What I learned from coverage of Japanese women's wrestling in English-language mainstream media
What I learned from coverage of Japanese women's wrestling in English-language mainstream media
Call it a book report, I guess?
Recently, on a lark, I decided to dig through ProQuest, Newspapers.com, and the like to dig up whatever English-language articles I could find in mainstream and scholarly publications about the Japanese women’s wrestling scene, generally All Japan Women during its popularity booms. Though the 1986 Wall Street Journal story about Chigusa Nagayo is fairly well-known, the others are not, and they contain a surprising amount of information and bluntness about how AJW operated, including the degree to which talent was underpaid. With that in mind, I figured I’d do my best to try to collate all of the most noteworthy information into one place. All but one of them are contemporaneous coverage, and the exception — a 26-page piece on the very early history of the Joshi scene published in the September 2021 issue of the Journal of Women’s History — is probably worth letting stand entirely on its own.
With all of that said — and the caveat that this is intended as an info dump, not a great piece of writing — let’s get started, shall we?
The earliest articles I could find were from the first big AJW popularity boom in the late 1970s, fueled by Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda as The Beauty Pair. The first story was from the Copley News Service wire in October 1978, and though it’s mostly a short, fluffy piece about the idea of a fad centered on singing teenage girl wrestlers, there are a few things that jump out as interesting and/or noteworthy. “In one recent match in a Tokyo suburb at least 90 percent of the capacity crowd of 3,000 were junior and senior high school girls,” wrote James Abrams, who added that ringside seats cost the equivalent of $10 U.S. (about $45 adjusted for inflation) at the time. Abrams also noted that the hit single “Runaround Youth” — you’ll find it online as “Kakemeguru Seishun” — was the direct catalyst for the explosion in the Beauty Pair’s popularity, which had escalated to the point that the ratings for their televised matches routinely topped 20%.
Perhaps the most interesting part comes at the end, though, where Abrams writes about the Beauty Pair’s “home gym,” seemingly referring to the AJW dojo: “There are now more than 100 women training regularly at the gym, ranging in age from a fourth grader to a 40-year-old housewife who says it is excellent beauty exercise.” Something may be lost in translation here since it seems unlikely that AJW was putting a 9-year-old and a 40-year-old through pro wrestling training at the time, much less that many wrestling trainees period, but it’s made fairly clear that this blurb is in the context of training to be pro wrestlers.
We skip ahead a few months to January 3, 1978, for a story in Guam’s Pacific Daily News, a week after AJW had run a pair of shows at the Guam Recreation Center, drawing more than 2,000 fans each night. This time, we get quotes, albeit kayfabe ones, before moving on to the more substantive information. “Their greatest hit, entitled ‘The Beauty Pair,’ was released a year ago and has sold 600,000 copies in Japan, they said,” writes Lourdes T. Pangelinan. “The Beauty Pair anticipates spending the next three years in the wrestling profession. Ueda intends to open a beauty shop once she retires, and Sato is interested in the restaurant business, they said. With the money they are saving from their two careers, the Beauty Pair expects to see their dreams materialize, they said. They receive $6,000 a month for their wrestling matches.”
Adjusted for inflation, that’s almost $29,000/month, but it’s not clear as written if that figure was the pay for Sato and Ueda each or the $6,000/month was for the Beauty Pair as a team, or if it’s a mix of wrestling pay and singing/merchandising income. There was a big gap between the pay for them and the rookies, though. “The wrestling profession is not as profitable for beginners in the ring, [Fuji TV chief producer and AJW general manager Hitoshi] Yoshida said. The newest members of the team, 16-year-old Nancy Kumi and 17-year-old Victoria Fujimi, earn slightly more than $350 a month, he said.” Adjusted for inflation, that’s about $1,700/month or $20,400/year to work an incredibly demanding, physical style of pro wrestling on what was often the hardest schedule in pro wrestling, with 300+ shows each year. This becomes a pattern in these articles, especially through a modern lens with regards to compensation for professional athletes and TV stars: Just how grossly underpaid female wrestlers have always been in Japan, even if they got to show out more by way of having women’s-only promotions.
