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AJW Kawasaki "Shinku" (crimson) no Toso (struggle/conflict) Commercial
Tape 8/23/98 Kanagawa Kawasaki Shi Taiikukan (4,350 sellout) |
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This was AJW's most successful show of 1998, drawing an overflow crowd of 4,350. It's safe to say the main event sold almost every one of these tickets. The show certainly had it's positives and negatives. On the positive side, Toyota showed that she can still go when she wants to, firing up to deliver her best match of 1998 even though she was strapped with an opponent that's tough to have a strong match with. This match was selected women's match of the year in at least one of the Japanese media's awards, although generally those awards place way too much emphasis on the magnitude of the match, as shown by Kandori vs. Gundarenko winning in one of the other polls despite being terrible and obviously worked. The show had something rare for women's wrestling in 1998, a hot crowd. It was more that they were popping during the main event than during any of the other matches, in particular it took 15 minutes for the crowd to react at all to the tag title match despite everyone working really hard. Still, on one match alone, the show had more heat than the vast majority of women's shows from 1998 because most shows were of the you can hear a pin drop variety but Kandori is a heat machine when she has a credible opponent. The booking of the important young wrestlers was good for once. Momoe was given the chance to shine, and her team captured the tag titles. Wakizawa was put in the spotlight, although, as you'd expect given who else was in the match, she was mainly a punching bag. They found a kickboxer so bad that Maekawa, who only does a kickboxing match once in a great while, was actually the better of the two. The most important thing about these women's shoot matches is the result, so it's better and safer to just find someone that the women can most likely beat. The problem is it makes for really low quality matches. By that I don't necessarily mean that they suck, although they often do, but that the technique is so bad that it's hard to get into them unless they are really clubbing each other. The main bad thing about this show was it really magnified just how lacking this promotion is when it comes to talent depth. I suppose you could say we've been spoiled by the days where Ito, Watanabe, Sakie, Yoshida, etc. were in the opening matches, but aside from the tag title match where the Jd' women were better than Takahashi and on the level of Momoe, there wasn't really anything promising or good. Takahashi's selling seems better, as does Wakizawa's, but overall they are not even average. The fact that they decided to make this an hour and a half tape with edited matches, rather than making it a two hour tape with complete matches says something negative about this show, although obviously there were other factors involved in this decision. The heel style of Ito & Watanabe once again hampered their ring work more than anything else, and AJW just can't afford to not have these two delivering very good matches. The ironic thing about the ZAP name is it stands for "Zenjo Afflict Purpose," while my thought on the gimmick and what AJW has done with it is is closer to, "what's the purpose?" The only match that was poorly booked was Takako vs. Nishibori. Unless Takako was sick or injured, there's no excuse for booking a pointless squash match like that on a major show. I mean, it would be one thing if they had some new monster squash someone, but Takako has been here for over a decade so what purpose was her squashing Nishibori supposed to serve? While I didn't have a problem with Toyota doing the job here, I would not have agreed to it if Kandori wasn't going to return the favor later on. Manami sorely needed a major win because she really didn't have a major non-JGP singles win in between her title defense against Aja on 10/6/96 and her win over Kyoko on 12/8/99. Instead of seeing Toyota beat Kandori in the rematch later in the year, we saw Kandori sit on the belt for the remainder of 1998 and the first two plus months of 1999. This can only be described as an unacceptable and pointless waste of an object that is part of the draw on the bigger shows. |
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