On 2/25/81, Mimi Hagiwara and Rimi Yokota won the All Pacific and WWWA World Single titles respectively, and a generational change was complete. This was the real start of the '80s era, though it was a rough start. A day after Yokota won the belt, she teamed with the former champion Jackie Sato. The crowd gave Jackie a huge reaction, and didn't make a noise when Yokota was introduced. Yokota said she had never felt so small in her life, and wanted to return the belt. She wasn't ready for this yet, and it would take her some time to step into the role. Hagiwara, on the other hand, despite debuting a year after Yokota, was more comfortable in her new role as All Pacific Champion. Mimi was older and more confident in herself, and the All Pacific title doesn't have the same pressure of the WWWA World Title, where the champion is the leader of the league. On 5/21/81, Jackie Sato retired to truly end the era. Maki Ueda was a guest, and they sung together one last time. It was a subdued retirement, in small building, and half of the roster wasn't even in attendance due to being elsewhere. Not what you'd expect for one of the biggest women's wrestling stars of all time. 1981 had some bright spots, but it was a year of transition, and a weak one overall.

1/6/81: Jackie Sato & Rimi Yokota vs. Nancy Kumi & Ayumi Hori. Energetic match that was probably the best AJW match of 1981. A hard working, fast paced action packed match for its time with everyone contributing. Yokota was the best, and provided most of the highlights. Her and Kumi's exchanges were the highlight. Sato was good, while Hori was the lesser of the four. There were plenty of neat spots, the coolest one being Yokota dropkicking the turnbuckle and deflecting it into a body press. Sato took the first fall with a backbreaker. The second fall slowed things down a bit. With Yokota being set to challenge champion Sato, there was no chance of their opponents taking a fall properly. Therefore, it ended up in a brawl with a count out levelling things 1-1. They were back to top speed for the third fall, with Kumi showing a lot more energy than she usually did, and Yokota hitting some of her trademark bursts. The finish was great with Hori going for a fireman's toss on Yokota, and Yokota landing on her feet and finishing with a leg-roll clutch, complete with Sato charging full boar at Kumi so she couldn't interrupt the pin. A quality all action match. ***1/2

2/25/81, All Pacific Title Match: Yumi Ikeshita vs. Mimi Hagiwara. The first of two historic matches on this show saw Mimi Hagiwara defeat Yumi Ikeshita to become the All Pacific champion under somewhat dubious circumstances to put it nicely. To add even more history to this show, at the beginning of it we had Chino Sato's retirement, which saw the first use of Soleado as the retirement theme song, which would become the standard for the next decade. This was contested under the weird Zenjo rules (like their junior matches) where the two wrestlers would wrestle a regular match to kill time and entertain the audience before switching into trading pin attempts back and forth legitimately. The Matsunaga brothers wanted Mimi to win, and she was better in sparring than you might imagine, but while they didn't just book the title change, Mimi definitely got quite a bit of help here. The match itself had enough to like to keep things entertaining. It's not one of Ikeshita's better efforts; she mostly just keeps things basic and does a solid job, but there's none of her legendary Black Pair style cheating or eye catching technical wrestling we've seen from her previously. Mimi was the one who made the match. Early on, she does it with her scrappy desperate attacks, and once Ikeshita starts working submissions, it's her selling and brutal screams putting them over the top, almost making it uncomfortable to watch. The business end didn't last long here, and as I mentioned at the start, was dubious to put it nicely. Ikeshita took the first pin, but Mimi rolled over to escape, and the referee didn't even bother to get into position to count. Mimi took the second pin with a small package, and that was the end of it, as the referee counted three despite Ikeshita being on her side. I think the brother just wanted Mimi to win, and got overexcited. It was so bad that the wrestlers themselves had no idea what had gone on. Mimi looked shocked at the result, as if she thought she may have been the one counted down, which would have been just as plausible in the position that they were in. Ikeshita just looked disgusted and stormed out of the ring. This wound up being Ikeshita's last televised appearance in the company before retiring at age 22 in June, presumably due to losing the title to a junior. ***1/4

2/25/81, 2/3 Falls WWWA Tag Team Title Decision Match: Nancy Kumi & Ayumi Hori vs. Devil Masami & Mami Kumano. With the two matches surrounding it being contested with shoot pinfalls, I suppose the company thought they better have a conventional match in the middle (it shows where we've gone if we're considering Black Pair style matches “conventional”). Devil and Kumano were supposed to carry on the Black Pair legacy before the whole thing was scrapped and Devil got her Devil corps group. This was just a good Black Pair style match that follows their formula. The babyface team gets the early run and thwarts a lot of the brawling, gets the first fall, and the heels resort to dirtier tactics to take the second fall. In this case, they took Hori out, so Kumi was stuck fighting both heels for the third fall. She was able to have some success using a chair, but the odds were too much for her, and she got put down. Hori came back in at the end because, as the young girl, it was her job to eat the pin, so Kumi bailed and Hori got mauled with the wrench and pinned to close out the match. There's some fun spots in here, like Devil trying to steal the house mic but not being allowed to grab, so she threw Kumi into Maki Ueda's lap, and Kumano wildly swinging around her comically oversized wrench and then nailing the ref in the arm with it (luckily not his counting arm). Overall, it was entertaining, but it wasn't one of the higher end matches of this style. ***

