GWE 2026 Legwork: Meiko Satomura

Meiko wasn't someone I had in consideration in 2016. That was about as down as I'd ever been on joshi as an overall style and even when I took a late run at some 90s stuff before the deadline, checking out anything from the 2000s was pretty low on my list of priorities. 2010s joshi was even lower. 10 years on and I've never enjoyed joshi more. Having gone through a ton of 90s stuff over the last five years in particular, early Meiko has become one of my favourite young wrestler ever. Nobody at 16 year old should be as good at pro wrestling as Meiko was. I'd have strongly considered her for my list based on those early years alone. I don't even know what people would consider her true peak but she looks incredible by the end of the 90s, incredible by the end of the 00s, and incredible midway through the 10s. It's been a pretty small sample size even then though, so I want to fill some gaps there and see what she was doing all the way up until she retired last year. It's also kind of wild that she had a full WWE run for a minute there. Either way, Meiko will be on my top 100 and at this point the only question is how high. 

Meiko Satomura v Sareee (Sareee-ISM, 1/23/25)

One of the things I love about the stupid pro wrestling is seeing how wrestlers will change how they work as they get older; how they adapt to their bodies breaking down and not being able to rely on the same physical tools they could in the past. Andre might be the most obvious example, but there are countless others in a business where people are liable to work deep into three or even four decades (or more still for the true psychos). So on the one hand it's almost a disappointment seeing this, one of the last matches Meiko worked, during the retirement tour of her 30th year as a wrestler, at 46 years old after a three-decade career of working an extremely physical style, where if you didn't know who these two were already you could be mistaken for thinking they came up in the business together. I mean how do you not watch this and wonder what Meiko Satomura working as broken down Gypsy Joe might've looked like? How cool would Meiko on retirement's door taking one single bump per match and working spots around getting tangled in the ropes have been? It would have ruled, I'm sure. But alas, some are just cut from a different cloth. This was not broken down Meiko, because Meiko never broke down. Nor was it Meiko in 2025 trying to work like Meiko in 2005 because she didn't know how to be anything else. It was just Meiko, on her road to 50, having never lost a step along the way. That's kind of cool as fuck too, you know. I'd never seen Sareee before, though I know she's highly thought of and considered one of the best wrestlers in Japan right now. I thought she kept pace with Satomura the whole way and worked this like she was trying to prove a point. It might be Meiko's retirement tour but she'll be given no quarter from Sareee, everything will need to be earned. They never pissed about early and went right into winging kicks, Meiko putting Sareee in an arm-wringer, kicking her down to one knee then thumping her in the elbow. I rewound it and slowed it down and Sareee's arm looked like it turned to jelly, just a grotesque shot not but 30 seconds into the match. They then had a follow up exchange where the crowd thought it was time for them to applaud the stalemate, but I love how Sareee decided to hell with that and charged Satomura straight away. Her main weapon throughout was the double stomps and she hit about six brutal ones, the meanest being off a big table while Satomura lay on the floor. Then as the double stomps couldn't do the trick she just melted her with headbutts. Obviously Meiko's own strikes were world class and her handspring knee was still one of the best in the game, even in year 30. This was pretty awesome.