Megumi Kudo

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[Loss]

Megumi Kudo is a contender for the bottom 20 or so on my list. She had an interesting career path in the sense that she wasn't considered up to snuff compared to her classmates, and athletically, that's probably true. But she was very smart and really became the female Onita in terms of excelling in outlandish gimmick matches. Her charisma was a different kind of charisma than Onita's though, so that's really where I think the parallels end.

 

Matches I'd recommend:

 

Tags

Megumi Kudo & Combat Toyoda vs Akira Hokuto & Bull Nakano (09/19/92, FMW)

Megumi Kudo & Combat Toyoda vs Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada (04/02/93, AJW)

Megumi Kudo & Combat Toyoda vs Manami Toyota & Toshiyo Yamada (05/05/93, FMW)

 

Singles Spotlight

Megumi Kudo vs Aja Kong (AJW 12/06/93) - One of my favorite Aja Kong matches because it's so different from other AJW matches at the time. Kudo is unapologetically basic and works like a Joshi Arn Anderson in this one. This is one of the most accessible matches to the unwashed, I think, because it's wrestled like an American main event.

 

Retirement Tour

Megumi Kudo vs Shinobu Kandori (01/05/97, LLPW, Street Fight)

Megumi Kudo vs Shinobu Kandori (03/14/97, FMW, Barbed Wire Match)

Megumi Kudo, Shinobu Kandori, Michiko Omukai & Kaori Nakayama vs Shark Tsuchiya, Eagle Sawai, Sayori Okino & Miss Mongol (04/07/97, LLPW)

Megumi Kudo vs Mayumi Ozaki (04/18/97, FMW, Barbed Wire Match)

(I thought every single one of these matches was 4*+, so I plan on going back and watching everything from her retirement tour since I have the feeling there's more there.)

 

Best Death Match Ever

Megumi Kudo vs Combat Toyoda (05/05/96, FMW)

[Timbo Slice]

Mistakenly put Ozaki instead of her in talking about the Toyoda match in Toyoda's thread, which is a boneheaded move on my part. I like the Onita comparison, and while I am weighing big matches heavily in how I construct my list, I'm not sure if she has enough to make my list. That being said, she really has had some fantastic matches, and depending on where I place the other joshi workers I like, she might sneak on.

[El-P]

Sad times, no one care about Megumi Kudo anymore. Terrific worker who could have coasted and relied on looks, yet had it tough working in the godforsaken FMW with awful opposition, becoming one of the best wrestlers in the world in the mid 90's. The "female Onita" part of her career is incredible.

[Jingus]

Did Kudo have anyone besides Toyoda who was even worth mentioning as an opponent? Shark Tsuchiya was basically an incompetent mad scientist's attempt at cloning Dump Matsumoto, but to quote Roger Ebert, "it's like one of those experiments where the room smells like gas and all the lab rats are dead". Aside from her interpromotional matches, who else was there? Bad Nurse Nakamura? Oh, I just made myself legitimately laugh out loud... in my bedroom... alone in the middle of the night... god, I'm depressed. But seriously, El-P's point about her terrible coworkers is a great one, because I can't remember anyone else who did such an amazing job of taking an entire division full of stiffs and still making the matches into something I genuinely looked forward to with anticipation. It's like as if Misawa still managed to be The Man and look as good as he always did except with a roster consisting entirely of Richard Slinger, Yoshinari Ogawa, and Giant Kimala with none of his top-shelf opposition ever existing.

[Loss]

I guess YMMV on the Kandori matches being "interpromotional" since they were after that era. But they did work each other in each of their home promotions as part of Kudo's retirement tour and they were in some multi-person matches together, and I loved them all. I'm comfortable calling Kandori Kudo's best opponent after Toyoda, and even then, I think Kudo and Toyoda only achieved greatness opposite each other once.

[Jetlag]

She is someone I like especially her performance in the Aja match but I recall being disappointed by the Kandori matches (that match with the chain being a particularily messy brawl that went forever and the barbwire match being a rather generic deathmatch) and the AJW tags are a mess and not as good as other womens tags from the time. Feels like a cult hero that really doesn't have much of a body of work to me. Still a hundred times better than Brody though.

 

Where will Necro Butcher be on your ballots folks?

[El-P]

Where will Necro Butcher be on your ballots folks?

 

Awful comparison, really. Necro was a freak show garbage guy in US indys.

 

Kudo only did deathmatches in the last few years of her career mostly after Onita retired because someone had to take the abuse, and she did it in big arenas and stadiums because she was a bit time draw.

[BillThompson]

 

Where will Necro Butcher be on your ballots folks?

 

Awful comparison, really. Necro was a freak show garbage guy in US indys.

 

 

 

Necro was much more than that, and actually he was very rarely that. He'll probably make my list as he is one of the best brawlers I've ever seen, who threw top notch punches, had believable offense, and could bump and sell his tail off.

[Clayton Jones]

I'd like to hear more about what makes Kudo's performance great in the Kong match. I really enjoy that match, but I remember it more as a great Aja showing. I'll fully admit that most of my familiarity with Kudo is from her deathmatch run so I was assuming she was a big time outsider underdog when watching that match previously. Maybe I misunderstood her role or perception with the crowd, but if that's not too far off the mark I think Kudo takes way too much and had me actively rooting for Aja's whirling dervish of death by the end. Also I remember quite a few execution problems from Kudo, which I know is part of the territory with joshi, but there's a point for me where it goes beyond accepting it with the style into actively taking away from the match.