2/25/81, WWWA World Single Title Match: Jackie Sato vs. Rimi Yokota. The best way I could describe this match is sparring disguised as pro-wrestling. The early portion saw some pretty standard matwork. Yokota hit a couple of her spots, and was competitive, but it was usually Sato in control. Jaguar took over going for Sato's arm and worked her over. This was some quality filler, solid work even if it wasn't designed to go anywhere. The worst thing was Fuji TV spending as much time focusing on the former champions on commentary as if they were the match. They introduced the pinfalls with Sato slamming Yokota into the mat three times, but Yokota immediately got off her back. They never dropped their mat wrestling, so it doesn't come off as completely alien, but if you know what you're looking at, you can see how back and forth it is. Jaguar's first attempt was actually off a rana, but under these secret rules you weren't allowed to use your legs to hold the shoulders down, which is why I presume the referee didn't start the count. She opted for something more conventional, with a pair of butterfly suplexes, but Sato was immediately onto her side. They spilled out for a brawl outside before restarting. Sato's next pin attempt came after a backbreaker, but she had no more success than her first try. Yokota's next attempt is the interesting one in the match. She gets Sato into position and Sato gets out, but she can't get off her back, allowing Yokota to continue trying to pin her. Because Sato couldn't get out of the pinfall, Yokota was able to continue trying to pin her. On the second last attempt the referee stopped at two, even though Sato's shoulders were down to a point that the referee would have counted them in any other match and the Matsunaga brothers wanted Yokota to win, but he was worried about repeating the Ikeshita vs. Mimi debacle, and wanted to show he was the better referee than his brother. It didn't matter though because she still couldn't escape, so Yokota was able to keep trying and got the three count with the next attempt. She wasn't impressed about the refereeing, but keeping her opponent on her back for almost 20 seconds unable to escape is about as definitive an ending as you could ever get under these rules (although the double edged sword is that if you don't know what's actually going on, it just looked like a bad, anti-climactic finish). This was pretty good and interesting, as they did a good job of keeping it a serious pro wrestling match while working their shoot rules into it. However, it's lacking any real excitement, and it's very restricted in terms of keeping things 50/50 (Hagiwara vs Ikeshita also suffered from this, but I found their work a bit more interesting). This is fascinating, and arguably the most important match of the decade, but their 1980 match was a lot better. ***1/2

/81: Nancy Kumi vs. Mimi Hagiwara. I could only pin down this match to have taken place sometime between May and August 1981. Kumi was quite happy dominating her junior with the usual stretching and tossing, and Mimi's selling was on point, as always. Mimi made a comeback, shitcanning Kumi with a butterfly suplex, but following it up with a better one, and looking to take over. It mostly only frustrated Kumi though, so after avoiding a body press, she just gave her a thrashing on the outside. Kumi went after her knee from there, but switched back into the power moves. Mimi decided to return the favor on the outside, but that backfired. She had more luck in the ring as the two scrambled to finish with the time limit beating them. Good work and plenty of fire. ***1/4

8/25/81, All Pacific Title: Mimi Hagiwara vs. Leilani Kai. Mimi basically dominated this whole match and destroyed Kai, which was a real change from her usual role of getting beaten on for 90% of the match and making a few comebacks. From the start, Mimi exploded, and they worked at a good pace. The good thing about Kai, unlike the rest of Moolah's girls, is she could bump around and had more than one gear. Mimi worked the arm a bit, and then took Kai for a walk and hit her boxing moves. Kai escaped out of the ring and Mimi followed her and stayed on the attack again. She was so aggressive in this, and not giving Kai anything. Kai was able to avoid a dive and get something going, hitting a brainbuster, but then missed a diving body press. They ended up back in a crowd brawling and didn't make it back, with the match ending a double count out. Seeing Mimi kill Kai like this was a lot of fun. ***1/2

1: Mimi Hagiwara. Perhaps a surprise. Jaguar Yokota was #1 for ability, but had her weakest year from 1980 – 1985 (it's no coincidence that it was also the leagues weakest year in this period). Mimi had a more memorable year, with better opponents and better matches. She took her All Pacific title push and ran with it. In a weak year overall, Mimi was a bright spot.

2: Jaguar Yokota

3: Devil Masami

4: Nancy Kumi

5: Ayumi Hori

1: 1/6/1981 Jackie Sato & Rimi Yokota vs. Nancy Kumi & Ayumi Hori ***1/2

2: 8/25/1981 All Pacific Title: Mimi Hagiwara vs. Leilani Kai ***1/2

3: 2/25/1981 WWWA World Single Title Match: Jackie Sato vs. Rimi Yokota ***1/2

4: 2/25/1981 All Pacific Title Match: Yumi Ikeshita vs. Mimi Hagiwara ***1/4

5: 1981 Nancy Kumi vs. Mimi Hagiwara ***1/4

Noriyo Tateno

Itsuki Yamazaki

Miki Asami