Tales of Stardom: the retirement of Saki Kashima and the art of (not) wrestling

[Libertine Seguros]

AKA, I lose my goddamn mind, because this is probably the most insane thing I’ve ever done on this forum.

The Race Design Thread has often been a bit of a refuge for me, especially at times when I’m pretty down, seeking a bit of escapism and looking out into the world, investigating places’ histories, cultures and geographies through the medium of entirely fictional bike races that I would want to see. And at times, not just the countries and cities that these fictitious races take place in, but the things that happened in those places and the people who lived and died there, send me down crazy rabbit holes, sometimes for better and sometimes for worse (I probably could have done without learning about Daniel Larson in my Tour of Colorado, for example), and often running into many paragraphs, especially in flat stages with little else to talk about. But a short while ago, while researching for a Race Design Thread project, I ended up…well, as I mentioned last week:

I’m afraid there’s quite the backlog of races built up, especially as researching one of them (one that I've been wanting to do for a long time, but have been prevented from doing so by the paralysis of choice) has sent me down the wildest, most bizarre rabbit hole yet, one that has grown so large it cannot go in the Race Design Thread as it’s far too off-topic but has run to absurd length (it's resulted in me writing, no joke, well over 10.000 words on the retirement of a pro wrestler I’d never heard of before December, and I’m willing to wager none of you have either)

I was designing - as I have tried to on many occasions in the past but never quite been happy with - a more all-encompassing Tour of Japan, as it is one of the few countries that I believe could realistically host an alternative “Grand Tour” - it is big enough to offer variety while being small enough to tour the majority of in a three week format, and it is geographically diverse enough as well as having sufficient infrastructure in mountainous areas throughout the country. I was researching the cities of the Chugoku region, at the extreme east end of Honshu, when multiple cities threw up suggestions regarding famous inhabitants who were, or had been, professional wrestlers. This, in and of itself, is nothing strange - pro wrestling is very big in Japan. However, all of them were women, who had come to the “sport” from unorthodox means, with a single connecting thread which led me to investigate further until I was so deep down the rabbit hole that daylight had disappeared from above me. Many of my posts over the years have acknowledged how I enjoyed wrestling during my childhood, but while the actual spectacle itself is something I’d left behind, the inner workings of the industry have been an endlessly fascinating subject to me - the maintenance and protection of the falsehood that underpins the “sport”, the interconnected scenes, the way different styles developed in different areas, and the culture of unwritten rules, respect and integrity that somehow are so pervasive in a custom so inherently ridiculous and built around at least maintaining the premise of deceiving a public that has been aware of that deceit for decades.

Japanese wrestling, or ‘puroresu’ as it is often called (a contraction of Japanese pronunciations of “pro-wres(tling)”), is big business. And despite the fact that, like elsewhere, the audience are well aware that it is entirely acted, it is generally treated with a seriousness far beyond its overseas counterparts. It is reported on, in kayfabe, in genuine sports media, most notably the Tokyo Sports, a newspaper serving as Japan’s equivalent of L’Équipe or Gazzetta dello Sport. Segments on shows not directly relating to “competition” are minimal; in-ring microphone time is usually limited to issuing or acknowledging challenges, other interaction is done mostly through pre- and post-match interviews and press conferences similar to those in legitimate sports; storylines are usually acted out within matches, rather than driven by backstage antics. Perhaps this seriousness is derived from its lineage; wrestling was popularised in Japan by Rikidozan, a Korean-born star from the 1950s, whose battles to preserve Japanese honour against foreign menaces pulled allusions and procedures from his sumo background, and refined a generation later through one of the most successful of these ‘foreign menace’ villains, Karl Gotch, a Belgian specialist in freestyle “catch-as-catch-can” wrestling (a forerunner of Olympic freestyle wrestling, in fact) who had been blackballed in America after a backstage altercation, and who trained a generation of Japanese stars in this more legitimate-looking style.

One of the characteristics puroresu shares with sumo is the clear segregation of men’s and women’s competitions; unlike in America and Mexico, where until recently female wrestlers would perform as a kind of novelty or side-show on the men’s cards, Japan had large companies dedicated solely to women’s wrestling (called “joshi puroresu”, literally “woman wrestling”). The women had a tendency towards more colourful outfits and shows, and many of the women were more flexible or acrobatic than their male counterparts, thus allowing for more creative and eye-catching techniques (indeed, many popular acrobatic moves of American wrestling in the 90s and 2000s were in fact invented by Japanese women). In the 1980s, the pairing of Lioness Asuka and Chigusa Nagayo, called the “Crush Gals”, would become mainstream stars in Japan comparable in popularity to Hulk Hogan in America, especially when facing off against intimidating, threatening-looking villains like Dump Matsumoto or against perennial rivals the Jumping Bomb Angels. In 1994, a cross-promotional women’s wrestling super-show at the Tokyo Dome drew over 30.000 fans.

AJW in 1993

However, at the same time as wrestling was seeing a huge boom in the West and the big Japanese men’s companies were at their critical zenith, the bottom fell out of the Joshi golden age. 1997 saw the largest company, AJW, suffer a financial collapse, and rival JWP faced tragedy after a wrestler called Plum Mariko passed away in August that year, Japan’s first death directly related to in-ring injuries. With the simultaneous success of “Junior Heavyweight” (i.e. lighter and more athletic) men’s wrestling beginning in the mid-90s, women’s wrestling was largely wiped out of the Japanese mainstream, surviving only with walking corpses of the former heavyweight promotions, and small independent companies with limited audience reach. An unflattering documentary that showcased the insides of women’s wrestling in Japan further damaged the industry in 2000; women are of course banned from professional sumo, but women’s wrestling featured many of the same underlying issues - often very young children being sent to live in collective dojos, undergoing rigorous physical training and being subjected to harsh punishment - with a culture of severe and often dangerous bullying and rookie-hazing being exposed, and trainees being subjected to excessive physical abuse, lending it a reputation combining the worst abuses of both a sumo heya and infamously exploitative gymnastics schools. Various methods were attempted to revive the popularity of Joshi in the wake of these successive blows, many of which resulted in absolute insanity, and this was where the rabbit hole took me.

The number one women’s wrestling promotion in the world right now is World Wonder Ring Stardom, or just “Stardom” for short. It is doing gangbusters in terms of business and has a pretty positive reputation nowadays, but it was not always thus. In fact, the history of Stardom as a whole is a huge and frequently insane rabbit hole. Its founder, Hiroshi “Rossy” Ogawa, is a businessman who had been a ringside photographer for AJW back in the golden age, and depending on who you talk to, he is everything from a kindly father figure to often-damaged young women, and a career saviour who can turn things around for women cast aside by other exploitative industries or badly treated in other wrestling companies, to a seedy old man who plays favourites, has a penchant for body-shaming, and who has allowed and even encouraged both abusive and exploitative practices - including potentially of children - to go on under his watch.

The ever-controversial Ogawa

The entire company was born out of one of many attempts - several of which involving Ogawa - during this downturn in the fortunes of women’s wrestling to adapt to the trappings of the already-exploitative and materialistic idol industry; to recount the many bizarre escapades of the history of Stardom would take forever. I mean, this is a company that built its public image around a gravure model; which recruited an island of misfit toys, including a former hikikomori (shut-in), and an internationally-competing yachtswoman and classical Japanese literature graduate from a prestigious university, who was recruited to Stardom after one of their trainers chanced upon her portraying a wrestler in an amateur theatre production. A company that first came to public prominence due to having to fire its World Champion, YOSHIKO, after she went off-script and deliberately pummelled a wrestler named Act Yasukawa so badly she was disfigured and permanently blinded in one eye, a shocking and gruesome event still known to the Japanese public as “the Ghastly Match”. A company which attracted criticism for building its reputation around rehabilitating idols and emphasising the physical attractiveness of its competitors, then putting 11- and 12-year-old girls in the ring in front of a paying public (some of whom appeared to take an uncomfortable interest in the youngsters) and selling swimsuit photobooks including talents below the age of consent. A company which saw its own fans bully and shame a young wrestler into retirement, and a couple of years later, even worse, its biggest rising star, Hana Kimura - following an altercation with a popular comedian on a reality TV show - became the victim of a targeted and aggressive cyberbullying campaign so intense that it drove her to public self-mutilation and suicide, resulting in multiple trolls being sentenced to prison time and precipitating changes to Japanese law. As an added twist of poignancy, it had been Hana’s mother, Kyoko, who had gone to ringside, called an audible and thrown in the towel to protect Act Yasukawa and bring an end to the “ghastly match”.

Act Yasukawa, an early Stardom fan favourite due to her charisma and sympathetic background, suffering from Graves’ Disease, having been bullied as a child to the point of attempting suicide and having to take medication that rendered her infertile in order to continue her career, before a brutal off-script beating (warning: graphic) that forced her into an early retirement

Shiki Shibusawa, Stardom’s Rookie of the Year in 2017, hounded out of the industry by abuse from the company’s own fans less than a year later

Hana Kimura, one of Stardom’s brightest prospects, shortly before taking her own life in 2020, aged just 22

And yet, somehow, this company survives - and not just survives but thrives. Stardom became strong enough that it attracted mainstream attention, and convinced NJPW, the biggest wrestling federation in Asia, to introduce a women’s title. Bushiroad, the corporation that owns NJPW, purchased Stardom and now markets its events worldwide. Ogawa has been ousted, freeing the company from some of the controversies of its past and sparking change in the style of promotion, and founded his own rival group, Dream Star Fighting Marigold. The company has developed partnerships with major companies in the US, Mexico and Europe, and most of the Japanese women to appear in WWE since 2010 have come via Stardom, while several non-Japanese stars have also spent time there. The promotion’s current champion, Saya Kamitani, originally joined the company to be a backup dancer having never watched wrestling in her life, and has now become a mainstream television figure in Japan, bringing live women’s wrestling to terrestrial television for the first time in 30 years, and become the first woman to ever receive Tokyo Sports’ MVP award. The company is doing record business.

But, what finally persuaded me to write about this separately was not the business side of things, the controversies or the madness of the company sourcing in ring talents from gravure models, sailors, dancers, an alleged yakuza princess, punk rock singers (no, really) and SMALL CHILDREN, but from something which I had not at all anticipated. That, for the first time in over two decades, and not including unscripted tragedies, somebody would make me care about the outcome of a wrestling match - moreover, a wrestling match which had already happened over two years before I learned of her existence.

Saki Kashima, or Less Is More, More or Less

While the stereotype of the usual wrestling fan in the West is of the drunk, ill-educated boor who still believes it’s real, the stereotype of the internet wrestling fan is more akin to that of the anime or strategy games nerd, a fat man-child with a neckbeard whose main fixation is about how many moves their favourite wrestlers can cram into a match, with little regard for anything beyond the gymnastic side of the medium. While that is part of the spectacle, of course, this view is akin to a prog rock fan turning their nose up at the Beach Boys because Pet Sounds doesn’t have any eight minute tracks with contrapuntal duelling guitar solos and shifting time signatures. Being able to do the moves is only one part of the puzzle; knowing when to do them - and when not to - is far more important. And something that makes this crucial is the acting element of wrestling. Wrestlers’ acting skills are often rightly derided as being corny and exaggerated, but this is usually deliberate; apart from the WWE kind of level, where big video screens accompany the shows, they have to convey their emotions in a manner so that the entire audience can read them, no matter which side of the ring they are seated. This exaggerated, performative aspect of the show is just part of the audience’s suspension of disbelief, but can then be dialled up extra notches for the sake of humour, and wrestling has always incorporated levels of comedy - often puerile or slapstick - to add variety to the shows.

In Japan, while the combat element of wrestling is by and large treated more seriously than elsewhere, the comedy is often more overt. This, I believe, is a holdover from the old days of converted sumo wrestlers; while sumo is legitimate competition, every competition day will include a slapstick performance by lower level rikishi who demonstrate the various forbidden actions within the dohyo by way of an exaggerated, standardised routine designed to illustrate to the audience what they will and will not see in the show, regardless of language or literacy. Nearly every company will have a wrestler or two who are never going to win any “best match” accolades or the hearts of the elitists, but their primary role is comic relief, usually with an exaggeratedly comical appearance or costume to reinforce that they are a spectacle separate from the more serious wrestlers, and they are also often used as the opposition when a wrestler is nursing, or recovering from, injury, in order to get them onto the show without expending much by way of physical exertion.

Saki Kashima is not a comedy wrestler. Except sometimes, when she is. But she isn’t.

She will never be the darling of the stereotypical wrestling fan. She is, however, the best in the world at knowing when not to do the moves. Or, in fact, any moves at all.

She is an unlikely pro wrestler - by her own admission, teenage Saki was a loner from a backwater town, who dropped out of high school, hated being in front of people, felt uncomfortable conversing, and weighed under 40kg. She was talked into giving it a try by her mother, who was desperate to find her daughter something sociable to do, as although she clearly wasn’t physically suited to it, wrestling seemed to be one of the only things she actually enjoyed. But she was the only trainee from her class who stuck it out. Kashima’s career began in 2011, but the first part of her career, in front of the tiny crowds of Stardom’s formative years, isn’t really of great interest other than the curio that she wasn’t debuted as part of a ‘wave’ of talents as rookies tend to be introduced in Japan, but on her own due to an unfortunately-timed injury, and she was curiously billed at 50kg, a weight she was visibly nowhere near (and would never reach in her career). This period would last only around 18 months, however, before she bid adieu; despite winning her first belt as part of the company’s inaugural trios champions, she was simply too frail for the nightly punishment of the regular circuit, and went on a long leave of absence which resulted in her contract being voided and the belts being vacated.

