Io Shirai/Mayu Iwatani vs. Kagetsu/Hazuki, STARDOM Goddesses of Destiny 2018 (6/17/2018)

In which Io Shirai says farewell.

The match is good.

You could call it borderline great even, and I wouldn’t put up too much of a fuss.

Lob ten minutes off of this thing and give them fifteen or sixteen rather than twenty-five plus minutes, and I probably really like it. It’s the rare occasion where the emotion and feeling of a STARDOM match actually resonates with me, Io having her final match and teaming with Mayu again against the opposition, all of that. It’s fun, and the wrestling is also good. Hazuki and Kagetsu are not in the league of either opponent, so the match feels artificially long, but it is a real long way from being a bad match.

Mostly, I want to talk about Io saying goodbye to non-WWE wrestling.

On one hand, it feels sort of mean to say it sucks. She gets used reasonably well in NXT, and has a steady presence on television and has for the last half decade. Many of her peers have done far far far worse, wasting incredibly valuable years of their lives, and in Kairi Hojo’s case even more than that, for less than a quarter of what Io’s gotten out of her contract. At the same time, none of it lives up the promise of her peak run here from like 2014 through 2018. Joshi — and especially STARDOM — is often not for me, as a result of matches with more of an emphasis on action than anything else, a focus on emotion that often does not feel earned to me, and the weirdest fanbase of any pro wrestling niche. That’s not to say I haven’t enjoyed stuff before her or after her (although mostly from Sendai Girls or SEAdLINNNG, to be honest). However, during these four or five years, STARDOM felt like a promotion that I simply had to watch, because it was where Io Shirai wrestled. A singular talent with a big match hit rate unlike many others in the same time and general place, in a whole lot of different roles, from home company protector to invading evil ninja to hyperconfident Ace to valiant Ace helping to make somebody in defeat. One of the decade’s best big match wrestlers, if nothing else, and in these years, STARDOM had as good a big match success rate as almost anyone else because of her.

STARDOM is never quite as good without Io.

It’s not to say they never have good or great matches again, but that like Raven in ECW or a Punk/Joe/Bryan in ROH, Io Shirai was the perfect avatar of what the company was, at its best. Big, grandiose, occasionally epic, not always perfect, but also almost always efficient, tight, and genuine feeling. The real loss is that, absent Io Shirai, STARDOM has never quite had someone again who felt like a genuine best in the world contender, an all-world level physical talent with a motor unlike almost anybody else in wrestling, and whose big matches felt like absolute cannot-miss spectacles, making it easier and easier to miss the company entirely. You can chalk a lot of that up to the company itself changing its approach, it’s totally possible that an Io who never left would be having those same matches that have annoyed me so much in recent years, but that’s not a thing that happened, and it seems real convenient that STARDOM’s artistic decline comes following the departure of its all time greatest wrestler.

(I am not interested in expanding more on this or debating you unless you pay me to write about whatever 2020s STARDOM match you think proves me wrong.)

Meiko Satomura/Chiihiro Hashimoto vs. Io Shrai/DASH Chisako, Sendai Girls Big Show in Niigata (6/16/2018)

Another easy hit.

Truly, there may be no more reliable thing in all professional wrestling, when accounting for match types or tropes or repeated occurrences, than these Sendai Girls all-star tags in the mid to late 2010s. You are not going to get one of the best tag team matches of all time or even of the year, nobody is giving you their absolute best one hundred percent effort A+ level performance, but they are always good and typically great. Great examples of reliable meat and potatoes wrestling, cutting out almost all excess, and allowing (typically) four great wrestlers to bounce off of each other and riff around for fifteen to twenty minutes.

Here, all of that holds true yet again.

Meiko, C-Hash, Io, and DASH know each other pretty well and have no problems throwing things out there and trying things out for the entirety of the match. If not all killer, there’s certainly no filler to be found either, very very little excess weight on the thing. And, most importantly, it whips ass. Hard shots, beautiful moves in the air, sick throws and suplexes, all of it. A casual celebration of most of the coolest stuff that professional wrestling has to offer.

It is the exact match I wanted to see when I turned the video file on.

You will not see anything new in this match. You will not see the most pronounced effort possible, the most epic scope imaginable, or anything with any real narrative might to it (although hey, Meiko’s already done that against Io and Hashimoto both in recent years already)

Io Shirai got one last big interpromotional tag, and thankfully, they made the most of it.

***

Meiko Satomura vs. Io Shirai, Sendai Girls (4/19/2018)

If you approach this as it is, there’s a very good time to be had.