(By the way, I’m not going to bother linking CageMatch or WrestlingData here, as available English-language AJW results are incredibly incomplete, particularly in comparison to the Japanese men’s promotions operating contemporaneously.)
The story then concludes with a series of comments, some quotes, some paraphrased, from Yoshida:
The requirements for entering professional women’s wrestling are minimum [sic], Yoshida said. “A woman ‘must be 5-feet-6-inches tall, have a pretty face and a pretty body, must complete her education through the junior high school level and must obtain permission from her parents.” he said. The popularity of women’s wrestling in Japan began last February, Yoshida said. Young girls swarm the manager’s office by the thousands seeking to.enter the profession, he said. “Earlier this year, more than 5,000 girls applied for the three open positions in the team,” he said. “This profession is perfect for any young woman who would like to make a lot of money quickly, and after the age of 22 or 23, she may enter any other profession with good finances,” Yoshida said.
As we’ll hear in other articles, that last line is probably more of a comment on the gender pay gap in Japan than anything else.
We stay in early 1978 with another Beauty Pair-centric story, this time in the February 22 issue of the Honolulu Advertiser. Quickly, the article brings up their income, which it puts at over $100,000 each (approximately $480,000 adjusted for inflation). Being that even if the $6,000/month figure was for each of them, that would still be well under $100,000, that’s presumably a combination of their wrestling pay and their music/licensing income. (We’ll see more of this later with the Crush Gals.) “Each day the powerful pair receives 300 fan letters,” the story continues “Their fan club has 12.000 members and is growing. Tickets, ranging from $8 to $22. are sold out for nearly every appearance. They’ve been on television talent and game shows over 50 times. Their three records have sold a total of one million copies.” After laying out how popular the Beauty Pair is, the article shifts to quotes from their manager, Kenichi Aizawa, to explain why they’ve blown up so much.
“Many women are attracted by the sight of women who can fight this way,” Aizawa told the Advertiser. “Many young male stars are effeminate and so young girls are turning to strong women. We often hear girls saying that boys are too weak. This is why they love Beauty Pair.” Aizawa then adds that “the most attractive point about women’s wrestling is not muscle, vulgarity, or brutality, but speed and physical beauty.” 14-year-old ringsider Miyuki Hashimoto seemingly backed that up by saying that “I love Beauty Pair because they are stylish. They’re strong, like men.”
The article claims that AJW was running 250 shows annually at the time, contrasting the figure with 150 for “men’s contests,” which is wrong, as AJPW and NJPW each ran roughly 200 shows/year at the time. 3,000 girls sent in applications for that year’s AJW dojo tryouts, with 5,000 total applicants expected, a massive increase over 600 for the previous year’s tryouts, which took place just before Beauty Pair blew up. Both members of Beauty Pair had dropped out of high school to break into AJW, with Sato explaining her rationale to the Advertiser. “I did not want to lead an ordinary life but wanted to do something special,” she said. “I wanted to use my healthy body to realize this ambition.” The article then closes by bringing up their post-wrestling plans. “Many women wrestlers later become traditional Japanese housewives who treat their husbands like kings when they quit,” Aizawa added, but Sato wasn’t sure that was for her: “I don’t know. I’ve never thought about that problem.”
We stay in Hawaii but skip ahead 10 months for the last Beauty Pair story via the December 14, 1978 edition of Jim Easterwood’s column in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin. “[I]t is no wonder they don't have steady boyfriends Indeed, going steady is taboo, and, realistically, few men would put up with the rigid conditions attached. Like, who wants to have a girl back in the dorm by 10 p.m.?” writes Easterwood, who places each of their income at $150,000/year (approximately $446,000 adjusted for inflation).