There is unfortunately more to it; Stardom at the time was rife with cliques - something that would be a persistent problem until changes forced by the “Ghastly Match” - and Japanese sources mention Ogawa talking of an incident in this period where a wrestler quit after a clique of seniors forcibly isolated them socially from their peers and controlled all their interactions for months, and “fled home to Matsue”. Although unnamed in the book, by process of elimination this could only have been Kashima (although a couple of hours away from her hometown, Matsue is the capital of her home prefecture, and where she would work at a pachinko parlour during her leave of absence), however as Ogawa can’t be considered an especially reliable narrator this was rather buried all the way until April 2026, when Kashima herself corroborated the story in an interview with the Samurai!TV channel, stating that she had not wanted to quit, but was being constantly threatened and harassed backstage, and felt coerced into “leaving of her own accord”.

Nevertheless, she would make an unexpected return to the ring in 2018, after five years away, following which she spent almost two years as part of the faction known as “Stars”, a saccharine-sweet group of do-gooders supporting the company’s main protagonist Mayu Iwatani. Mayu was the last remaining part of the “Threedom” group, whose exploits had rebuilt the company’s reputation after the “Ghastly Match” (the others being Io Shirai and Kairi Hojo, both of whom left for WWE), and a pet project of Rossy Ogawa, who had quite literally taken her in and put a roof over her head; according to a 2017 documentary, she experienced something traumatic but undisclosed as a child, causing her to refuse to leave her house for almost three years, before deciding to become a wrestler and running away to Tokyo, aged 16 and with nothing but two bags of clothes and the money in her pocket. Due to this childhood isolation, she had remained off-screen friends with many of her fellow first- and second-generation trainees even after several of them retired, as they were among her first real friends. It was perhaps natural that she and Saki would share a connection, both being similarly-aged, lonely high school dropouts from small Chugoku towns who had been among Stardom’s earliest wave of recruits, and that she would play a role in bringing her friend back to wrestling years down the line.

Stardom wrestlers in 2010. Kashima and Iwatani, aged 17 and still trainees at this point, can be seen together in the top left

Two small-town social recluses, recast as cheerful, cosmopolitan heroines upon reuniting almost a decade later

While this kinship with Iwatani meant she got a prominent role in skits and non-wrestling segments, due to her slight build making her a physical underdog in the vast majority of match-ups and her outward appearance of prettiness and fragility setting off protection instincts in the mostly-male audience, Kashima’s character at this time would largely be limited to “babyface in peril”, the good guy who gets beaten up in tag team matches before tagging in the bigger star to save the day; she would take a huge amount of punishment, never giving up, until finally tagging Iwatani in to deliver the crowd-pleasing climax - and Saki would often be pinned when they lost, so that the bigger star didn't look weak. Once a bigger name returnee, Arisa Hoshiki, joined the faction and became Iwatani’s primary partner, Kashima saw herself relegated to a bit-part player. She got a couple of reigns with team-based titles, but she was always the junior partner to bigger stars in these. And it was always her that took the fall when the time came for them to lose the belts. Her most memorable chance to show personality during this period came during a feud with the villainous Oedo Tai stable, where a wrestler called Natsu Sumire would grab the microphone and karaoke along to Kashima’s entrance theme, enraging her and amusing both her Stars teammates and the crowd.

In Natsu’s defence, Saki’s theme is a banger. Note Saki’s teammates holding her back on the ramp, and her supposed best friend Iwatani dancing along in the ring

Sumire would spend almost a year storyline-tormenting Kashima, mocking her appearance and small-town background and calling her a “Donki” or “Don Quixote girl”, referencing a cheap Japanese chain store selling knock-off or end-of-line clothing and make-up, somewhere in between Hot Topic in the US and Primark in Western Europe, and popular with the yanki subculture of dropout teenagers and 20-something NEETs - ramping up the trolling further in a gimmick match during a holiday special, where the wrestlers all had to cosplay as one another; she would come out to the ring as “the REAL Saki Kashima”, with her generic, smiling demeanour exchanged for a scruffy delinquent in thrift shop clothes, cheap make-up and perfume, smoking and carrying her ring gear in plastic Donki bags, suggesting that her entire presentation was a façade.

Sumire makes her entrance in the costume-swap match. Saki is also dressed as another wrestler. The music preceding Saki’s entrance music is a Don Quixote advertising jingle.

But the thing is, it kinda was. She may not have been the caricature presented by Sumire (for one thing, neither Masuda nor Matsue has a Don Quixote store), but neither was she the pure and clean idol Stardom presented her as; her previous employment was being whitewashed to downplay the grey economy nature of pachinko, while her ring gear was high-waisted to hide a tattoo on her hip, which would also be airbrushed out of the company’s idol-oriented content. The character she was playing had both a shelf-life and a ceiling, and it was becoming increasingly clear that change was needed to avoid becoming stale. And to stop Sumire from further embarrassing her and making her a figure of fun to the audience, the path of least resistance would be… to join the villains herself, of course.

Mayu laughing along on guest commentary while Saki got pummelled during a match was the final straw. Iwatani being a terrible leader of the good guys, constantly introducing a new flavour-of-the-month best friend, only to cast them aside for a new toy and see them turn on her, became a running gag in Stardom, as Kashima was just one of many who followed this route to on-screen villainy. Although it does not appear that there had been much long-term planning involved (in fact, Kashima at first had to borrow outfits from former nemesis Sumire in order to fit with the colour scheme of her new colleagues), joining Oedo Tai boosted Kashima’s career, because as is often the case in wrestling, the “heels” get to show more character. At first, she was portrayed as an intense villain, and a chaotic “Lumberjill” match in an empty arena, where Iwatani would get her chance at revenge on Saki, and the two engaged in a battle of one-upmanship over who could show the least regard for their own personal safety, is considered by many to be the best thing Stardom did during the Covid-19 era.

However, she was similarly ill-at-ease in this role. During the Covid days, due to the empty arenas, Stardom increased their amount of backstage content, allowing wrestlers to livestream and film their own behind-the-scenes action to encourage fan interaction, and despite ostensibly being villains, Oedo Tai as a whole would enjoy a wave of popularity due to their entertaining presence in this format, becoming more about wreaking mischief and mayhem than ruthless acts of villainy, which suited Kashima far better. She teamed with the faction’s leader, Natsuko Tora, and she played the older sister/mentor role after recruiting Rina, one of two 13-year-old twins promoted to the roster with an angel/devil dynamic, into the team later in 2020. But perhaps most significantly, she was the last woman standing for her team in a match against her former team that resulted in Oedo Tai press-ganging Fukigen Death, the company’s resident comedy character, an evil clown (portrayed by veteran wrestler Kaori Yoneyama) who would do short matches which required a minimum of physical effort and would see Death running around creating chaos, with Kashima taking up the role of keeping the mischievous and troublesome clown “under control”.

In time, Kashima would make that desire to expend the minimum amount of effort possible into her most defining character trait, really playing into the characterisation of Sumire and portraying herself as both the ultimate chickens**t villain, whose mouth wrote cheques she couldn’t cash, and a lazy, manipulative grifter. She would show herself shirking work, ignoring strategy meetings, playing rhythm games on her phone, trying to scrounge money out of Ogawa, ordering fast food whenever she succeeded, and referring to her fans as “kimo-ota”, variously translated as “nerds”, “creeps” and “losers”, who were only good for making her money by buying her merchandise. This would translate to her in-ring presentation too; although a safe worker who isn’t known to have ever injured anybody, her scruffy style of execution suited desperation better than control. While the origin of the “Real Saki Kashima” schtick may have been grounded in reality at least at some point in her career, though, Kashima by all backstage accounts (notably including those of punishing trainer and notorious rookie-hazer Nanae Takahashi, a divisive character who had given Saki a roughing up in her debut, as was the fashion of the time) worked really hard to make it despite her physical limitations, and this character change was more about maintenance and longevity; at 163cm she was far from the shortest wrestler on the roster but, weighing just 45kg at her heaviest, she was comfortably the thinnest and lightest, and at higher risk of getting injured. For context, when she debuted she weighed less than Gaia Realini; at her heaviest, she is still 4kg lighter than Kasia Niewiadoma-Phinney. Shortly after her return to the ring, Hana Kimura mockingly called her “a beansprout” due to her stick-thin build, and the nickname stuck, both in and out of the ring. While she was good at being a sympathetic ‘babyface in peril’, though, she simply wasn’t physically durable enough to take that kind of punishment long-term. Portraying a villain at the very least enabled her to avoid being thrown around like a ragdoll every show - but it was a careful balancing act, as while the role she was developing offered plenty of scope for humour, there was the risk of becoming pigeonholed as a comedy wrestler if she overdid it. She still needed to be perceived as a threat.

So, Saki Kashima became a thief. And she became efficient. It was in her interest - both in character and out - to get the job done as soon as possible. She would therefore purge her repertoire of anything that seemed too laborious, relegate her former finishing moves to emergency use only, and in their place came Kishikaisei.

The most electrifying move in sports entertainment

A television and movie trope, “Kishikaisei” (起死回生) translates as “awaken from death and come back to life” and is often used to refer to that moment when the hero has been beaten down and then makes a miraculous comeback. If you’ve ever seen a Rocky movie, you’ll recognise this. It’s a grandiose and melodramatic name for what is, at its core, a form of cradle, an amateur wrestling leverage technique rather than anything that would hurt the opponent. It had been part of her arsenal before, but with Oedo Tai it became a signature, a calling card, and eventually the centrepiece of any Saki Kashima match. Frequently in Oedo Tai’s multi-person tag matches, she would be their saviour; the villains would often be on the brink of defeat when she would pop in at the last second and deflate the audience by stealing a cheap win with a Kishikaisei, even when outnumbered. Against more neutral opponents, she would be being beaten down and surviving by the skin of her teeth, before recovering with a desperation Kishikaisei out of nowhere to score the win. She eliminated Iwatani from high-stakes elimination matches in back to back events with it, and later Saki’s powers of survival and revival became the central driving point of a lengthy title run for Oedo Tai, with Starlight Kid and Momo Watanabe being above her in the pecking order but frequently having to rely on Saki’s clutch ability to pull a Kishikaisei out of nowhere to retain the belts. She could be pinned by the lowliest member of the opposition team… but if she survived long enough and got her move in, she could beat the very best - including the top dogs of the company. She would enter the company’s annual 5 Star Grand Prix (a sort of league table of singles matches taking place over two weeks, akin to a sumo basho) and lose to everybody… except the two highest-status wrestlers in her block, both of whom she’d defeat with a surprise Kishikaisei.

Audiences became conditioned to react to the move’s set-up until it was almost all she need do; it ceased to be a desperation move, and became something that she would look to hit from any angle at any time. Her teammates took to carrying a stopwatch to her matches as their brevity became a feature; most of the shortest matches in the company’s history are matches Kashima won by executing a Kishikaisei in the first few seconds of the match, usually via a deceitful fake handshake offer, enabling her to pop the crowd off barely ten seconds’ work. Including a long-awaited revenge meeting with Mayu Iwatani, where she pinned the company’s most established star in 17 seconds. Including opening the company’s premier tournament by pinning its biggest rising star in under 40 seconds. And including what for many years was the shortest match in the company’s history, when she pinned Hana Kimura in 8 seconds during the 5 Star Grand Prix.

The move even got its own top 5 moments from Stardom’s official account.

And perhaps most impressively, the crowd would come unglued whenever the move was threatened or executed, yet it wasn’t some impressive powerful slam, top rope dive or acrobatic feat that would generate that reaction; it was a cradle pin, one which could be delivered to any opponent at any time and carried no physical risk to either the giver or receiver of the move. Saki Kashima is the smartest wrestler out there. I mean, Hulk Hogan could get by on just a couple of moves, but 40 years of leg drops destroyed his hips. People who paid good money to see the company’s biggest stars could see their heroes lose to the villain in ten seconds, and go home happy. Genius.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Survival Horror

On October 8, 2021, a day before Stardom’s 10th Anniversary Grand Final show, a wrestler named Konami was diagnosed with acute enteritis and had to be withdrawn from the following day’s show. She was scheduled to face Syuri Kondo, a decorated former shootboxer (13-1 in professional kickboxing) and MMA fighter (6-3 in all MMA, although her record in UFC hadn’t been good), in a UWF Rules match (a style of match derived from the fad in Japan in the late 80s and early 90s of hybridising pro wrestling and the then-embryonic world of MMA) and who rarely, if ever, would suffer a defeat in Stardom at the time. It was an important show for the company (first Joshi show in over 25 years in a major Osaka venue, and their first major post-pandemic show), and personally for Syuri as well - I think it had something to do with her family attending (her mother had recently passed away) and also an anniversary of a key event involving her mentor that she wanted to pay tribute to - so while she joined the commentary team for the event, she was devastated to miss out on performing. Now, Sumire’s impression was subverted; while the on-screen Saki Kashima may be a notoriously lazy and manipulative slacker, the off-screen Saki Kashima is a lot tougher than she looks - she did judo as a child, and trained with shootstyle legend Ikuto Hidaka. Despite already fighting that night, she went to management and offered to pull double duty, so that Syuri could get to deliver a performance that clearly meant a lot to her. Messages were conveyed, Saki delivered a challenge to set up the match, Syuri got to deliver her tributes, and tapped Kashima out with relative ease, as was befitting of their relative roles. Unbeknownst to either at the time, though, one of the most unique and compelling long term stories in pro wrestling had just begun.

In mid-2022, Stardom held a press conference for that year’s 5 Star GP series. Each wrestler would get a few seconds to comment on the upcoming series - and from the reactions around her it seems that not everybody present had been clued in that Saki would use her allotted time not to threaten opponents or promise results, but instead to complain to management and beg that they change the groupings because she didn’t want to have to fight Syuri again, before running off distraught as half the roster - including Syuri herself, who presumably was aware of what was coming - corpsed into laughter.

