag team. They looked invincible against Toyota in particular, doing a number on her the likes of which I've seldom seen anyone else do.

 

Hotta pulled her weight well, doing nothing either particularly offensive or resoundingly spectacular.

 

The tree of woe spot where Aja hits the avalanche on both Toyota and Hotta was tremendous, and I also liked Aja flattening them both at the same time with a flying bodypress. Give ALW credit for making Aja look like both a monster and a real athlete at the same time, which most promotions either fail miserably at or don't even attempt.

 

I understand wanting to put Toyota over in her hometown, but this match felt organically like it should have gone to Aja and Kyoko, which means that they probably got too much offense for the desired outcome. A more even bout would have made the result a bit less of a shock, at least to me,

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  • GSR changed the title to [1993-04-24-AJW] Manami Toyota & Yumiko Hotta vs Aja Kong & Kyoko Inoue

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