I Watched Some Joshi (for the Mariko Yoshida)

Mariko Yoshida & Yumiko Hotta v Bison Kimura & Madusa Miceli (AJW, 11/14/90)

Pretty sure this is the earliest match I've seen from every woman involved. I didn't think Madusa showed up in AJW until a couple years later, but it turns out she'd already been there as early as '88. Her heel shtick was sort of amusing, she threw a few nice kicks and she wasn't afraid to cheapshot someone. Hotta never really potatoed anybody and worked pretty light with Madusa. Maybe she hadn't yet developed that crowbar streak, or she wasn't quite as comfortable full force punching the foreigner in the nose. Yoshida played a fun FIP, got ragdolled for a few minutes and took a few nasty face-first bumps off of hair swings. She wasn't into the shoot style/lucha funkiness yet -- this was her doing a bunch of Irish whips and bridge ups at a hundred miles an hour. Not the best version of Yoshida, but I'm interested in watching some of her earlier stuff and for a two year pro there weren't many holes to pick. Finish being a plain old slap was...strange.


Mariko Yoshida v Carlos Amano (GAEA, 4/30/04)

Cracking little match. Yoshida is a wonderful pro wrestler and we got to see plenty of what makes her so here. Her early grappling and tying up of Amano's limbs was Navarro-esque, only quicker and slicker. Pretty soon this became about how Amano could possibly survive Yoshida's masterclass, and she'd eventually get her answer by using her head as a weapon. She'd just launch herself head-first at Yoshida with these wild headbutts from various angles, which opened the door for her to bust out some of her own slick grappling. For an eleven minute match they did a pretty great job of getting across how dangerous the Air Raid Crash is, as every time Yoshida went for it Amano would frantically try to escape or reverse it into a hold. That then meant we got to see Yoshida come up with ways of escaping those predicaments, and I don't know if there's anybody better at milking a possible submission than Yoshida. Those little struggles over a cross armbreaker or a neck crank -- nobody does them better.