When the time to have the match came, Kashima would enter first, then cower in the corner while Syuri entered, try to stall the start, dive out of the way when her opponent charged at the bell with an expression on her face like she just cheated death, and take nine minutes of an absolute ass-kicking before escaping and pinning Syuri with the Kishikaisei, 1-2-3 in the middle of the ring. And then run away in case Syuri got mad, despite the victory being clean as a whistle. This was ranked #1 in Stardom’s video of the top 5 Kishikaisei surprises shown before.

Syuri would get her revenge, though. A further singles match was booked a month later, which Saki promoted by… sulking in a corridor about how Stardom were trying to kill her. Her kayfabe fear of Syuri would only get more theatrical and performative, with stablemates Starlight Kid and Ruaka having to frogmarch her to the ring to force her to compete; Saki would almost win by Kishikaisei in the first 20 seconds and try to pretend she did win so she could retreat to the back, only to be forcibly dragged back into the ring. Kashima proved elusive and slippery, but eventually Syuri would catch her and put her in a submission hold while spinning her around, the 13kg weight advantage and Kashima’s ability to ragdoll her spindly body creating a great visual and forcing Kid to throw in the towel, before we got one of the great post-match promos; Syuri promised Saki that the feud wasn’t over, as Saki had earned her respect and she wanted to offer her a shot at the World Championship title… and Saki said “no thanks, I’m good” and bid a retreat while Syuri looked confused. It was like that Pat McAfee anecdote with the trick play against the Pittsburgh Steelers, where just for the sake of some training film, Troy Polamalu, one of the hardest-hitting safeties in NFL history, stands right in the gap McAfee is supposed to run through and he calls an audible out of pure self-preservation. The coach asks him what he saw, and Pat responds “what did I see? I saw the angel of death staring back at me!” In storyline, in Syuri’s mind, she’s gone 1-1 against a quick-witted opponent who she has outpowered, but who has tricked her into defeat and earned a shot at the prestige all wrestlers aspire to; in Saki’s, however, she’s just tried and failed to fend off a wild honey badger twice, and has no desire to repeat the experience.

In fairness, cooperative or not, that doesn’t look particularly comfortable

The next time they would meet would be in the tag league, with Kashima’s pessimistic pre-tournament promotion being that there was “nothing to look forward to” about the competition and using her press conference mic time to throw her tag team partner, Fukigen Death, under the bus in the hope Syuri would leave her alone (again eliciting much corpsing). When the fixture came up, the main theme of the match was Saki trying to get Death to handle Syuri and running away until, of course, pinning her with the Kishikaisei. Having also pinned Syuri in an elimination tag match as well and now holding the most victories over her of anybody in the company, a cocky Saki cut a promo about how she was no longer afraid of Syuri, and didn’t need pinfalls to win so she would be challenging her to a UWF Rules match, harking back to their first bout in 2021 - Syuri however heard the challenge and accepted, dooming Kashima to walk into the valley of the shadow of death once more.

This match, unlike the previous battles which carried an air of Tom & Jerry slapstick, would be taken seriously by Kashima, but she would be predictably outclassed in a format specifically suited to Syuri’s skillset. With Kashima down to her last point, Syuri throws her around, but she no-sells and hulks up Hogan-style, the crowd builds excitement for the traditional wrestling comeback… then Syuri just kicks her in the head, Kashima does probably the best ragdoll sell she’s ever done, the ref stops the match, and Syuri somewhat sheepishly tends to her victim after the match, and helps Oedo Tai carry her limp body to the back.

Saki learns the phrase, “you mess with the bull, you get the horns”

That would have been the end of that, but fans still clamoured for interactions between the two, much to Saki’s chagrin. Stardom also hosts a knockout tournament called the Cinderella Tournament (as the winner gets a wish, usually a title shot or dream match, granted) in the Spring; after Kashima won her first round match, the tournament brackets threatened to make her face Syuri in the second. She responded by broadcasting herself desperately cheerleading Syuri’s opponent, curling up in the foetal position, then attacking them when they failed to save her from having to face her nemesis once more.

The hotly-anticipated match got off to a great start when Saki refused to come out and had to be dragged by her wrists to the ring by Syuri herself. This time, Oedo Tai would handcuff Syuri to the ropes, allowing Kashima to grow cocky and remind a crowd that had become perhaps a bit too sympathetic that she is, in fact, supposed to be a villain, humiliating her helpless opponent with helium and water, before eventually throwing powder in the ex-UFC fighter’s face and pinning her. For the first time in the story, Syuri had a legitimate reason to be angry with Saki.

The feud was therefore a strange one. The fans cheered the woman who was supposed to be the villain because her cowardice was both funny and, to many, justified, seeing as Syuri is a legitimate fighter, Saki’s size made her a legitimate underdog and she didn’t actually do anything deserving of comeuppance until the very end. She managed to be the centre of the feud throughout while never once detracting from Syuri, and won several times without ever diminishing the threat that her opponent posed. Syuri didn’t want to be a bully, as seen when she took care of her victim after the UWF Rules match; she just couldn’t wrap her head around an opponent whose primary concern is not self-betterment but self-preservation instead; Kashima’s antics dragged a lot of personality out of her, which humanised her more and gave her character more depth than being a one-dimensional killing machine. It was incredibly silly, yes, but everybody involved came out of it more popular than they went in, audiences were highly entertained, and willing to pay to see the next instalment - and despite what po-faced internet commentators might tell you about match quality or move execution, that is the ultimate point of pro wrestling.

The Need for Speed

Maybe it was something to do with post-pandemic culture, but something about Saki’s character really caught on at this point. When Natsuko Tora had been out for a year with injury, Oedo Tai were without a leader and to avoid them from losing their edge as a threat, they were portrayed as being more than the sum of their parts. Nothing showed this more clearly than their trios tag title run through most of 2022 - no matter what the increasingly-exasperated on-screen authority figures tried, they just couldn’t get those dastardly cheats and thieves to lose. Single pinfall, elimination rules, Royal Rumble-style over-the-top-rope eliminations, triple threat matches, nothing seemed to work. Oedo Tai may have been cheats, but they were very loyal to one another. And the main architect of this title run was Saki Kashima, constantly crushing the hopes of the good guys when they looked sure to win, escaping onslaught after onslaught with a surprise Kishikaisei out of nowhere. In the end, it took the company hiring in a crack team of deathmatch specialists and giving them carte blanche to use weaponry to bring Oedo Tai’s reign to an end, eventually pinning Kashima, but not before (safely) dropping her on her head, through a table, from the top rope.

Kashima, Starlight Kid and Momo Watanabe with the trios belts

But somebody who constantly defies the odds to triumph is an underdog; combining this with her frequently hilarious social media presence and backstage antics, Kashima became a cult favourite of the crowd. Yes, she was lazy, devious, manipulative, a grifter and forever provoking trouble only to run and hide behind the bigger kids, but far from wanting to see her get her comeuppance, the audience were revelling in her antics. In the immediate post-Covid environment, where terms like ‘quiet quitting’ were en vogue and forcible introspection around Japan’s toxic work culture became a hot topic as people returned to their offices, a woman who wasn’t interested in promotion or self-betterment and just wanted to be left alone to do her thing quietly in the corner, expending as little effort as possible to make money, had somehow become the most relatable character in wrestling. Rossy Ogawa commented on how, despite being nominally a villain, Saki had become an unlikely “people’s champion”, her popularity far outstripping her position on the card. The kimo-ota tag went from a pin of shame to something worn by her supporters as a badge of pride (literally, as she put out merchandise brandishing the term. Which, in another stroke of inspiration, she would market by using as a weapon to choke opponents with).

When Kashima won a convoluted stipulation match that entitled her to a title shot of her choice (by entering last and completing the victory in under a minute), she chose not the World title, nor the secondary “white belt”, but instead decreed that more befitting of “Instant Kill Kashima” would be the High Speed title, a tertiary and lower-level belt which had been held by a wrestler named AZM for over a year. It appears that this title is aimed at smaller and faster wrestlers as a whole, but I have been unable to figure out any weight limit or match stipulations applicable. Like with Syuri before it, though, Kashima would lock in, take the match seriously and fight with honour, earn the support of the crowd… and lose.

A couple of months later she had a rematch, but bizarrely this time it would be a three-way match, and this time they had to add Oedo Tai’s comical clown foil, Fukigen Death, to the mix (not like forgetting to add Kurt Angle to the mix, a common error made by newcomers to Scott Steiner math). However, rather than the teammates work together to eliminate AZM, the match would be a festival of deceit, with Kashima trying every tactic in the book to earn a cheap win, but finding AZM too quick for her to catch, and Death knowing her too well to fall for her tricks. In the end, however, when Death went for her own favourite cradle pin on Kashima, AZM was knocked out of the ring. One scruffy pin attempt later, and Saki Kashima was your new High Speed champion.

But it was really the aftermath that gave this meaning. Obviously she knew going in that she was going to win, but when Ogawa entered the ring to hand Saki the belt for the first time, she burst into spontaneous floods of - real - tears. She wouldn’t let him leave the ring without photos. You can see her choking back the emotion as she tries to deliver her signature pose with the belt in hand. She tells the camera, “finally, finally, I got a singles belt!” as she walks to the back. In the customary post-match interview, she talks of how she knows it wasn’t a great match, she doesn’t have any emotional or marketable backstory, and it’s only a low-level title, but it’s really important to her. Over 500 matches into her career, she’d only ever had five singles title shots (one of which being the improvised one against Syuri in 2021), and she had lost every one. It was a rare glimpse of the woman behind the persona. She would expand on this in a letter to the fans on social media; the fact that she had debuted over 12 years prior and, for the first time, she had been entrusted to carry a belt on her own name and value alone, was an emotional moment for her, and a culmination of a long journey that many - including herself - never thought would take place at all. She would keep some elements of “kayfabe”, making sure to promise that she would remain the same character that the audience had grown attached to, but still letting us peek a bit behind the curtain to see the many years of hard work and sacrifice behind the lazy and selfish act, and recognise that this relatively modest accolade nevertheless meant the absolute world to the little beansprout.

“It’s been 12 years since I debuted in wrestling, and I won my first singles belt. Some people might say, ‘you’re a returnee, you’ve not been in wrestling 12 years’, some people say ‘don’t act like you’re a senior’. But I’ve never said, written, nor thought that I’ve had a 12 year career, nor do I claim there are people who think of me as a senior.

Even if there was a reason why I quit, it is still an undeniable fact that I already quit once. I was frustrated at the five year gap, and I had unfinished business. I was ready to come back, and I came back with determination. And today I realised my dream of winning the singles belt that I had dreamed of 12 years ago. This is also a fact.

When I won, the memories of those days came back to me, like a lightbulb coming on. I was so frustrated, yet so happy, that I forgot myself and cried. People have always slated me as an energy-saving wrestler, said that I don’t take matches seriously and so on. And I don’t have a touching story like other people. Yet, I was so happy that it brought tears to my eyes.

I may be a champion, but I will continue to fight matches so as not to get tired. I will continue to try to make things easy. I will run away from those that scare me, and I will be aggressive to those I think I can beat. This is Saki Kashima in her 12th year. That was a false cry.”

It wasn’t just Saki who became emotional. KAIRI (Hojo under a new ring name), then WWE-bound for the second time, would congratulate her and affectionately call her “Saki-senpai” to show that despite having long since eclipsed Kashima’s achievements, she still respected the seniority Saki herself had downplayed, while social media caught Mayu Iwatani secretly cheering her old friend’s big moment on from the aisle. And it was a feel-good moment for a lot of fans as well - while she may make a good scripted underdog, the fact is that wrestling fans know that what they’re watching is a show, and they were also reacting to Kashima the genuine underdog. The woman who nearly didn’t make it to even debut (and already left once) because of her lack of physical size, who had been dismissed as a bit part player, incapable due to her physical limitations of having the kind of matches required of a champion, who had spent years toiling as nothing more than a sidekick character or comic relief while her friends got the glory, whose position on the card was completely at odds with the value she brought to the shows, but who had worked so hard to cultivate a unique and compelling character to create a niche for herself despite those limitations, was finally getting some recognition for the years of service she’d given the company.

Back in character, having spent such a long time earning the right to call herself a champion, she was going to make damned sure she got to enjoy it. She certainly didn’t want any credible contenders coming up and challenging her when she’d only just won the belt, and in another subversion of wrestling norms, she would not be issuing any open challengers or taking on all comers, but rather simply rejecting challenges outright.

Kashima protects her precious belt from the terrifying threat of… somebody wanting to compete for it

On that same show, however, this title change was just one part of a number of intertwining narratives that were slowly simmering to a storyline boiling point, which set a huge part of the roster onto a collision course, culminating in the summer in one of the most celebrated moments and matches in the history of the promotion. Pro wrestling has always had groups, especially of villains. In the west they’re typically called ‘factions’ or ‘stables’, the Japanese term is often translated as ‘unit’. Most of the time in Japan these were a variation on the classic “foreign menace” trope, with gangs of outsiders (be they Japanese or gaijin) presented as a threat to the status quo, and the ‘sekigun’, or loyalists, putting aside their differences to battle a common foe. One company in particular extended this strategy out, with multiple villainous units appearing at once and battling one another as well as the loyal heroes, and those who did not have an affiliation being vulnerable to attack from multiple sides, until the entire roster was attached to one of the units. This federation was Ultimo Dragón’s Toryumon company, later rebranded Dragon Gate after Ultimo sold up. One of many upstart companies built around smaller, more acrobatic wrestlers in the early 2000s, Dragon Gate stood out by virtue of having - by far - the biggest female audience share among wrestling companies. It is not surprising, therefore, that this unit alignment-based style would be aped by Stardom, seeing as many of its roster had got into wrestling via Dragon Gate.