Which is to say, recognize the situation.

This match is second-from-the-top on a Sendai Girls show. They are not going to do their absolute best, in terms of the scope and magnitude of a match, outside of a main event. Io Shirai is also very clearly inching towards the door out of Japan and towards the WWE, and is not going to go full on bump freak Io like he has in the past against Meiko. And hey, speaking of that, these two already had their big gigantic epic(s), and I personally think that the very best of the bunch is the best joshi match of the 2010s, so it’s a little hard to be all that upset at two wrestlers of this status turning in a B/B+ effort instead of their A+ one.

Consider all that, and there’s a lot here still worth your time.

Or, at least that I found to be worth my time, and I consider that to be a far more valuable thing than your time.

For twenty minutes exactly, no more and no less, two of the world’s best wrestlers break their instruments out and toss some riffs and licks and ideas at each other. If you’ve seen them wrestle before, not much of it is new. The matwork is fun, they do some really cool moves, and they hit each other really hard. It’s great stuff. Neither is a perfect wrestler, especially in this sense, but this is a match that knows exactly what it is and is super super confident about it. No time wasting half-ass K-Hall Brawl, no try from Meiko to go to an arm or leg, just pure offense, constantly moving forward. They’re not pushing the thing as fast or as hard as it’ll go, but that foot (those feet? a four gas pedal car maybe) never lets off the gas.

Above all, it’s also SUCH a credit to Io and Meiko at this point that this works as well as it does. It’s all just stuff, sections of the match devoted to throwing things out there on the mat, with their feet and elbows, and then the bigger moves.

It’s another example of how, a lot of the time, I am far more impressed by smaller-scale or lower-ambition success than I am by the big bombastic epics that succeed. We’ve seen that not just anybody can have a great bombfest, I certainly would not say that just anybody can have a great World of STARDOM Title match, let alone the best one of the decade. However, I would say far afar far fewer wrestles

No two other female wrestlers in Japan at this point, probably with an Arisa Nakajima or Nanae or Sareee shaped exception (and even then probably not, those are either slightly worse wrestlers or people who do better with firm goals to work for in a match), could have had a match exactly like this that I liked as much as I liked this. It’s not just all this offense that rocks, it’s the combination of just enough laziness and just enough unmatched confidence to simply have a match like this, trust in it, and not try for anything more. Only Nixon can go to China. Only Meiko and Io can have a bullshit twenty minute draw crowd pleaser retread that still whips this much ass.

Yeah. Whatever. Not their best, not what it was, don’t care. That’s all correct.

Still, in the short window here for a final match between the two, it’s nice to see them fight for twenty minutes again. If you’re going watch a match where two people riff around and bounce off of each other until the clock strikes midnight, there are roughly a thousand worse combinations than this.

I just liked it, man. You probably would also.

***

 

Io Shirai/Tam Nakano vs. Kagetsu/Sumire Natsu, STARDOM DreamSlam 2018 in Nagoya (4/1/2018)

This was a Current Blast Exploding Bat Deathmatch.

Is it a great match?

No.

There’s only one genuinely great wrestler (Shirai) in the match. The larger arena means the sound in the ring isn’t as crisp, and the crowd isn’t quite as loud as they might be inside Korakuen or something. The match is also a little long at over twenty five minutes, which is something that even the best wrestler in the match often avoids in singles matches. Said best wrestler is also not in this nearly as much as the other three, who are comfortably at least a level below her, and probably further down than that. The match drags a whole lot in the first half, and also a little near the end, opting to end after a few more minutes following the second big explosion shot, and feeling real anticlimactic as a result. 

Having written all of that, I’m not sure it’s even a good match. 

It is, however, sick as hell to see people hit with barbed wire bats rigged to make gigantic explosions and this is a match that does that twice, and so “good” has a way of becoming an incredibly flexible word.

Io Shirai vs. Momo Watanabe, STARDOM Queen’s Fest (2/18/2018)

This was for Shirai’s Wonder of Stardom Title.

If you were talking to me online around the time that this happened, I am not as blown away by it as I was at the time. All the same, it’s still a match I like a whole lot.

For the many great STARDOM matches over the last three or four years, some that may be considered better than this, in what I would consider to be Peak STARDOM, second to maybe only the Meiko Satomura vs. Io Shirai title switch in December 2015, this is maybe my favorite match of the bunch.

Largely, that’s because of how impressive it is.