On the business side, AJW promoter Tohikumi Matsunaga clarified that AJW’s roughly 20% TV rating translates to approximately 2 million viewers. The column also noted that Beauty Pair’s first two singles sold 500,000 and 400,000 copies, respectively.
Easterwood quotes AJW promoter Matsunaga about the legitimacy of his promotion’s matches after explaining that the one time Sato wrestled Ueda, the winner got $50,000 and the loser got $5,000. “Some of them know who is going to win but most of them are on the level,” Matsunaga said. “They have to be because the girls are paid according to their won-loss records." As for recruiting, he added that “We'd rather have the good-looking girl, but sometimes it doesn't matter.” At the AJW tryouts, 5,000 girls are whittled down to 200, and just five are picked from those 200 to go to the dojo and qualify for the final test before debuting as a wrestler. “Ten points is the highest a girl can get to qualify If she scores six she'll make it,” said Matsunaga. Circling back to their personal lives, he outlined the restrictions on the Beauty Pair and the other girls. “It's in the contract,” Matsunaga added. “They can have dates, but marriage is out. If we hear of it, they are fired If they want to get married, they have to let us know a year ahead of the time.”
Next, we skip ahead about seven years to the issue of Japan Quarterly dated October 1, 1985, which included a feature-length story by Satoshi Kamata titled “Women in the Ring.” Kamata was embedded with the AJW crew on a tour through northeastern Japan as the Crush Gals boom was ongoing, and not surprisingly, his more “highbrow” feature writing style reads a lot better than the various newspaper articles did. The first substantive piece of information gleaned from this article is how the Matsunaga brothers and the rest of their family (“There is probably no other industry in Japan that is so completely monopolized by a professional family.”) fit into the AJW management structure and bigger picture surrounding the company:
The oldest brother, unnamed, who ran an appliance store, did not want to be part of AJW.
Kenji, 49 at the time the article was being written, was the second brother, and he served as managing director while also running the merchandise stand. After intermission, though, he was referee Mister Guo. As Guo, he was prone to saying things like “Come on, hold your ground. Show’em, girl.” to the wrestlers during matches. He left a job managing a Sony-affiliated factory to start AJW.
Takashi, 48, was the third brother and company president.
Kunimatsu, 43, the fourth brother, was the executive director of the company, but better known as chief referee Jimmy Kayama.
Toshikuni, 40, the fifth brother, was the company director and the supervisor of the referees.
Two sisters, unnamed, were wrestlers on the famous inaugural women’s wrestling tour of Japan in 1954, and they joined the brothers as founding members of the company.
Takashi and Kunimatsu’s wives had been wrestlers, as recruitment was so dismal in the early days that the brothers had to ask family members to break in as workers.
The oldest brother’s son was married to retired AJW star Mimi Hagiwara.
At the time, the AJW roster consisted of 18 wrestlers, including trainees, though three were not on the tour being covered. The company’s total headcount at the time was 45 employees, which included Kiyoharu Ujiie, 24, who served as both ring announcer and bus driver. The team bus, originally built for 60 passengers, was customized by the Matsunagas to serve as a more comfortable vehicle for AJW’s 35-person troupe. As readers of Madusa’s recent memoir also learned, the girls would hang their hand-laundered gear and other clothes on the windows to dry.
Kunimatsu Matsunata told Kamata that he wanted to get a new bus, a double-decker, but the cost (¥80 million or $333,000 U.S. at the time, which is about $929,000 adjusted for inflation) was deterring him, particularly compared to the existing bus having set them back (¥20 million or $83,000 U.S. at the time, which is about $232,000 adjusted for inflation). “[T]he fact that they can even toy with the idea of purchasing a vehicle for four times that amount simply shows how popular their business has become recently,” Kamata wrote. “Kunimatsu says offhand that the company has a cumulative deficit of over ¥100 million ($417,000), implying that it is not a significant amount.”