Units often last several iterations and go through renamings and realignments; unit members serve as seconds to their colleagues, and this means that multi-person tag matches can take on additional importance and can be used for stipulations that add importance to an event, similar to the mask or hair wagers that Mexican wrestling is famous for. Matches can take different forms, and leadership and vice-leadership of factions becomes crucial as it allows for different dynamics both inside and outside of established teams, especially historic teams which can see internal power struggles, and also change behaviour around the ideals of their leaders.

Two of the most historic teams by mid-2023 were Oedo Tai and Queen’s Quest. The former were now on their fifth leader in an eight year history, while the latter were in the midst of a crisis of confidence; their long-time leader had defected and while a new leader had stepped into the vacuum, dissension with her tag team partner, a fast rising potential future leader and a loss of mid-level talent left them in disarray. Oedo Tai had lost their own long time leader to retirement in 2020, and their successor had spent an entire year on the shelf with a bad injury she was not long back from - but they had successfully tempted Queen’s Quest’s previous leader away to fill that void, and she was, for her part, trying to repeat the feat with QQ’s current second-in-command. They had, however, better experience in match stipulations of this nature and had replenished their forces this way before - in 2021, a “last one eliminated leaves their unit” wager match between Oedo Tai and Stars had seen comedy wrestler Fukigen Death forced into joining the villainous forces; a failed attempt to win her back had resulted in Starlight Kid being similarly press-ganged and being devastated that Iwatani, reeling from two such defeats, chose not to take a similar risk for her, such that when Iwatani finally decided to run the gauntlet for her, Kid didn’t want to go back. Picking over the bones of dead units had also become a storyline device, with recruitment drives, drafts and wagers over “free agents”.

But you know what often really sucks in wrestling? Cage matches. Despite being one of the more iconic stipulations, much like a lot of things in wrestling, they’re actually really stupid when you think about it. The idea of “two men enter, one man leaves” is designed to resolve the most violent of blood feuds - and yet rather than beat the tar out of each other as you’re supposed to believe is the only way for the differences to be settled, the wrestlers spend half the match trying to escape from one another. Unless you’re doing a story with a cowardly villain trying to run away but having nowhere to run anymore, how stupid is that? Unit wagers solve that problem, because they provide a legitimate reason for escape. Stardom Sunshine 2023 finished on a 6-on-6 elimination cage match as Oedo Tai and Queen’s Quest would seek to settle six years of rivalry, with the condition that the last woman left in the cage would be forced to leave their team. This was the match that taught me to care about a wrestling match for the first time in two decades, and it merits a deep dive all of its own.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Nowhere to Run to, No Place to Call Home

Peoples’ definitions of what makes a “good” or “great” wrestling match differ. Some matches are simply great exhibitions of the participants’ acrobatic skills. Some matches are not necessarily “well wrestled” technically, but they succeed in working the emotions of the crowd. And some matches are purely about a narrative that the audience can become lost in, knowing that what they’re watching is merely a story, but still wanting to know how the story ends. I will be blunt, this is the latter. It’s mostly well-performed, but there are 12 women in that cage, and some cliches are necessary to keep it coherent (for example, the “two wrestlers fight in the middle while everybody else lays around or does chokes to stay out of the way” trope common to most melee matches). A couple of spots are a bit ropey, too. However, it is a story with several moving parts and the overarching narrative is excellent. When I was first directed toward this match, my dive into the rabbit hole was still pretty shallow. I knew next to nothing about any of these women. By the end of the match, I at least partly understood the character of, and had an opinion on, all twelve.

First out are the on-paper villains. They’re all dressed in black to make them easy to identify as such even to the novice fan, in a uniform of baggy cut-off tops and sweatpants to signify their unified approach to the match. There are six women representing six villain archetypes, and they bring six weapons to the match.
Natsuko Tora is the leader of the group, and its longest-tenured member. She makes sure you know she’s a villain by being a larger woman with short, dyed hair, white contact lenses and facepaint, a sukeban subculture-inspired uniform common to many women’s wrestling villains in Japan, and a style she inherited from her predecessor, Kagetsu. She carries a metal pipe and a chain.
Momo Watanabe is her second-in-command, and the former leader of Queen’s Quest. She is the snake, the manipulator, with dyed-blonde hair and a plastic bat, which she’s been trying to use to lure Saya Kamitani to villainy.
Starlight Kid (“SLK”) is Stardom’s only masked wrestler, small but feisty and loud, the pest of the group and very much embracing her villainy at this point. She carries an Oedo Tai-branded chair.
Saki Kashima is the opportunist, the rat, the thief. She doesn’t carry a weapon and she doesn’t often cheat, but she’s a trickster and a sneak, and she’ll beat you by deceit.
Rina, the “pink devil”, is the youngest of the team, twin sister of Hina and younger sister of guest commentator Hanan, and she’s the brat of the group. She was taken under the wing of Hana Kimura (in storyline this was out of pity after going undrafted when her previous unit collapsed, but in real life Hana trained her), and then brought to Oedo Tai and mentored by Kashima after Kimura’s suicide resulted in that team being disbanded in turn. She also carries a chair.
Ruaka is another youngster, cousin of Rina/Hina/Hanan, serves as the muscle of the group and due to her bulky build and rough style, Tora’s protégé and henchwoman. She is the bearer of a plastic box, a weapon in Japanese wrestling popularised by Dragon Gate. She is afraid of heights.

Oedo Tai enter. Rear: Watanabe, Tora, Kashima. Front: Rina, Kid, Ruaka

By contrast, our on-paper heroes arrive in conventional ring gear, two with baseball jerseys and the others with extravagant Ric Flair robes, but no colour or costume co-ordination, which highlights their more colourful, but disjointed, nature.
Utami Hayashishita is the leader of the group. She is a tall and powerful woman in red and gold, who became a child star thanks to a show similar in premise to The Osbornes as her father is a famous celebrity in Japan. She took over the group when Momo defected, but has been struggling lately and her authority and leadership has been questioned, especially after snapping at her own partner.
Saya Kamitani is her tag team partner and second-in-command. She’s a tall (western fans nickname her “Tall Saya” to differentiate her from another wrestler with the same given name) former dancer in white, green and gold with tassles, who is known for daredevil high flying. Her aspirations of leadership conflict with her loyalty to Hayashishita.
AZM (pronounced “ah-zoo-me” for some reason) is a fast-rising and fast-wrestling starlet in a multi-coloured singlet known as the “High Speed Bomb Girl”. That probably tells you what you need to know about her style.
Lady C is a former teacher and relatively inexperienced wrestler wearing black and white stripes, but she’s also 1.80m tall and the biggest powerhouse in the match.
Hina is Rina’s twin sister, and likewise the youngest on her team. While Rina embraced villainy, Hina embodies stoic heroism. Also like Rina, she is a judoka originally. She wears blue and gold.
Miyu Amasaki has only just passed rookie status and was fast-tracked into Queen’s Quest after impressing Hayashishita in a tryout match. She wears a mint green and blue outfit and, for reasons unknown, fans outside Japan call her “Kevin”.

Queen’s Quest pre-match. Rear: AZM, Utami, Kamitani. Front: Hina, Lady C, Amasaki

For reasons also never quite explained other than, hey, these are common wrestling tropes, a table and a small ladder are also in the ring (nobody on either team brought them in) when the cage door is locked. Both teams rush to pair up and start brawling. The match is full of little details and subtle foreshadowing; in these initial exchanges, every good guy gets the upper hand except Amasaki, the rookie, who is overmatched against Watanabe, her group’s former leader. Starlight Kid is the first to use the cage as a weapon, grinding Kamitani’s face into it, and also the loudest, trying to rile the crowd. Lady C and Kamitani use their size advantage to throw Kid around, and then Momo, as the only member of Oedo Tai to have won her initial exchange, is kicked around 5-on-1 by the good guys. The psychology of the match is immediately set, as the highest-status wrestlers on QQ try to boost Amasaki, the weakest, out of the cage immediately, but it’s far too early and this attempt is foiled by Kashima and SLK. The villains come back strong, bundle QQ into the corner and take it in turns to squash them from a running start. Tora and Kashima pin Lady C on the table and Ruaka puts her through it from the top rope before attempting to escape. However, Ruaka is one of the heavier women in the match as well as not being good with heights, and speed is not her forte; AZM springs up the side of the cage to the top to hold her back from above, before Amasaki delivers a series of DDTs from all angles. The two twins use judo throws to take down rivals before loudly brawling with one another. Hina gets the better of the exchange, and then we see a wrestling trope as everybody enters the middle of the ring one at a time and delivers a move to the previous wrestler until we get back to the starting wrestler again, with Rina the last to deliver a move, before both twins, despite being on opposing teams, recognise that blood is thicker than water, and escape together at the five minute mark to make it 5 on 5.

Next up we have a high speed segment where SLK and AZM show off their acrobatics and end up both standing on the top rope after an escape attempt is foiled. Lady C uses her height advantage to chokeslam SLK down. AZM gets to the top of the cage and leaps down landing on both feet on top of Kid (how on earth they smoke-and-mirrors that I do not know, it looks brutal) before rebounding to the opposite corner where she springs up to the top of the cage and escapes before the eight minute mark. 5 on 4. While SLK is still down, Utami takes control of proceedings and the heroes lock the villains in submission holds. Lady C uses her reach and takes advantage of Kashima’s slenderness to wrap her and Watanabe both in holds simultaneously, leaving a window of opportunity for the vulnerable Amasaki to make a break for it and escape before SLK recovers. 5 on 3.

Elimination scramble is great for storytelling, though, as the fewer in the ring, the easier the story becomes to tell, and the better you do, the more of a disadvantage you put yourself at. The stipulation means that there is also motivation to help the ‘lesser’ names out and for the ‘stronger’ names to stay and fight, as the psychology of winning the match is balanced against the psychology of trying to force out somebody of importance to the rival faction, but needing to risk your own stars to do so; now outnumbered by two, QQ just don’t have enough hands on deck to prevent Watanabe grabbing a weapon and taking them out. The villains’ head honchos take out Utami with a double team attack and Momo tries to escape. Kamitani cuts her off, but Kashima is able to corral her and buy the time for Momo to make it out at the 10 minute mark. 4 on 3. This leads to a high speed exchange between Saya and Saki, followed by a power slugging exchange between Ruaka and Lady C. Starlight Kid gets her revenge on the latter with an unnecessarily unprotected chair shot (it’s not the 90s anymore), scales the cage and pops the crowd with a backflip off the cage… which she undershoots badly, and is very lucky Lady C is as tall as she is to catch her, or that could have been real dangerous. Perhaps wisely, Kid takes this opportunity to escape at the 12 minute mark to even it up at 3 on 3.

Lady C gets double-teamed by Tora and Ruaka, while Utami and Saya double-team Kashima. C hits a desperation move on a ladder which buys a window of opportunity, but she’s too un-coordinated to escape; Hayashishita metaphorically tells her, “you’ve done your job, I’ll take it from here”, crawls between the ropes and hoists her up on her shoulders so that she can reach the top of the cage, and C does the rest to make it 3 on 2 at 14 minutes - now, Queen’s Quest are at the numerical disadvantage, but they must win or they will lose one of their top 2 talents. In a classic wrestling spot, Utami ends up hitting her own partner when the villains dodge, so Tora holds her back and instructs her colleagues to try to escape; Kashima is well on the way to doing so when AZM, outside the cage, sets off a fire extinguisher in her face. Escaped Oedo Tai members start brawling with AZM, which causes a distraction that allows the nervous and slow-climbing Ruaka to scale the cage on the opposite side of the ring. As Kashima tries to regain vision, Hayashishita is back up and executes a scary-looking top rope move on her where they’re both falling blind, ragdolling Kashima but giving the window of time needed for Ruaka to complete her escape and make it 2-2. The heroines work together to incapacitate the villains’ leader and now that the outside has become volatile, they use the ladder to escape the cage and stop rivals from interfering with the outside of the cage. Utami holds the ladder steady and Kamitani crawls to safety at 17 minutes, but when Hayashishita tries to follow her, Tora pulls the ladder from under her. She delivers a series of moves to put Utami down; it’s not enough, but neither is Utami’s response enough to keep Tora down. Now alone, 1 on 2, she tries to escape anyway, and it ends up with both leaders at the top of the cage. They could both escape now, but neither wants to spare the other. SLK climbs up the outside of the cage and hands Tora her pipe, she hits Utami, and the QQ leader crumples into the ring. A groggy Kashima drags her into the middle of the ring, and Tora executes a front flip dive from the top of the cage.

But then, the difference between the teams is made. Natsuko Tora sees her chance and climbs the cage. Momo, SLK and Ruaka are cheering wildly below her, while Rina is trying to alert her that she’s left Saki behind. Seemingly oblivious, Tora climbs down at the 21 minute mark, and it’s down to 1 on 1. In the ring, Kashima realises she’s alone and starts to panic, flopping like a fish as she claws at the cage, almost making it to the top when Utami - now bleeding in time-honoured wrestling tradition — is able to grab her by the ankles - and the power difference shows, as the QQ leader is able to throw her much lighter opponent halfway across the ring. Kashima bounces back to her feet, but Utami nips any comeback in the bud with another move, before trying to climb again. No ladder option now. She makes it halfway up the cage when Momo Watanabe starts to climb the outer side. Saya Kamitani starts to climb up the cage alongside her. We now have one escaped member of each team converging on the top of the cage to greet QQ’s leader. Watanabe is handed her bat… she smiles at Utami and offers the bat to Kamitani, who looks at it and takes it with an expression of uncertainty. The crowd audibly tenses. This is pro wrestling, so they are steeled to expect a betrayal. They do not want to see a betrayal. Hayashishita looks up at her teammate, her partner, brandishing the bat above her. Kamitani looks across at the temptress, then down at her friend. She lifts the bat hesitantly… and clocks Watanabe in the back of the head. Momo falls onto her teammates below. Queen’s Quest lives. Below them, Saki Kashima is stirring. Hayashishita is standing on the top rope. Kamitani extends a hand down. Saki tries to grab onto Hayashishita’s ankle just as Utami had done to her, but it’s too late; she cannot get purchase as Kamitani pulls her partner to the top of the cage. Parts of the crowd are actually chanting Kashima, the villain’s, name. Saya and Utami share a few words with tears in their eyes at the top of the cage, and escape to victory as Kashima, defeated, falls back into the ring.