Every other truly great STARDOM match tends to be one of these super fights between the big stars on the roster, or from outside at the time. Your Nanaes, Io vs. Kairi, Meiko against both of them, Io’s weird little psuedo Inokiist displays against shootier-style Americans, but this is not the case here. Momo Watanabe is seventeen years old, she has not shown a whole lot more before this than potential, and even then, we are not exactly talking about 1992 Jun Akiyama here. It’s not to say she is a total dud or whatever, that this is entirely this Io Shirai master class, but that creating something out of nothing, conjuring a match this great out of thin air, is a lot more impressive than established great wrestlers and relatively big stars managing to live up to and occasionally exceeding expectations.

Roughly translated, successful alchemy is a thousand times more impressive than simply finding gold.

Narratively, it’s a tale as old as time.

Young upstart takes it to the Ace of the promotion, whips more ass than anyone could have imagined, but when flying a little (a lot) too close to the sun while trying to keep up, sees her wings melt before careening down into the sea, with the Ace making her point clear with great and abundant force before the end. It’s one of the most interesting and satisfying stories in the entire history of professional wrestling, one that when in reliable hands, almost always succeeds, and this is no exception.

Performance wise, in terms of performing these ideas on a character level, they’re both perfect as what the match asks them to be.

Momo Watanabe is a hell of a young upstart. She has all the fire in the world and lays her elbows in in a way that helps me enjoy this a lot, but also constantly gets her ass kicked in really fascinating ways. Within thirty seconds of the match, she jump starts Io and rushes her, only to already get her ass kicked in response, and that’s how the match goes. Every time Momo does anything, Io does it better, and it feels meaner and meaner each time until Momo breaks loose, itself feeling like a miniature victory.

In addition to the way the match is supposed to be, Momo benefits in a few ways that are firstly probably unintentional and secondly very obviously unintentional.

Firstly, when compared to Io Shirai, one of the crispest and smoothest wrestlers of her generation, Momo’s struggles are so endearing. She’s not sloppy, but she can’t get the same height on her dropkicks, strike with the same refined precision, or any of that. There’s a clear effort put into everything she does. While it wouldn’t have the same effect if she was supposed to be working from above or in a dominant role, as the underdog against a dominant force, it works to her advantage in a very natural way. Secondly and more obviously accidentally, the bloody nose she suffers here helps her a lot. Like her less refined offensive execution, it does so in a very specific way, not a real glorious or dramatic kind of injury, but one that denotes a real beating. There’s an element of punishment to it that might not be there for a showier crimson mask, and while you can’t really credit them for something that’s an accident, it’s an incredibly fortunate one that adds so much to Momo’s performance.

On the other end, save for maybe Madison Eagles, no other woman in the last ten to fifteen years has played a better promotional Ace than Io Shirai.

While this is not her absolute crowning achievement, it is a different sort of Ace performance that many others don’t have. Io not only elevates and then dispatches with a challenger not on her level, but does so with such a special performance. It would be easy just to be mean, but that’s not what she is. It would not be easy to do this and still be likeable, but she does that as well. I never would expect to call an Io Shirai performance something that reminds me of Bret Hart, but relatively speaking, it’s that same kind of tightrope. She is casually dominant, occasionally coming off as mean spirited due to the intensity with which she throws basic attacks at an underdog opponent and occasionally gets frustrated, but always still feels like someone worth believing in and supporting.

In terms of what they do in the match, it’s also pretty interesting. As previously mentioned, Io shuts down Watanabe constantly, and while never especially petty or rude about it, there is something still kind of oppressive about it that benefits this match a ton, both when that’s happening, and later on, when it isn’t.

The match breaks open about halfway through when Momo lands a wild kick to the face, and the Io Shirai war machine finally has to roll out of dodge to adjust.

From then on, it maybe doesn’t feel like Watanabe ever has a genuine shot, but the match is open in a way it wasn’t before. Watanabe empties the arsenal, has a few real cool things to offer up, and accords herself a hundred times better than anyone could have expected going on.

Shirai wins with her classical Moonsault following an especially nasty Tombstone, in what, yet again, feels both excessive enough to make a point, and impactful enough to help little Momo out as much as possible.

Probably the last STARDOM match I really genuinely liked, if not the last real great one, and no, I am not interested in hearing from you on that.

***1/3

Io Shirai vs. Nicole Savoy, STARDOM Kyoto Max 2018 (2/4/2018)

This was for Shirai’s Wonder of Stardom Title.

