Meiko and Kana hit each other very hard

Meiko Satomura v Kana (Triple Tails, 2/13/11)

This might be as close to joshi FUTEN as I've ever seen. I don't just mean the stiffness or how they worked it stylistically -- I'm talking right down to the presentation with the smaller crowd, the tightly-packed environment, even the dodgy close-up camera shots. You could hear eeeeeverything in this and it gave the very obvious brutality an even more visceral edge. There have been outright stiffer matches in joshi, things like Hotta/Aja coming to mind, but where this was remarkable was how CLEAN the striking was. I think there was one strike that looked a bit whiffed and it was a running shining wizard from Kana. Other than that, if they threw, I don't know, 50 strikes in total, 47 of them were a 9 or 10 out of 10 on the execution scale. It was absolute god tier striking. And of course they laid it in something fierce. Kana was throwing roundhouse variations and spin kicking Meiko in the lungs, winging urakens that about made Satomura's eardrum explode, full force Wanderlei punting her in the dish. While Kana doing this to people is nothing new, Meiko isn't someone I'm used to seeing work as Ikeda, at least not to this extent. But she was absolutely drilling Kana with shots and that cartwheel knee to the back of the head was an absurdity of a thing. There was one strike exchange towards the end that nearly veered into your rote "you hit me and I'll hit you and we'll show everyone how tough we are" nonsense, but even in the moment it felt like it was rooted in Kana operating with a chip on her shoulder. The way she celebrated at the finish reinforced that as well, how it came across like this was an actual combat sport contest and she'd just beaten one of the very best, someone that maybe nobody expected her to beat. Plus the strikes themselves looking amazing will make something like that a little more tolerable anyway. The grappling wasn't necessarily flashy and you've seen better Battlarts/FUTEN matwork, but it was undoubtedly aggressive and competitive, everything being fought over and when they locked something in it always looked like they were going for the tap. Nothing felt like it was applied merely to further the match or to bridge from one series of strikes to the next. And the chicken wing choke at the end really did look killer.