The emotional climax to the match as Kamitani and Hayashishita reconcile at the top of the cage

The crushing inevitability of defeat hits Kashima

It’s a superb piece of storytelling. It’s not flawless, and it’s not some masterpiece of execution, but it weaved a storyline that was open to intrigue. As a standalone match I was able to become invested in it as an absolute novice, and clearly understand several things about each wrestler’s character and motivations, but it also delivered on multiple storyline strands to deliver an emotional climax for dedicated viewers; it subverted a wrestling cliche (the “so-and-so turns on their friend at the end” trope is so stupid, as if you were going to do it, why not just do it at the start of the match and win easily?) and making it unclear to the end who would turn and who would be left behind. They slowly eliminated potential “easy” casualties from contention, increasing the stakes each time. Were we to act like this was real rather than theatre, it would have been very easy for Watanabe to just hit Utami with the bat herself and take the cheap win, and it would have been very cliched for Kamitani to have turned on her friend. But making it so that Watanabe handed the bat to Kamitani, because she cared more for corrupting her rival more than protecting her friend, furthers her role as the snake; Kamitani was offered leadership, but at the price of her best friend. Hayashishita went full Optimus Prime and made sure to save Lady C and Kamitani before attempting her own escape, risking her own future to prove her worth as a leader; Tora, by contrast, gave her underlings one chance, but then prioritised saving herself. Not only that, but after escaping herself, she pulled the ladder up behind her (almost literally), leaving Kashima to twist in the wind.

A dazed Kashima wonders what the hell just happened

But there were more nuances as well that left future story strands to develop. The way Rina was the only Oedo Tai member to register or care that Saki had been left behind. The fact that AZM, despite being a fast riser with aspirations of leadership, was one of the first to escape and did not support more vulnerable members of her team like Utami and Saya did - and was also the only member of Queen’s Quest to resort to underhand tactics, when she sprayed Kashima with the fire extinguisher after having already saved herself - left questions of whether she might have been the better target for Watanabe’s manipulation. The way Watanabe had run early while more vulnerable members of Oedo Tai were still in there, then tried to orchestrate the result from the outside. Ruaka conquering her fear of heights to escape. The irony that the woman whose primary fighting strategy is running away would be the only one to fail to escape, and that Oedo Tai were happy to leave Saki to it because she’d pulled off against-the-odds comebacks so many times before - even though Kashima’s primary “revival” technique was useless to her here, with escape the only means of victory - and circling back to the subtle foreshadowing that she was the only member of Oedo Tai not to have brought or used a weapon, and the only one not to have taped her fists. The way QQ’s leadership had isolated that Amasaki was their most vulnerable member from the first exchange, and tried to support her by getting her out of the cage as soon as possible; her running while QQ were at a numerical disadvantage was therefore not to be treated as cowardice but opportunism. Everybody in the match got a moment to shine and even the least experienced and lowest-ranked got a specific role to play.

But while the bell may have rung, the action continued. While the cameras focused on QQ’s celebrations at ringside, in the ring Starlight Kid had just initiated a gang beatdown on Saki Kashima by Oedo Tai henchmen angry at losing. It’s effectively only a 3-on-1 beatdown, however, as Tora is busy berating her hitherto longest-standing accomplice on the microphone for her weakness and failure, and Rina is trying to look cocksure in front of her seniors but not wanting to contribute. There will be no send-off, no emotional goodbyes as is customary in these wager matches. Kashima is expelled in disgrace before she can formally leave to fulfil the match stipulation. Her facial expressions here, simultaneously expressing dazed exhaustion, confusion, fear and utter helplessness, are excellent. The crowd is booing in a way that the famously reserved Japanese crowds never do. AZM is the first to notice what’s going on and calls for backup, as members of Queen’s Quest awkwardly assemble by the door. When Tora finishes humiliating Kashima verbally and goes to swing at her now-ex-teammate with a weapon, Utami springs into action to cut her off and we get another brawl. Tora “rejects reality and substitutes her own” as the meme goes, pointing out that she did not lose because she escaped before Utami did, and storms off in anger, leaving an arena full of people in stunned silence.

Oedo Tai add injury to the insult they added to injury

Queen’s Quest try to extend an olive branch

AZM addresses the woman who took her title from her, no longer adversarially, but with sympathy - and perhaps some remorse. She offers props to Kashima for being a warrior - something that I would later find out is not something anybody ever accused Saki of before - and offers her hand… but Kashima refuses and slumps back out of the cage silently. Again, subverting the expected outcome in such a situation in pro wrestling, but it makes more sense, no? After all, in storyline, these women were her mortal enemies until a few moments ago, they’ve cost her all of her friends, and the woman offering her hand is the same one whose cheating thwarted her one chance to save herself. The arena falls deathly silent as Saki stumbles exaggeratedly to the back and AZM has to rouse the stunned crowd into giving Kashima a round of applause in appreciation of her efforts. Backstage in Stardom’s customary post-match interviews, Tora continues her ranting and threatens Rina for her refusal to attack Kashima. This serves as a clear line where the old mischievous, devious Oedo Tai is left behind, and a new, more ruthless and vicious iteration of the group is born. Queen’s Quest get a long interview to really sell that they’ve put their disunity behind them, and Utami vows to make up for previous deficiencies in her leadership. Finally, the show ends on a more sombre tone as a tearful Saki, crumpled on the floor, insists that this is not a disaster but an opportunity and she will be fine flying solo, in a manner which makes it unclear who she’s trying to lie to more, the audience or herself.

Of course it’s all pre-ordained, it’s all according to script - but then nobody believes that Arnold Schwarzenegger is a robot sent back in time, either, but people can still get invested in the story. Wrestling is an inherently ridiculous medium that necessitates a wilful suspension of disbelief from its audience, but at its heart it is just another form of performance theatre with exaggerated, unrealistic elements, no different to something like a musical - but where the viewer really gets to know a character as it develops over several years in the same way as soap operas and telenovelas. I’m not going to claim that if you don’t “get” wrestling, or if you didn’t watch it as a child and have a sense of nostalgia attached to its melodramatic, pantomime eccentricity, that this match will suddenly change your mind. Far from it. But the crowd was clearly absolutely invested in this story, and my interest was piqued enough to investigate why. And in doing so, I uncovered ever more layers that had gone into it, and before I knew it, I unexpectedly became invested too.

An Unlikely Saviour

The fans were more than ready to cheer for Saki by this point. Even as a “heel”, she’d become a popular part of the show just by being too damned entertaining to truly hate, and her limbs-akimbo style of selling and lack of size (which she would further emphasise and accentuate deliberately with her mannerisms, stance and side-on signature poses) made her a somewhat sympathetic figure, even while her main character traits were cowardice and conflict avoidance. She was still the High Speed Champion, and soon found herself defending that title against former colleague Fukigen Death, with all of Oedo Tai at ringside. I have no idea why a comedy character in clown makeup was continually challenging for the belt other than, you know, pro wrestling, but there is a great moment of subtlety at the start of the match where Kashima offers a handshake to start the match, and successfully manages to convey absolutely crushing devastation, despite barely moving a muscle, when these overtures are rejected. The idea is that Death has seen Saki offer a disingenuous handshake and turn it into an attack, over and over again (think Ric Flair or Eddie Guerrero), so will not fall for such trickery - but Death was the only Oedo Tai member not present at the cage match, and for once Saki’s desire to shake hands is genuine; she’s lonely, vulnerable, and she just wants to feel like somebody still wants to be her friend. While this moment is surprisingly poignant, the match overall is a generic wrestling tale; Oedo Tai cheat every time Kashima gets the upper hand, until she retains her title with a Kishikaisei, then they storm the ring and stomp her into oblivion (except, again, Rina, who walks out on them to further that subplot) while forcing Death to participate in the beatdown and destroy Kashima’s final hope of any reconciliation. Until, suddenly, they are sent packing by two women in black who storm the ring out of nowhere, shocking the commentators. Kashima groggily sits up after the beatdown to see what’s going on, and immediately scuttles away in fright… for the woman standing over her turns out to be… Syuri.

Natsuko Tora asks Syuri if she’s lost her mind, putting herself on the line for such a weakling. Wrestling is often guilty of overly-simplistic writing, seeing changes from hero to villain and vice versa being just like a lightswitch with complete personality overhauls overnight, but you needn’t worry about that with somebody who understands nuance like Saki does. She backed off because in storyline, she knows her unexpected saviour has good reason to be mad at her, and cautiously thanks Syuri. She knows she’s made herself a lot of enemies in her time with Oedo Tai and is now utterly defenceless, and she shamelessly pleads with Syuri to protect her, and to accept her into God’s Eye, Syuri’s crack team of MMA-themed badasses mostly coming from legit sporting backgrounds (shout out to Syuri’s expression of utter incredulity at the sheer audacity of this request as well), promising to be her “goldfish poop”, a colourful Japanese idiom conveying undying loyalty and subservience. The former UFC fighter looks at this scrawny, terrified woman clinging to her leg like a child to its mother, but sees instead the woman that wrestled twice in one night, unprompted, to help her fulfil her dreams in 2021, who she’s been trying unsuccessfully to repay the favour to for two years now; she accepts.

A new dangerous alliance is formed

There is a nod and a wink to tell us that Saki hasn’t really changed, though - her first thought is to celebrate not because she’s found a new set of friends, but because she realises she has found a way to not have to fight Syuri again.

It is, however, a masterstroke for the company. God’s Eye as a unit were credible, but suffered from a lack of engagement with the crowd, with everybody playing a similarly serious, honourable fighter role. The addition of Kashima as a fish out of water in their ranks did wonders for their popularity, with many of the character traits of Oedo Tai-era Kashima being used as fuel for a series of skits that became some of the most popular in the company’s history; these mostly involved Saki trying unsuccessfully to shirk the team’s intensive training sessions, while the rest of God’s Eye try unsuccessfully to make an honourable fighter out of her.

God’s Eye lure the beansprout to the dojo with the promise of yakiniku

This gave a platform for other members of the faction to show individuality and personalities that had hitherto been somewhat limited, and would extend beyond Stardom’s screened shows and into the wrestlers’ personal social media, raising the popularity of the entire unit, as well as earning them various sponsored and advertisement segments. Saki would pull old tricks, like provoking the opposition before the match started and instantly tagging out when the bell rings, only to find all her teammates go walkabout on the basis that sometimes, the best way to teach somebody a lesson is to let them get their ass kicked and figure out why it happened - hijinks that would upset Saki at the time but that she would come to appreciate when the team played her at her own game; trying to be an honourable fighter and prove herself worthy of the team paradoxically made her weaker, because her box of deceitful tricks was what her success had been built on. There was even a long-running story where Konami (the same Konami who had to withdraw from the 2021 event that kickstarted the Syuri/Saki shared history) felt that not only did Kashima not belong in their unit, but that she was taking advantage of them and abusing Syuri’s generosity, and her slacking and lazy ways were rubbing off on others and causing the team to become soft - only for MIRAI (another of those wrestling names stylised in all capitals) to leap to Saki’s defence, with the two then fighting over whether Kashima would remain in the team or not, with MIRAI winning while Saki sold “dying of nerves” from ringside as MIRAI’s second and bawled her eyes out when Konami finally, albeit begrudgingly, acknowledged her as a colleague.

Konami berates a mournful Kashima for her weakness

In Konami’s defence, having been a teammate of Saki’s in Oedo Tai in 2021, she would know her better than anybody else in God’s Eye, and it can’t be denied that the image of the team as fighting champions wasn’t helped by the only title-holder in the team running away from opponents, refusing title shots to anybody other than rookies and comedy acts, and ducking any worthwhile challengers. But that was just Saki being Saki, and her teammates came to find themselves appreciating, even enjoying, Kashima’s antics, taking as much pleasure out of the challenge of unravelling Saki’s web of excuses to get out of training as they did out of Syuri sadistically working the beansprout over when they finally did manage to get her to work out. Syuri even selected Kashima as her partner of choice for the company’s autumn Tag League (essentially the same as the 5 Star Grand Prix but with tag teams), and they became a popular and entertaining odd couple team. They even got matching ring gear. And sold standees of Saki sat on the floor clinging to Syuri’s leg.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

↑↑↓↓←→←→BA, Start

Konami Takemoto is a well-established wrestler who was brought into the sport by Kana (WWE’s Asuka) and trained under former MMA practitioners, lending her a heavy-hitting and “shoot-style” set of moves that made her a natural counterpart to Syuri; she had been part of Stardom for several years but had had to take a career hiatus in 2021 due to injuries - shortly after her withdrawal from the UWF Rules match with Syuri that kickstarted the Kashima/Syuri storyline, in fact. She had been part of Oedo Tai at the time, but when she returned several months later and on a part-time schedule, she was moved into God’s Eye, as this both stylistically matched her character well and allowed her to keep that on-off schedule, as they also had other members who were contracted to other companies and would work Stardom part-time. Her time with God’s Eye was relatively uneventful, save for the aforementioned storyline regarding her dislike of the group allowing a slacker like Kashima to join their ranks. However, she respected the stipulation and grudgingly tolerated Saki, though she would engage a less good-natured tone than the others regarding her antics or her propensity to literally hide behind Syuri when in the presence of a threat. Konami’s credibility with the audience was high, however, so despite not being a permanent fixture on the roster, she was considered high up the ranks within God’s Eye, and so a logical partner for Syuri when gunning for the promotion’s tag team titles, which they won in June 2024.