[Loss]

What Kudo did great in that match was not work like everyone else. She worked a more basic, slow-paced style, which was a breath of fresh air during a time that the pace was constantly escalating.

[Clayton Jones]

I agree that the more limb focused style was refreshing as far as joshi in that era, which had as much to do with Aja's selling as it did Kudo's offense. I don't think Kudo wrestles a great match fundamentally though in that by the end she's working as if she's the dominant heel. Like I said I could be wrong about how I perceived her role going in, but if she's supposed to be a sympathetic underdog then I don't think she was an especially good one.

[Phil Schneider]

 

 

Where will Necro Butcher be on your ballots folks?

 

Awful comparison, really. Necro was a freak show garbage guy in US indys.

 

 

 

Necro was much more than that, and actually he was very rarely that. He'll probably make my list as he is one of the best brawlers I've ever seen, who threw top notch punches, had believable offense, and could bump and sell his tail off.

 

 

 

Yeah Necro Butcher is so far above Kudo that they only people who might think otherwise are fossils stuck in some 90s wrestling epistemic closeur loop

[Dylan Waco]

So...Megumi Kudo....

 

I am neither a Peakist or Longevityist. Instead I try to strike a balance between the two and try to take other things into consideration when thinking about how to apply those things in looking at a workers career. That said, in the case of Kudo I feel that she sort of strikes out on both fronts. Yes she has years that we can point to as peak years as anyone does, but they don't feel particularly special to me either within the context of Japanese wrestling, the 1990s, or even Joshi itself. This is made worse by the fact that she really doesn't have a lengthy career, or even a career like a Kandori where we can point to great matches littered across a ten year span even if the gaps aren't heavily documented. I don't think she had a long collection of good-to-great years like a Masami or Satomura, nor do I think her peak years would have ever put her in the top 5 Joshi workers in a given year. That's hard to overcome.

 

What Kudo does have is the odd distinction of being a female ace in a non-Joshi exclusive promotion. By that I don't mean that she was the actual top star in FMW after Onita retired, but she may not have been far off, and she absolutely anchored their women's division to the extent such a thing existed. She did admirable work in that role, especially when you consider the fact that she was often saddled with middling-to-weak opponents, and was working a style that does not immediately lend itself to opportunities for classic matches.

 

I don't know that I absolutely love any of the death matches she worked sans the Kandori stuff, but I do think she was an overachiever on that front and understood the psychology of how to work those matches far better than most. In that respect I do see her as more of an heir to Onita than anyone else in FMW, which I do consider a positive. That said I don't think she's as good a death match worker as the true all timers of the theatrical wing of the genre (Onita, Colon, arguably Goto), nor do I think she can really compete with the crazed brutality of someone like a Necro Butcher. I'm not sure I'd have wanted her to work like Necro (check that - I'm positive I wouldn't), but I do think it's worth noting that Colon was often saddled with opponents that were roughly as limited as Kudo's and delivered much better matches in similar settings.

 

She had good blood feuds and high drama matches which were of great importance, but in a sense I think her stand out match is the Aja Kong match. I tend to agree with what Loss says about the match being especially accessible by Joshi standards, though I'm not sure I'm as prepared as he might be to give the majority of the credit for that to Kudo. In any case it's a great showing from her in a non-gimmicked setting when she was at her absolute physical peak. At minimum it gives us a glimpse of what might have been in if circumstances had been different, and for those inclined to view her uniqueness as a major attribute I could see using the Kong match as a sort of rear guard defense to argue for her inclusion if the forces of "fuck death matches" have you cornered.

 

I do think her selling was generally better than most faces of her sort on the Joshi scene, and like most above average Joshi workers she was very good in tag matches. To modify a Parv-ism, her base skill was strong in many respects, though I think she had the same problems with execution that plague many Joshi workers.

 

If this was a favorite list I would almost certainly include Kudo, because I've always been a fan, and I think her act as the underdog valiant warrior was incredibly easy to get behind. For that reason I like the idea of including Kudo on my ballot, but ultimately I find the idea impossible to defend. Loss always talks about how the WON HOF shouldn't be about righting wrongs and I think he's right. I'm not really sure the GWE should be about righting wrongs either, so I can't rate Kudo.

[ohtani's jacket]

I'm not a fan of Kudo in particular, but I think the reason her career doesn't fit the standard peak vs. longevity molds is because she really didn't have a normal career. She's a special case where it's kind of hard to draw parallels except to Onita himself, who was out of wrestling and on the bones of his arse in the mid-80s. Her FMW run only lasted six years, but that's comparable to girls who came through the mandatory retirement system, and I actually think six years is about the length of peak that most girls had even after it was abolished.

 

I'm curious that you didn't mention anything about the Toyoda match, which is kind of her crowning masterpiece.

[Grimmas]

Wild she hasn't been talked about for GWE26, as her prime is unbelievable. From a great underdog in awesome tags and singles, to amazing death matches! She seems like she could get into many people's lists.

[EnviousStupid]

It's not a long run and she was never the flashiest, but she's easily one of my favourites of the 90s joshi scene. Did a lot of deathmatches, however something like the title match with Aja Kong at St. Battle stands out for how well she can adapt as this invader who is dwarfed in stature and manages to balance a fine line between getting slapped around so much, while still posing a threat to Aja as she goes after the arm.