The article then pivots to Kamata’s interview with the Crush Gals, Chigusa Nagayo, 19, and Lioness Asuka, 21, where they explained to him how they weren’t crazy about the tours of northeastern Japan. “Tours of remote areas such as Tohoku, they say, are somewhat deflating, since the fans are not nearly as enthusiastic as in the big city,” he wrote. “Most of the spectators are middle-aged or older people and a kind of pall seems to hang over the halls during their matches in such areas. Besides, they tell me, they have injuries and want to get back to Tokyo for treatment.”
I’ll skip the background information about Nagayo and Asuka, as I’d just be reprinting that whole section. (Go read the original article for it.) According to Kamata’s interview with Nagayo, she was being paid approximately ¥300,000 or $1,250 U.S. each month ($15,000/year), or about $3,500 adjusted for inflation. Yes, strictly on her wrestling pay, the most over wrestler in the business was being paid just $42,000/year adjusted for inflation in 2023, if it wasn’t obvious by this point just how ridiculously underpaid these women and girls were.
Kamata also spoke to Jaguar Yokota, 23, and Devil Masami, 22. “Very plain-spoken. Jaguar has none of the ingratiating coyness of most Japanese women,” he wrote. “Her answers to my questions are forthright and uncompromising, perhaps reflecting the self-confidence she has acquired after hard training as a wrestler. She has been a professional wrestler for eight years, the longest career of any of her associates.”
Yokota took the time to explain how the fan base had changed between the Beauty Pair and Crush Gals boom periods. “These days there are more and more girl fans who scream and carry on a lot, but somehow I think the atmosphere is different than in the days of the Beauty Pair,” she said. “Back then fans reacted most wildly only when the wrestlers were beautiful or when they would sing. Today more fans come to watch the wrestling itself. After all, this is professional fighting, and if the fans come only to see matches because we sing, it would be pointless.”
Though Kamata singled Yokota out as particularly candid, Masami doesn’t come off much differently in the quotes he used. “Have I no worries? Of course I do,” she told him. “I am a woman, and I want to marry and have children. In this work I might damage my pelvis and never be able to have a child; even worse, I might get killed.”
It would appear that wrestling pay was based on seniority, as Masami was making approximately ¥10 million or $42,000 U.S., which is roughly $119,000 adjusted for inflation, or 2.8x what Nagayo was making. But because we’re talking about an exploitative pro wrestling environment, her expenses were high. “She spends a lot on medical treatment and has to furnish her own outfits—gowns, tank suits, and boots,” Kamata wrote. “Food expenses are also large.”
The article also delves into the post-wrestling lives of the women briefly, and in a much less crass manner than the older newspaper articles handled it. “Of ex-wrestlers who have married, only half are said to be happy,” Kamata wrote. “Most of the women in wrestling have little time in their hard schedules to go out on dates or socialize with men. More often than not they marry hastily, without knowing men in general very well and being little prepared for the realities of married life.”
Kamata even got some candid time with top heel Dump Matsumoto, 23. “Fresh from a bath, without any makeup on, Dump looks girlish—hardly the villain,” Kamata wrote. “‘I became big and fat like this after entering the company,’ she excuses herself. When she was in junior high school, the wrestler Mach Fumiake was popular, and Dump strongly identified with her.” Dump and tag team partner Crane Yu had so much heat as heels at the time that it was not uncommon for them to get hate mail that included razor blades, with the suggestion being that they kill themselves. “Still Dump says she likes her role,” Kamata adds. “She does not care when she is reviled by the fans; it is her job to play the villain. It has its advantages too, she says, and gives her greater freedom in the ring.” Though the article doesn’t outright break kayfabe, Kamata does write that veteran wrestlers carry younger wrestlers to longer matches for the good of the business instead of quickly squashing them.