However, this was a bit of a tumultuous time for Stardom; Rossy Ogawa had been outed as plotting to set up a rival organisation now that he no longer had sole control of storylines, and had been tapping wrestlers up to follow him, for which he was summarily dismissed. He had opened Dream Star Fighting Marigold, and taken with him five roster members, including two faction leaders in Giulia and Utami Hayashishita, and one of God’s Eye’s prominent members in MIRAI. In addition to this, Mayu Iwatani, though she still had time left on her contract, made it known that she would not be renewing on its expiry, with the assumption being that she would join Marigold as well, due to her loyalty to Ogawa; this resulted in her largely being moved out of high profile storylines. There were actually fewer defections than had been feared at the time, but the sudden disappearance of these high profile names meant that Stardom was in dire need of correcting course, establishing new stars and storylines and ensuring the upstart promotion did not steal a march on them.

A month later, the tag champions would be on a collision course with old rivals Oedo Tai, facing the team of Momo Watanabe and new recruit Thekla, a former punk rock singer turned bodybuilder from Austria who had replaced Starlight Kid; the latter had been removed from the group and ‘turned face’ in the wake of the Marigold departures, owing to her rising popularity and marketable mask and character. Watanabe, reprising her role as the temptress, offered Konami the chance to strike Syuri with a weapon, but Konami refused, instead striking Momo, just as Kamitani had done in the cage match. In the kind of heavy-handed, illogical wrestling storytelling that had been absent in the cage, it was all just a ruse, however, as when Syuri then went to embrace her teammate to thank her for staying true, that was when Konami turned on her, valuing rejoining Oedo Tai over the title belts - but in true dumb wrestling fashion, only after fighting them tooth and nail for a quarter of an hour first. In a nod to the nWo, she would then use spray paint to humiliate her opponent, in this case spraying Syuri right in the face, resulting in the remainder of God’s Eye storming the ring. Other members of the unit would set to battling with the villains, but Kashima, rather than contesting a brawl she was likely to lose, would choose instead to protect the defenceless Syuri by laying on top of her like a bodyguard to take the blows, before scrambling her former saviour out of the ring to safety. The post-match promo just consisted of Syuri crying, while she would later remark on how she had been betrayed and didn’t feel she could trust anybody anymore, particularly singling out how Kashima, like Konami, had been recruited to her group from Oedo Tai.

Ever the opportunistic villains, this is something that would be exploited in words and deeds by the latter unit, trying to sow further dissension (hey, Momo) and isolate Syuri within her own group. But this is where I think Saki Kashima excels herself; unlike 99% of people within pro wrestling, Saki has a good memory, both in and out of storyline. And perhaps even more uncommonly, she trusts her audience to have one too. How she wrestles, how she interacts, how she collaborates, everything is framed through past experiences rather than storyline convenience; she acts as her character should, and trusts you, the viewer, to figure out why. As an example, when a random-draw tag saw her forced to team up with Starlight Kid, the fact that the latter had long since been kicked out of Oedo Tai and become a hero figure successfully ingratiated with almost all of her former enemies was irrelevant to Saki; everybody else may be willing to work with her, but Saki was not yet ready to forgive the woman who she had teamed with in Stars and welcomed into Oedo Tai, only for Kid to be the one who initiated the post-match beatdown in the cage when she was forcibly expelled from the team; she would refuse to tag her or be tagged by her to the point of sabotaging her own team. Or the time she recognised that Rina’s reluctance to let go of her was resulting in her being ostracised within Oedo Tai for being too sympathetic to Saki after her expulsion, goading Rina into attacking her, not because she wanted to hurt the youngster but because she recognised Rina didn’t want to hurt her; doing the most un-Saki Kashima thing imaginable, shouldering the workload of the match and willingly taking shots to allow Rina to prove herself to her remaining teammates, before pulling long-forgotten moves out of mothballs to win and bidding an emotional farewell to the youngster she mentored - only to be scolded as an “old hag” for her troubles.

The Marigold exodus also resulted in a considerable re-alignment of the units in the company, with Oedo Tai being rebranded as HATE after Konami’s betrayal of God’s Eye, and Queen’s Quest essentially dissolving after Utami Hayashishita left the company, removing Rossy Ogawa’s paw prints from the company branding and negating potential copyright or royalties issues. Syuri, now being on the warpath against HATE and with both Konami and MIRAI leaving the unit, would be potentially vulnerable; God’s Eye now numbered fewer than their enemies, and, worse, Ami Sohrei was out with a long term injury that kept her from wrestling for an entire year, so with other members contracted to other companies and only appearing part time in Stardom, it left only Saki Kashima and a rookie, Ranna Yagami, as permanent support. With Syuri beaten down by the ruthless villains, Saki could beat a safe retreat, or reintegrate into the team that she had enjoyed her greatest success under. A chance to reunite with Rina and with Fukigen Death, from whom parting had been painful. And, most importantly, a chance to take the path of least resistance, a path which she’d built her career on taking.

But this time was different. This wasn’t about what was best for Saki Kashima. This was about what was best for Syuri. Much as when Syuri had looked at Saki and seen not the coward clutching her leg and begging for protection, but the fighter who had gone out of her way to let her fulfil her dreams back in 2021, this time Saki looked at Syuri and saw not the ex-UFC fighter who had thrown her around like a toy and terrified her for years, but a woman who had put her neck on the line to save her when she had nobody to turn to, and who was now vulnerable and alone, needing somebody to do the same for her. They conveyed all of this without saying a single word, because they are both really good at professional wrestling. The cowardly little beansprout stood up tall and slapped the ever-loving s**t out of Thekla, and went to town on HATE. We had come full circle; now, Saki was Syuri’s protector, not the other way round. She got a desperation win and, sprawled on the floor, told Konami, “no matter what you do, I will never back down from you” before promising Syuri, “I will always be at your side against these guys. All I ask is that you look after me should the worst happen.” And the crowd came unglued for it. They were invested. They were with her for every strike, every move. They cheered every boot, every forearm, they got behind her goofy Street Fighter-inspired “Spapapapa-n!” strike combo like they truly believed this was real…she used up several of her 1001 lives kicking out of whatever HATE threw at her, because she was determined not to let Syuri down. And then the numbers game would get to her, she’d get suplexed out of her boots, she’d lose, and the crowd would weep with her. But she would prove true to her promise to be the most loyal “goldfish poop” to Syuri, even if the latter had to carry her lifeless carcass out of the arena in a crumpled heap, acknowledging the sacrifice with approval.

After a beating, Saki gives Konami instructions precisely how to f*** off

Stability and Instability

Over the ensuing weeks and months, the depleted God’s Eye would obtain backup from the ashes of Queen’s Quest, changing the group dynamic away from a specifically-dedicated MMA theme to more of a hybrid one, adding Lady C and Hina to the team, as they had shared business protecting themselves from HATE in the wake of being left to fend for themselves. And Kashima’s unique sense of long-term storytelling and relationships would continue to take centre stage; Saki would gladly take Hina under her wing - her being a judoka fit the God’s Eye unit theme, and with her being the twin sister of Rina, who Saki had previously mentored, it made sense for Kashima to welcome her in and try to be to her what she could no longer be to her twin - but she never grew to accept Lady C, who she still resented. The quest on C’s part to earn Saki’s trust - and Saki’s manipulation of this eagerness in order to get out of hard or painful work - became one of the most prominent storylines within the team for several months. Saki would use Lady C for protection where necessary, but would always reject offers of friendship; she would use her as a last resort partner or tag her into the most disadvantageous situations and abandon her to seek safety. But, more than anybody else, Saki would always be at ringside for her stablemates’ matches, supporting and cheering. She was the one Syuri would turn to for advice or support on leadership matters. The woman who never fit the group’s ethos from day one had become the glue that held God’s Eye together.

The crucial thing with all of this is, however, that while Kashima’s antics may at times have been designed to frustrate or anger, or at times to amuse and entertain, the crowd, there has always been a level of consistency to her motivations and actions and in fact everything she does, no matter how absurd, is intended to maintain that. She will still try to sneak wins via as little effort as possible, stealing into the ring to make a pin after opponents have taken one another out, tag in to try to steal a pinball only to tag back out if unsuccessful, try to finish matches in 10 seconds with a disingenuous fake handshake and a Kishikaisei, run away and hide from opponents much bigger than her, try to shirk hard work. When she was tasked with teaming with some rookies and they joined her backstage, her “warmup area” was shown to be her slouching on a blanket on the floor near a charging point so she can play games on her phone. She always sits on the floor - even when chairs are provided. When masked villains took to the ring and isolated the members of God’s Eye, Saki still - literally - hid behind Syuri and used her as a human shield. But she still bears the scars of the betrayal in the cage, and whenever she comes up against members of HATE, she will always give 100%. And if somebody wrongs Syuri, Saki will be there and she will go at it like a buzzsaw to defend her. She might not succeed - but she’ll portray a woman fighting to the death in the moment. She still resents the remaining QQ members from that cage match, and she still views them with suspicion years down the line. Because, ultimately, she is still a lazy and hypocritical grifter when she is not emotionally connected to a situation, but she’s progressed her character over the years to where her cowardice and comedy can be seen as a defence mechanism, to keep herself emotionally distanced; when she has things to fight for and people she cares about for what they’ve done for her and what she’s done for them, she’s a completely different person. The fact that she’s so willing to play into the silly side of wrestling makes it mean all that much more when she drops the act and gets serious. The crowd knows that only certain things will trigger that side of her, but they are totally invested whenever Saki flips that switch and gets serious, and they genuinely care when she gets hurt or when she is wronged.

In a world which usually presents one-dimensional heroes and villains and each are expected to act a certain way, Kashima presents constantly-shifting shades of grey in her character, and she perceives shades of grey (that may or may not be there) in others’ characters too. She bears grudges, but only where justified. She is loyal to her colleagues to a fault, but expects similar loyalty in return. She craves acceptance but is scared to change in pursuit of it. She forgives when she is ready to forgive. It’s ironic, the wrestler who was at the centrepiece of a feud that was essentially a live-action cartoon has cultivated the least cartoonish and most human personality in wrestling. “Anecon”, as Saki and Syuri are known when teaming together - translated, it means “big sister complex” - has become the default God’s Eye team because of this mixture of odd couple energy and undying loyalty to one another that has made them into one of the company’s most popular acts.

Anecon beat one of Stardom’s best and most established tag teams in 11 seconds

Dénouement

Wrestling, of course, is not a meritocracy in terms of wins/losses, but they do matter. If somebody is beaten and made to look stupid week after week on TV, nobody’s treating them as a serious challenger. Saki Kashima inhabits her own, almost completely unique, role in the “sport" where she can be anything to anybody at any time. She can believably lose to almost anybody on the roster - but she also has a lot of wins against the biggest names in the company. Indeed, when she beat Syuri, one of the most “protected” wrestlers on the roster, in the Cinderella Tournament, she immediately followed it by losing to somebody who routinely loses 80% of her matches. She’s strong enough to kick out of big move after big move… but still weak enough to believably be pinned after any one of them. She can fill in on any spot on the card, whether facing rookies in the first match or the world champion in the main event, and the crowd will accept it. She can be 100% comedic, 100% serious, or anything in between, and again the crowd will accept it. She gets one of the best reactions from fans of anybody in the company - and those fans will be just as accepting of a match that lasts 15 seconds as a match that lasts 15 minutes from her. She’s neither a hero nor a villain, nor is she an anti-hero; but she can believably be any of the three at any given time. She’s a true chaotic neutral, a chameleon, shapeshifting her roles and her morals depending on who she’s with and who she’s against - and sometimes playing multiple different roles and behaviours towards different people within the same match. And yet, she has such a perfect command of character that she can effortlessly switch between these, take the crowd with her every step of the way, yet always unfailingly maintain consistency in her motivations and actions.

And even when she’s playing a purely comedic role, she is still adding new tricks to the repertoire after all these years, subverting many of wrestling’s cliches and keeping her act fresh. Whether it be taking a seat in the stands and disguising herself as a fan during a match she’s supposed to be part of, bribing opponents with merchandise (note: does not work on Momo Kohgo, as she already owns all Saki’s merchandise), pretending not to understand foreign-language challenges, sneaking pins so that her officially-recorded winning technique (another Japanese wrestling tradition held over from sumo) is somebody else’s move, relentlessly mocking her colleagues’ seriousness (such as trying to get them to do Koguma’s goofy “bear dance”), issuing challenges while using her teammates as a human shield, pretending to be one of her opponents’ seconds and throwing in the towel for them, “hurting herself” throwing strikes and having to tag out immediately, throwing her tag team partners under the bus for personal gain (doing so especially remorselessly to Lady C, who she might throw under the bus just for the hell of it too), finding ever new ways to avoid being available in the corner when her partners need somebody to tag out to, or feigning exhaustion after a 30-second match to milk sympathy from her colleagues, she’s always keeping things interesting in a character that could easily have run its course in a few weeks in less capable hands. Because no matter what she does or how she does it, the audience know that Saki Kashima isn’t really a comedy wrestler, even when she is; she may be willing to play nearly any situation for laughs, but she only needs a second to apply a Kishikaisei, and as soon as she does, she can - and often will - credibly win. Against anybody.