The article closes with Kamata joining the girls for the trip back to Tokyo and a show at the promotion’s home base, Korakuen Hall. There, Kamata notes that the crowd is 80% tweens and teens, with 70% of those kids being girls. “When I ask if they are interested in men’s professional wrestling, they frown and say that men’s wrestling is dirty and the action slow,” he wrote. “Women wrestlers are attractive, tough-looking, light-footed, and strong. They are real, and their physical agility is convincing. To see them crashing into each other with very real violence and physicality, the fans say, makes the delicate female singers so popular on television look like fragile shams.”
We skip ahead 11 months for what’s probably the most famous piece of English language media about AJW: Stephen Kreider Yoder’s September 10, 1986 Wall Street Journal cover story about Nagayo and company. At the time, the AJW TV show on Fuji TV was averaging a 12% rating and 3,000 girls would apply for their annual tryouts, of which just 10 would be picked to train in the dojo. Despite it being a Wall Street Journal feature, the business details pretty much bookend the article, with the above coming early and a little more added at the end.
There, it’s reported that trainees living in the dojo have to live on an ¥80,000 or $520 U.S. monthly allowance, which is about $1,300/month adjusted for inflation. The Crush Gals, however, each made ¥30 million or about $193,000 in 1985, “thanks to advertising endorsements, record albums and magazine articles.” (It’s not explained why they would be paid for “magazine articles.”) That’s about $536,000 each adjusted for inflation. Combined with what we learned in Japan Quarterly, the picture being painted is pretty clear: Upwards of 90% of the Crush Gals’ income came from non-wrestling sources, and if they were getting paid for AJW merchandise, it wasn’t much at all.
Again, with regards to pay, make sure to remember that this pay was for working the hardest style in pro wrestling on the hardest schedule in pro wrestling, with AJW running 250 to 300 shows a year using their small roster. And there’s a real argument that the style was so unsustainable that the only way to pull it off was to use teen to very young adult girls who would be forced into early retirement.
Speaking of quality of life, though, we get our first mention of the “Three ‘Nos’” here. “The wrestlers’ lives aren’t all spotlights and confetti,” wrote Kreider Yoder. “They live with three noes: no drinking, no smoking, and no men. ‘Those things are a curse to wrestlers,’ says Takashi Matsunaga, the 50-year-old president of the wrestling promotion. ‘It ruins their wrestling every time.’”
Two months later, on November 7, 1986, NBC Nightly News closed with a story on the AJW boom helmed by Bonnie Anderson. It’s worth watching, but there isn’t much to add from it. Masami told Anderson was the “three ‘nos’” was the hardest part of being an AJW wrestler.
Nagayo, meanwhile, said that the lifestyle was “worth it,” with her income being touted as being “as much as $200,000 a year from bouts, public appearances, endorsements, and record sales.” She told Anderson she hoped to become a karate instructor after she retired.
There’s also an April 26, 1987 San Francisco Examiner profile of Dump to round out the Crush Gals era coverage, but it doesn’t add anything to what’s already been discussed here.
The last real “genre” of articles looks at Madusa’s run in AJW. We start with a story by Dan Wascoe Jr. in her hometown newspaper, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, on January 14, 1990. The first quote, from Verne Gagne, is a sign of the times: “She’s blond and well-endowed.” We get a more tactful take from veteran wrestling reporter Fumi Saito, though. “People here thought she was some movie star,” he said. “She’s very good-looking and big and strong. She’s 120 percent American.”
The article refers to “her six-figure, yearlong con tract with All-Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling,” and later, one of her business managers, Paul Moe, says he expects her income by the end of 1990 to be between $200,000 and $300,000.” That’s between wrestling, merchandising, and music royalties. There isn’t that much more to be learned from the piece if you know Madusa’s story, though.
We skip ahead a couple of months to the March 19 edition of Dave Meltzer’s weekly wrestling column in The National Sports Daily (better known as simply “The National”) for a piece titled “Japanese mad over Madusa.” Here, the main attraction is the contemporaneous quotes from Madusa.