It’s just unfortunate that in the early God’s Eye days, and especially in the wake of Konami turning on Syuri, when the crowd was 100% molten behind Saki Kashima, that she never got that rocket strapped to her to take her to the top of the card and become a bigger star. The opportunity was theoretically there, as circumstances allowed spots up there to open up; one of Stardom’s biggest angles of all time saw beloved former champion Tam Nakano forced into retirement in early 2025 by losing a career vs. career match against the company’s new centrepiece, Saya Kamitani, who had transitioned to villainy after Queen’s Quest dissolved. While “retirement” stipulations are rarely adhered to in wrestling, Nakano’s defeat and retirement had been so well done, and the fans so invested in it, that she has stayed fully incognito ever since. Almost immediately after this, Mayu Iwatani’s contract expired and, as expected, she left the company and signed for Marigold. Another former champion, Maika, was forced into a long injury absence. Kamitani has taken the ball and run with it, and evil Saya Kamitani has become probably the biggest mainstream crossover star joshi puroresu has seen since the golden days of the 80s and 90s, but aside from her there was room at the top, as the saying goes. And one of the only people to have a singles win over Kamitani since her rise is… Saki Kashima.

But promoting Kashima into that kind of role was simply never an option, no matter how much the crowd - and indeed many of the roster - wanted it for her. 2022 through to early 2024, where Bushiroad (the owners of NJPW and now Stardom) had installed a very old school manager, and Rossy Ogawa was still backstage politicking around creating his breakaway company and leading to a lot of resentment and dissatisfaction backstage, was a strong period for the in-ring product but a very tough time off-screen, and having used Ogawa as a prop in her hijinks during her Oedo Tai days, the company may also have been wary of giving her too strong a role in case she was one of those to defect, too (although she has simply pivoted to using Taro Okada, his replacement, in similar fashion). But most of all, it was just that the working schedule in this era was particularly tough on the women, and the more injuries suffered, the fewer the workload could be shared between. Being higher up the card requires more time in the ring, and a general rule of thumb in wrestling is that, on average, the good guys have to take more of a beating than the villains. Kashima was simply unable to wrestle long matches and before long, even with shorter ones she would see herself needing to be pulled from cards increasingly frequently in order to take maintenance days; if she went all out on a long storyline match or one where she had to be ragdolled around like the old days, she’d need time out to recover. While a change in management in 2024 resulted in a new regime that preferred a less strenuous schedule and allowed more time out for maintenance, and she could be protected from too many bumps by working primarily in multi-person tag matches, the fact that in 2025 Syuri also had to miss time due to injury and foreign excursions as well restricted the company’s options even on that front.

And this made it hard to strike while the iron was hot; Japanese wrestling does not offer the same scope to be part of the show without a physical element as fans of North American wrestling might be familiar with, and even allowing for her less strenuous style, Kashima had effectively been wrestling a heavy schedule for seven years straight at this point; needing to miss shows after a major angle would torpedo the momentum she was gaining, and she would increasingly need to be kept to tag team competition or used solely in her comedic role in order to protect her from too much physical abuse. She had got a brief second run with the High Speed title after joining God’s Eye, but even during that she was visibly performing hurt - and ultimately that was as far as the company was able to capitalise on her white-hot momentum. She lost it the same way she originally won it - without the champion being pinned - and would try to steal the belt before making a replica she called the “Low Speed Championship” she could carry around. Too many injury absences in 2025 - including an unfortunately-timed one that meant she and Syuri had to withdraw from the Tag League after already qualifying for the finals - meant that while she remained a popular part of any show she was on, she was largely having to be kept away from major stories and matches that would necessitate too much physical punishment, even when they were heavily implying it, such as putting her in a series of tag matches where she could run and hide from behemoth gaijin wrestlers. That tag tournament injury was probably the final nail in the coffin for any kind of upward momentum for Saki; despite Anecon routinely getting one of the best reactions of anybody on the card and a triumph of that nature being a fitting conclusion to hers and Syuri’s four year story arc, she just was not physically able to handle the workload of night-after-night tournament action any longer, and would soon be primarily working the rookies, allowing basic and relatively short matches with limited physical exertion, or being used almost exclusively as a comedy act. One of her most memorable moments in this period was when Stardom ran a rare show in Matsue. With this region being completely off the company’s regular circuit, it was the first chance her grandparents had had to see her wrestle. The company arranged an “intra-God’s Eye” tag team battle in the main event of the night, where they’d draw straws to see who’d be on which side, and of course it was rigged so that Saki found herself on the opposing side to Syuri, and they could “play a few of the hits" in front of her family.

God’s Eye after playing the hits. L-R: Ranna Yagami, Lady C, Tomoka Inaba, Saki Kashima, Syuri, Ami Sohrei, Hina

On January 10th, 2026, Stardom held a show at Korakuen Hall, a smallish (2.000 capacity) arena adjacent to the Tokyo Dome which is nevertheless iconic for hosting many combat sports including boxing, kickboxing, judo, MMA, and countless wrestling promotions over the years. All eight members of God’s Eye were split into two teams, with four of them facing members of HATE, and the other four in a very much odds-and-sods match with some guest wrestlers from Mexico and other unaffiliated names. Unusually, given their histories, Syuri and Saki Kashima were in the latter, along with two of the team’s junior members. After an uneventful, non-storyline match, Saki took the microphone - which, despite her comments about her younger self hating talking in front of people, was not altogether unusual - and then, with pretty much no fanfare whatsoever, announced that she would be retiring at the company’s prestigious Yokohama Arena show in April. And then she dropped the microphone and ran to the back, as though she didn’t want to see the audience’s reaction, or didn’t want the audience to see her reaction. The arena was stunned. Hell, Yagami looked stunned and I’d wager she will have known about it before the fact. The junior members of God’s Eye were in tears in the post-match interviews. Saki couldn’t bring herself to face the cameras.

There’s no doubt that it will be a hit for Stardom, too; as well as being a veteran talent who can credibly work up and down the card with anybody, she remains one of the company’s bigger movers of merchandise - and not just in the traditional routes of signed photos and supporter towels, or Stardom’s idol-inspired photobooks and acrylic standees, but also through ironic T-shirts and apparel that play on her lazy grifter gimmick and her characterisation of her fans as creeps and losers (a tag they’ve come to wear as a badge of pride), so hopefully she’s built herself a solid financial backing to leave with - her telling the fans to shut up, run to the ATM and buy her merch has become a running gag that has even been a design feature on said merch - which fans laugh along with, before, you guessed it, running to the ATM and buying that merch. Despite the name suggesting creepy vibes, the kimo-ota are surprisingly wholesome, especially considering Stardom has had issues with the type of fan it has attracted to shows in the past, thanks to the idol-heavy presentation and often excessively young wrestlers. And it’s not like she isn’t pretty, or doesn’t play on people’s protection instincts with her act or accentuate her fragility with her attire and mannerisms, either. But, at least post-Stars, Saki is neither idol-coded like, say, Tam Nakano or Natsupoi, nor is her appearance any significant part of her character presentation like, say, Mina Shirakawa or Yuzuki Aikawa. The fans aren’t clamouring for Saki Kashima the idol; they like her more as a delinquent. They want their girl to remain a sneaky little sh*t, talk trash she can’t back up, be an agent of chaos; she’s just more relatable, more interesting and more human that way. While obviously she is a pretty woman, wrestling fans are wrestling fans, and there’s clearly enough interest in the idol-type merchandise to merit Stardom continuing to push it out, most of the vocal kimo-ota seem to be genuine wrestling fans who appreciate her act and are willing to lean into the bit, and, for her part, she seems to genuinely appreciate them too. Despite in-character caring only for the money, she is known to recognise, learn the names of, and acknowledge individual long-time fans at events, and did once publicly chide Stardom for overcharging fans for photos and chekis, adding individual designs and personalising each and every one to ensure each kimo-ota got their money’s worth.

But, ultimately, the same thing that had made her so compelling as an underdog and driven a lot of her character and personality as a wrestler was inevitably her undoing; no matter what she did, she simply could not put on weight, and was unable to pack enough meat or muscle onto her tiny frame to protect from injuries, which were starting to mount up. Worsening tendonitis - apparently not uncommon for people with this kind of super-skinny build in physical careers - was lengthening the recovery process and making performing any significant role in matches increasingly difficult for her, so the shortness of her matches and increased emphasis on her comedic side was becoming less a stylistic choice and more a necessity. She has shown herself keenly aware that she was never going to be a darling of the type of wrestling fan who obsesses over match quality, especially now that the scary bumps and ragdoll selling that had been such a big part of what had made her popular were no longer possible, and some of her more athletically-challenging or risky moves were off-limits. The sad thing is that you can find event reviews where people are saying that they can tell Saki is beaten up and her body needs a break all the way back in 2019; she had filled so much of her “bump card” with the physical punishment she took in her initial run with Stars, where she didn’t have the same connection to the audience and was treated as a bit part player, that it limited how much she was able to profit later on, when the audience genuinely cared about her. But then, paradoxically, part of the reason that audience came to care so much was due to the unique character she cultivated precisely because her “bump card” was almost full.

It seems she was also aware that her build would give her a limited shelf-life as a wrestler - when she first returned in 2018, she had set herself a five year schedule and intended to retire at age 30, but when that time came, she was at peak popularity, and not ready to say goodbye. However, often careers in joshi pro wrestling begin and end early - partly to do with the patriarchal nature of society in Japan and women leaving the industry or taking breaks to start families, and partly to do with the brutal schedule and injuries, especially among those who start young. While there are equivalents to the old-timers still hobbling around that we know from the West and guys like Ric Flair and Hulk Hogan still trotting out in their 50s and 60s as shells of themselves (golden age villains Aja Kong and Dump Matsumoto are still competing at 55 and 65 respectively, for example) - and wrestling is wrestling so never say never when somebody says “retirement” - the history of joshi has a lot more examples of people, even those at the top of the industry, retiring young. Just within Stardom since Kashima’s return in 2018, Kagetsu retired at 27, Himeka just before her 26th birthday, and Arisa Hoshiki retired at just 24 while holding Stardom’s second most prestigious belt, after suffering recurrent head and neck injuries.

The fact that Saki is retiring on a regular show, not as part of a benefit show specific to her retirement, raised questions about what form her retirement will take. She held a singles match with Syuri at the start of her ‘retirement road’, which many people had expected would be the final stop on said road thanks to their lengthy history together - it took place on Stardom’s February pay-per-view and saw special introductions as well as Saki bringing out ringwear from her Oedo Tai era as a nod to the past, with the two friends having their most competitive match yet, and, because it wouldn’t be Saki if she didn’t do something to keep the audience guessing, they had Syuri beat her… with a Kishikaisei. She has also already had a reunion of team We Love Tokyo Sports! (Saki and Fukigen Death) to set up a match with the clown, as well as facing Kaori Yoneyama, the 20-year veteran who has extended her career by playing the Death character, in Yoneyama’s own promotion - Saki’s only career match not held within World Wonder Ring Stardom. While I was writing this, Stardom held a show in the town of Otsu, as a favour to veteran wrestler Saori Anou. This seems to be something that the current ownership like to do to long-tenured and respected wrestlers; Anou is an Otsu native who had always dreamed of performing in that venue since her childhood, and it was about to be demolished - so this would be her final opportunity to fulfil that dream. She was allowed to book the show herself, and had Saki Kashima come out and beat her in seven seconds to break Stardom’s fastest match record. Since then, Syuri has started threatening the wrestlers booked to team with Saki that she’ll kick their asses if they let her get hurt before her retirement event, which has led to some of them playing this up by serving as her “security”, and now subverting expectations one last time by having to stop Saki from getting involved in matches.

People have wondered if Natsu Sumire, who left Stardom during the pandemic and has only come back for a one-off appearance since, may return and sing Saki’s theme one last time to send her off; whether she may finally accept Lady C or reconcile with Rina; people have even mentioned Mayu Iwatani, although the fact she is contracted to Marigold, and there remains bad blood between the owners of Stardom and Rossy Ogawa due to the circumstances of his departure, makes that unlikely unless it happens on a non-Stardom card - meaning they likely cannot face off in an actual match unless Yoneyama hosts it. MIRAI, however, has since left Marigold; in storyline she was the one who stood up for Saki and believed in her when Konami wanted her thrown out of God’s Eye. Nanae Takahashi, Stardom’s first champion and the same woman who roughed Saki up in her debut match fifteen years ago, made a one-off appearance, her first in Stardom since retirement, as a ringside second for Saki’s final match with the full God’s Eye team. A common joshi tradition for retirement is a gauntlet of several matches with extremely short time limits to allow a whole parade of opponents from a wrestler’s past to all come and contribute in an exhibition style, similar to how, when a sumo wrestler retires, various opponents, stablemates, coaches and rivals from past and present will all come up in turn and take part in cutting their topknot to say goodbye; if she wanted this type of gauntlet, pretty much the whole roster would be happy to give her a sendoff and a big speech after which there probably won’t be a dry eye in the house; it’s clear that she is popular and respected backstage as well as with fans, from her public interactions and from the very genuine reactions to her retirement announcement from her God’s Eye teammates and other colleagues, and the fact that she has been being booked so that pretty much everybody on the roster has a chance to play a part in her retirement road. The entire God’s Eye unit did an interview show ahead of their final match together, and each of them draws a match length to give Saki a farewell message. There’s something surprisingly moving about seeing a legitimate badass kickboxer and veteran of UFC genuinely break down in tears because she didn’t get as much time as she wanted to say goodbye to her friend.