“The fans are so cute,” she told Meltzer. “A lot of them are very shy. Sometimes, they’ll just hand me a letter and almost run away. Last week someone gave me a Pomeranian dog [which costs about $850], It was so expensive I didn’t want to take it but I knew it would hurt their feelings if I didn’t.” Later, he adds that while she had dabbled in bodybuilding, that’s not the focus in AJW. “Endurance is the priority,” she told him. “There’s lots of running, jumping rope and jumping squats. The biggest difference between Japanese and American wrestling is speed. They're all fast. If you can’t keep up, you screw up a lot. American wrestling is like Shakespeare, and I’m not putting it down by saying that. But this is all sport.”
Meltzer also gave an updated view of the AJW tryout process: “Several thousand” teenage girls would apply, with 400 moved forward to the actual tryout, where eight would be picked to train in the dojo, though “about half will quit in the first year.” He also adds that after her second tour, Madusa “was offered a deal that made her the highest paid wrestler” in AJW.
“In January, she was voted by her peers The Most Inspirational Wrestler for her dedication in improving her ring ability,” reads the start of the kicker of the article. “To Madusa, that award meant more than any other honor she’s received since entering pro wrestling. And those honors have included two versions of the world title and a rookie of the year award from Pro Wrestling Illustrated.”
The last Madusa article comes from the April 5, 1991 edition of the South China Morning Post. There’s less of note here, although it’s interesting to see how blunt she is at one point. “In the States, an injured wrestler gets time to heal,” she told the Morning Post. “In Japan, you’re patched up and expected to get back in the ring almost immediately. There’s no time for recuperation.”
The last look at AJW proper comes from the September 16, 1992 edition of the St. Petersburg Times, just before the inter-promotional boom set business on fire. This one does the best job of giving the full cultural context around AJW and how it fits into Japanese gender roles more broadly, but while avoiding over-intellectualizing the topic.
In the article, Lioness Asuka and Kenji Matsunaga express the belief that it was the Crush Gals’ mini-concerts becoming routine that shifted the audience from being mostly adult men with white-collar jobs to women and girls. And then the article gets a bit deeper.
“People assume that Japanese women are delicate creatures in kimonos,” Matsunaga told the Times. “But deep inside the Japanese women is a strong will to get anything she wants. It is like a snake sleeping inside her. They never give up. I've trained many. They get hit or kicked and they never give up even when they're bleeding at the mouth and have bandages all over. They are asked if they are ready to give up and they just get up and continue fighting!”
Speaking generally, reporter Reena Shah explains the expectation in Japan where women are all expected to work as, basically, secretaries and be subservient to the point of buying “duty chocolates” for their male coworkers on Valentine’s Day. “After a few years at a company, these ‘office flowers’ are expected to retire, preferably with a husband culled from the company's pool of eligible men,” she adds, also giving examples of how women are portrayed in Japanese media like advertisements and manga. And then we get to the money.
“Like most women's jobs in Japan, though, wrestling doesn't pay much,” wrote Shah. “The women get an allowance of about $600 to $1,000 a month. They share dormitories and cook their meals. They have to train all day and polish their act. They are piled into buses for engagements around the country. If they get unexpectedly popular like the Crush Gals did, they can make some money on the side by selling T-shirts or cassettes.”
Unlike the previous articles, it’s not entirely clear if the is a reference to trainee pay or roster wrestler pay. Based on the bulk of the phrasing and the pay being close to the trainee allowance in the Wall Street Journal article, I’m going to guess that it’s the trainee allowance explained badly. That said, it’s still a direct reference to Japan’s gender pay gap, and the allowance only rising a little to make pace with inflation suggests that the roster wrestler pay may not have increased much, either.
A Matsunaga quote about what they borrowed from American wrestling closes the article, but it’s proceeded by a more interesting one from Lioness Asuka. “It doesn't matter if you are overweight. In fact, it is better if you are heavy," she told Shah, who contextualized the quote as Asuka explaining why wrestling is “ideal” for women. “You can be angry in public, and people will cheer you instead of scolding you for being bad. I am so glad I got chosen.”
We skip ahead 11 years for our last article, a look at the broader Japanese women’s scene that writer Leslie Downer and photographer Leticia Valverdes had published as a glossy, full-color, four-page feature in The Independent in September 2003. It starts at the AJW dojo as Nanae Takahashi leads a class, with the focus shifting to 15-year-old Keiko Hirose, better known these days as Deborah K in World Woman Pro-Wrestling Diana. That year, AJW had just 15 applicants to train in their dojo, with five picked to move in, but by this point, three of the five had quit. Hirose’s allowance is described as “a small wage, just enough to survive.”
“I often think of running away,” she told Downer while icing her swollen elbow. “I cry. I hate being such a weakling. I’m embarrassed to say this, but I’ve only once beaten the other new girl. But I’ve dropped out of everything else I’ve ever done. I’ve got to make a go of this.” In something I did not expect to read, Downer attributes the dramatic decrease in number of applicants for the dojo to “occasional deaths,” presumably referring to the accidents that killed JWP’s Plum Mariko and Arsion’s Emiko Kado a few years earlier.
“Nevertheless it is still a path to fame, though a bloody one,” Downer adds before going into the various forms of merchandise available at the AJW store situated above the dojo, including “a volume of tasteful soft-porn photographs of the prettiest” of the wrestlers, Kayo Noumi. “Pretty women can be good wrestlers too,” said Noumi. “It’s good to be pretty and strong. I get fan mail every day, especially after tournaments. I like the fame. When I’m out, everyone recognizes me.”
The article then pivots to Chigusa Nagayo and her GAEA Japan promotion, noting that when she applied for the AJW dojo, the recruitment ad read “Why not become a pro wrestler and be famous?” She did, of course, and made money to both pay off her family’s debts and buy “a black Mercedes with individually heated seats and a television in the front.” Downer contrasts the shows she attended from each group: At Zepp Tokyo, GAEA drew a 50/50 split of men and women with a show full of colorful characters, while the AJW audience at Korakuen Hall was “largely male” for a card that Downer seems convinced is full of real fights. (Although she did also say that, in GAEA, “the fights are choreographed but not rigged,” whatever that means.)
In fairness, it’s clear that at the AJW card she attended, the wrestlers beat the crap out of each other:
Backstage, Takahashi appears with a blood-stained towel around her head. Her face is pale and puffy. “It was particularly tough today,” she says. “We need to study their form better.” But there is no chance of a rest. There is another tournament the next day. “Sometimes I feel like giving up,” she confesses. “But not today. When I’ve been beaten like this I want to get straight back in the ring and get my own back.”
So, what have we learned here?
If nothing else, the pay issues jump out the strongest. While the wrestling pay cited for Devil Masami relative to Chigusa Nagayo in 1985 suggests that the compensation got more reasonable for the wrestlers who had seniority, it doesn’t change the overall picture that much. These girls and young women were working an incredibly punishing style, arguably the harshest in the wrestling business at the time, on the hardest schedule in the business (250-300 shows annually), but you definitely wouldn’t tell from their pay. If you weren’t selling hit records or a veteran, you were making less, adjusting for inflation, than a lot of indie wrestlers now who work half or less the number of matches in a year.
More broadly, it’s just plain interesting to see how much coverage there was of (mainly) AJW as a human interest topic in English-language mainstream media, particularly given the level of access that the reporters got. You don’t see this kind of story about AJPW or NJPW, after all. But the Beauty Pair and Crush Gals booms allowed for an easy hook in the form of singing teenage girl pro wrestlers that wouldn’t be there with the other major Japanese wrestling promotions, and the vast majority of the stories I found are from those two booms.
As always, though: Remember that there’s a lot more wrestling history — hell, history in general — at your fingertips than you might realize. You just have to go look for it.