However, this is Saki Kashima; we are just as likely to see her retire by facing a single opponent, winning by Kishikaisei in the first fifteen seconds, and then trying to run to the back only to be dragged back into the ring by Syuri so that everybody can give her a hug and send her off while she shuffles awkwardly and tries not to cry. And you know what? That might actually be the retirement scenario that the crowd would eat up the most. It would be peak Kashima to try to get out of her own retirement ceremony because it looked like too much hard work, and for old time’s sakes have to be dragged kicking and screaming to it.

 

[Libertine Seguros]

Kashima the Memorious

There is a certain bittersweetness to it all, however. Wrestling in the 2020s - and especially during pandemic time - carries a different air to it than the wrestling back in the 1990s and early 2000s that I remember. Social media has changed the way wrestlers communicate, some jumping fully out of character and being entirely separate on- and off-screen personalities, others doing things like live-streaming as a different character from their on-screen selves, others living in character through everything they post, and others still separating out their real life selves’ accounts, but especially during the pandemic when they were performing to empty arenas, social media was the best way that the wrestlers could generate crowd reactions. Saki Kashima has been very savvy in using social media to further her character and role in her interactions with fellow wrestlers, Stardom staff, and her beloved kimo-ota. She and Natsu Sumire were already going at each other with photoshop back in 2019, but the use of social media as an additional storytelling device really ramped up during Covid. Storylines have been furthered and played out through online communications, and her many droll and sarcastic comments, and constant humorous trash-talking-from-a-safe-distance, were a large part of what increased the loyalty of her fanbase as well, rewarding the fans for following beyond the televised shows. Outside of her in-character interactions, however, she is very guarded and it seems that despite everything, some residual parts of that withdrawn loner of her teenage years remain - indeed, we may have seen a glimpse of that with her reaction to her retirement announcement, when forced to address the crowd with a message not from Saki Kashima the carefully-crafted wrestling persona, but from the heart of the woman behind it. Saki Kashima is, unlike with many wrestlers, her real name, so the in-character personality obfuscates matters when any part of her out-of-character life breaks through, and if she does have any out-of-character socials they are very well hidden. With such a well-attuned mind for the business that she has been able to carve out such a niche and generate reactions from the audience so naturally, allowing her to remain one of the most popular figures on the roster while minimising physical risk and effort, she would surely do well in a role as a backstage agent, as a trainer, or as a non-physical on-screen personality.

However, the fact that her wrestling persona attaches such significance and importance to memory and personal history is very deliberate, as it is something of great importance to her; the one aspect of her non-wrestling life that Saki has been willing to share with her fans has been her quest to qualify to care for dementia patients. She has had a personal connection to this, with members of her immediate family suffering this most cruel of conditions, and periodically she has dropped the act entirely to talk about what this means to her and to share her pride at passing various stages of the qualification she has been pursuing. It appears this is something she had been working on in parallel with her wrestling career ever since returning to the ring in 2018. In fact, bearing in mind her original schedule for her career on returning, and the time lost during the pandemic, there is good reason to believe that her second wrestling career took place to facilitate this nursing qualification. Having seen dementia take hold in members of my own family, I can quite honestly say that it is one of the things that terrifies me the most in this life. I’ve never been somebody who buys a lot of souvenirs and trinkets, and rely heavily on my memory when it comes to cherished moments in my life, but as I grow older and start to consider my own mortality, and the thought that all those experiences, those places I’ve been, and faces I’ve seen, will one day be lost to the sands of time, scares me, and the thought of powerlessly watching my own life disappear into the ether and all that is and was me becomes lost, while I’m still there but no longer able to pass on my thoughts and deeds - even if there is somebody to pass them on to - is upsetting. And having seen even just for a short period what they have to deal with on a daily basis, I can only say that those carers need nerves of steel, hearts of gold and incredibly thick skin to be able to cope with what that job throws at them.

Saki proudly displaying her most recent certification in December 2022

And it was this that drew me in; when I was first reading up on the women’s wrestlers of the Chugoku region to include in a post, it seemed unlikely that Kashima would be mentioned more than just in passing; as she herself acknowledged in her 2023 letter to the fans, she doesn’t have that compelling or unusual a backstory, certainly nothing to compare to Iwatani’s social isolation or Hojo’s bizarre adventure taking her from international boatmanship to WWE. But if Saki Kashima can see the effect of dementia on her own family, and choose to confront it by subjecting herself to several years of punishment that she was never physically built to take, in order to dedicate her life to caring for those with the condition - a thankless and potentially traumatic, under-appreciated and by most accounts in Japan underpaid job - then that to me is a compelling backstory, and certainly a more admirable one than most. Maybe it’s influenced by where I have arrived in my personal and professional life and my own growing fears and concerns, but reading people’s comments about this side of her when her retirement was announced really spoke to me. I felt compelled not to leave her out, and dipped into her career because I wanted to at least have something to say about her.

But as I did, her retirement road would throw up additional things that I wanted to include, to comment on, and before I knew it, it had become a journey that quickly swelled way beyond my usual essays, resulting in this university dissertation-length meditation on the career of a wrestler that it’s unlikely any of you have ever heard of (or will still be reading to reach this dénouement), a hunt for anecdotes that led me to finding a tiny part of my childhood self that I’d thought long buried. With her mind for the business and how she has managed to make a compelling - and moreover marketable - character within professional wrestling out of being lazy and weak, it is a shame for wrestling for Kashima to retire and not be moving into a role where she can utilise that knowledge and ability and pass it on to the next generation. I’ve only come to be aware of her right at the end of her career, and I’m disappointed that, after being so surprised to find myself being drawn into a wrestling plot line for the first time in two decades, no sooner have I become invested in where her journey takes her than that journey is over - but then, I wouldn’t have had reason to investigate her active career had it not been for the news of her retirement. However, ultimately, and I can’t stress this enough, the world needs dementia carers more than it needs professional wrestlers.

There’s just a certain irony in that the woman who made a career out of being the weakest, most selfish, and most cowardly woman in professional wrestling history might just, in her post-wrestling career, prove to be one of the strongest and most selfless people to ever grace the ring. Fare thee well, little beansprout. Wrestling will be worse off for you not being in it anymore, but I’m sure the kimo-ota, while they will miss you dearly, will also throw hands to protect you from anybody giving criticism.

Unless that person is Syuri. If there’s one thing that you can learn from Saki Kashima, it’s that you really don’t want to fight Syuri. She’s scary.

Postscript: What Became of the Unlikely Ladies?

While the curtain may draw on Saki Kashima’s career at the end of the month unless something highly unexpected happens, she has been there to see World Wonder Ring Stardom go from a tiny upstart promotion in joshi’s dark ages to the pre-eminent women’s wrestling promotion in the world and part of a huge cross-promotional corporate machine. As I alluded to at the start, however, it has not been an easy journey that they have been on, with chaos, controversy and often insanity along the way. I thought a nice way to wrap things up would be to take a quick roll-call of the people we met along the way.

Rossy Ogawa, as mentioned, was fired from Stardom in 2024 after Bushiroad (the corporation he sold the company to in 2019) caught him trying to incentivise contracted talents to join the new company he was setting up. Dream Star Fighting Marigold began in 2024 and is a moderately successful young company - however Ogawa had expected to have been able to attract more of the Stardom roster to his company and seems to have grown bitter and resentful that the company has not risen to eclipse the one he left, nor does Stardom seem to be missing him; unfortunately he only tends to attract headlines for the wrong reasons nowadays, such as body-shaming his wrestlers or taking potshots at his former company. Nanae Takahashi was one of Stardom’s co-founders and a somewhat controversial figure in her own right, propagating an old school bullying-and-hazing mentality in the locker room. She resigned after the Ghastly Match, immediately founding a new company called Seadlinnng (sic) and making that controversy’s perpetrator, YOSHIKO, its champion and main star. She would seemingly reconcile with Ogawa and make a return to Stardom at the end of 2020, making sporadic appearances over the ensuing years culminating in a series of matches which drew as much praise for their spectacle as they did criticism for having the 45-year-old and past-her-prime Takahashi defeating all of Stardom’s most talented young hopefuls. It seems that her loyalty was to Ogawa as she would then have a similar, but better-received, run in Marigold until her eventual retirement in early 2025, and the only time she’s been in Stardom since his departure was to be at ringside for Saki Kashima during her retirement road, since she was Saki’s opponent on debut in 2011. YOSHIKO, as noted, joined Seadlinnng after its formation; she had “retired” after her suspension for assaulting Yasukawa, but walked out on her own retirement ceremony. She has slowly rebuilt her reputation in the ring and more and more companies have become willing to work with her. She even made a surprise return to Stardom for Mayu Iwatani’s tenth anniversary show in March 2021, but although reception among the live audience was polite, public backlash has kept this to a one-off. During the pandemic she became a surprise hit on TikTok for her cookery videos; she has even released a successful cookbook and appeared on mainstream Japanese television in this role, to an audience mostly blissfully unaware that she initially rose to fame by beating a disabled woman half to death. Act Yasukawa attempted to return to the ring after the Ghastly Match but eventually had to abort and retire by the end of 2015. A documentary would be made about her struggles to make it as a wrestler and her attempts to return to the ring the same year. Five years later she was able to make a return to wrestling in a company called AWG, which emphasises the theatrical and acting side of the medium, allows opportunities for separate acting careers, and requires a far lower physical workload. In 2025, AWG did a showcase at a Stardom event and in an emotional moment, for the first time in a decade, Act Yasukawa stepped into a World Wonder Ring Stardom ring.

From the era after the Ghastly Match, Kairi Hojo would go on to join WWE in 2017 where she would be renamed Kairi Sane. She would leave during the pandemic to return to Japan, spending some time in Stardom under the name KAIRI, and become the first woman to headline and close a New Japan Pro Wrestling event when she became the inaugural IWGP Women’s Champion. She has since returned to WWE where she remains to this day. Io Shirai would follow her to America and has wrestled in WWE since 2018, first under her Stardom ring name, and subsequently under the name Iyo Sky. Mayu Iwatani as we know remained loyal to Ogawa and stayed with Stardom as the leader of the Stars faction until 2025, when her contract was up and she jumped ship to reconnect with Rossy in Marigold, where she has been the company’s biggest star. In 2022 a low-budget film about her life was released, entitled Runaway Wrestler - and its star, Anna Hirai, was so inspired by the role that she has joined Stardom as a trainee wrestler. No, really. Shiki Shibusawa would formally retire in a ceremony in March 2019, four months after her final match, and become a successful streamer and radio host alongside her sister; another Stardom trainee from the time forced into retirement by injuries, Leo Onozaki, is a regular guest on their shows. Shiki was genuinely passionate about wrestling and, despite the sad way her career ended, has remained on good terms with the company, co-hosting some of their pandemic-era non-wrestling content and maintaining friendships with Stardom alumni past and present. No such reconciliation will ever be possible for Hana Kimura, of course, but her mother Kyoko hosts an annual memorial show on the anniversary of her death, which many Stardom wrestlers and alumni have participated in over the years.

Of the women that made up Saki’s teammates in Oedo Tai, Kagetsu was already on the road to retirement when Kashima joined, but made a one-off return to the ring in 2021 for the first Hana Kimura Memorial Show. In 2022 he came out as female-to-male transgender, and now works in the Tokyo Police Force. Natsu Sumire left Stardom without fanfare in 2021, and has only made a one-off in-ring appearance since, but she has never been far away - while she still wrestles part-time, she also owns and operates a bar in Tokyo, which Stardom have used on numerous occasions as a filming location; wrestlers bursting into arguments in the bar and tearing up her posters advertising her post-Stardom career has become something of a running gag. Natsuko Tora, Momo Watanabe, Ruaka, Rina and Konami are still part of the Stardom roster and part of the HATE unit, the immediate successor to Oedo Tai. Starlight Kid was kicked out of the group in 2024 in similar fashion to Kashima, and formed her own unit with AZM and Miyu Amasaki when Queen’s Quest was dissolved. Lady C and Hina remain part of God’s Eye and have been part of Kashima’s retirement road. Utami Hayashishita left Stardom for Marigold as arguably its biggest day one acquisition in 2024, and has been positioned as one of their biggest players, although has seemingly fallen out of favour with Rossy Ogawa if his public body-shaming of her is anything to go by. Saya Kamitani, on the other hand, joined the HATE unit, changed her colour palette to all black, dubbed herself the “Phenex Queen” (sic) and has become the biggest crossover star in Japan that women’s wrestling has had in 30 years, regularly appearing on mainstream TV shows and headlining shows all over the country. Kaori Yoneyama (aka Fukigen Death) still wrestles as part of HATE in Stardom, but also under her real name in her own promotion Gokigen Pro Wrestling, a comedy-themed promotion that seemingly puts shows together on the fly. She actively wrestles around 200 matches a year well into her 40s - not bad for somebody who “retired” fourteen years ago only to change her mind literally in the middle of the traditional ten-bell salute. Thekla left Stardom to wrestle in America for the AEW promotion in 2025. For the most part, Saki’s friends and colleagues in God’s Eye all remain with Stardom; in addition to Lady C and Hina as already mentioned, Syuri, Ami Sohrei, Ranna Yagami and most recent addition Kyoka Kotatsu are all regulars on the shows; Tomoka Inaba is too, but she is officially contracted to another company called JTO, which is operated by former WWE wrestler Taka Michinoku. Her sister Azusa is a member of HATE as well. Only MIRAI is no longer part of the company, having left to join Marigold in 2024. However, she would leave there too after only a year, and now wrestles mostly against men in the regional Michinoku Pro Wrestling promotion (not related to Taka, though he did wrestle there).

And yes, I might legitimately have gone insane.