On paper, a neat little variation on the previous year’s Io Shirai vs. Shayna Baszler title match, but in actuality, it’s something that’s just different enough to still feel unique, even if it isn’t quite as great.

Slightly, I mean that in the sense that Savoy is not exactly Baszler in terms of her shootier style work, but primarily, it’s an evolution of that as well, as when confronted with a very similar attack on her arm, she goes to Savoy’s leg instead. The result is something a little more interesting than usual, with Shirai embracing the Tanahashi part of her weird kind of Tanahashi/Ibushi fusion, and given that they actually do a really good job with it, one of the better and more unique matches for STARDOM’s top title.

(Whichever title Io held from December 2015 to mid 2018 was the top belt, sorry.)

What everyone knows is probably going to be great about this delivers as promised. Savoy kicks really hard, does some great stuff to the arm that’s both effective and mean as hell, and Io Shirai is a phenom. An offensive marvel unlike almost nobody else in the entire wrestling world, crisp, reckless feeling in the best way, a magnetic presence on top of that, everything.

The stuff that could easily have just as well not worked is what really makes this, ties it together and so forth, and that is the really really good job of selling on both ends.

Shirai is not quite as good at it as Savoy is, doing that thing where a limb is hurt but then you use it fine for big offense, but she gets just enough right to count, given the level of attention paid to the arm. Holding the arm most of the time, shaking it out, it’s enough when Savoy’s attack is not all that consistent. There is a level of basic attention and respect paid to the work that I want more than anything else, and especially in the last third of this match, Io Shirai does that. Savoy is even better at roughly the same, likewise never delivering maybe the greatest selling performance alive, but always feeling in pain and hindered in a way that serves the match especially well.

Which is sort of the thing with this match in general. Imperfect, but with their hearts and minds just close enough to the right place to count.

They maybe drag the thing out a little long before Shirai’s Moonsault brings them to a conclusion, it is still STARDOM, but there’s so much good and, for the promotion at least, different about this that I don’t care all that much.

A fun reminder that, at one point, STARDOM used to produce some pretty great wrestling matches.

***+

Meiko Satomura/Io Shirai vs. Chihiro Hashimoto/Hiroyo Matsumoto, Sendai Girls Big Show in Osaka 2017 (12/2/2017)

Secretly — or if you’re one of the eight people or so who read reviews of non-famous and/or smaller scale things like this or other Sendai Girls tags, maybe not so secretly, or maybe it is just a secret you know about, I don’t know — there are few more reliable things in wrestling at this point than a Sendai Girls semi main event all star tag.

Your main events for the Sendai Girls World Title or Tag Title might turn out to be great, but they do with far less regularity than the matches before them tend to. There’s a casual greatness on display at all times in matches like these, four women thrown together with pairings essentially picked out of a hat and just riffing it out for fifteen to twenty minutes, and it’s so impressive. These matches demand very little understanding of backstory or anything like that, and really only require a basic kind of wrestling literacy (can you see a bare bones story a match is telling you without an announcer shouting it at you in your native tongue, or do you have a professional wrestling baby mouth?) to understand, and most of the time, to love as well.

Of all of them, this may be the most star studded yet, putting two generational talents in Io Shirai and Meiko Satomura on the same team.

The problem with a lot of these in later years, once the herd thins and they don’t have the roster to constantly deliver by just mixing teams up, is that there is not always a great wrestler in the ring at all times. While less-than-great wrestlers can have a great match, there’s a certain insurance that comes with a pillar of consistency like Satomura or arguably the world’s most sensational wrestler in Io Shirai, and this match is proof of that. At all times, a generationally great wrestler is in the ring with another good to great one, and so there’s no point at which this match slips.

It’s all killer and no filler, with another nice little basic story on top of the fireworks.

With neither team being all that well versed as a tag team, unlike November’s all-star tag, it comes down to the sort of geometry of the thing. Hiroyo is eventually able to catch Io and stop her, and without the spark plug to bail her out and with a stronger and bigger wrestler to help C-Hash, Satomura has to do it one on one again. As the last two years — and the next — will show, against Hashimoto, she simply cannot.

Hashimoto takes her win from November back with the Albright German.

A textbook example of what casual greatness looks like.

***1/6

Io Shirai vs. Shayna Baszler, STARDOM Stardom of Champions 2017 (2/23/2017)

This was for Shirai’s World of Stardom Title.

It is the exact match that I imagine you would want out of an Io Shirai vs. Shayna Baszler match, or at least that I imagine you would want if you’ve found your way into reading this review.

Shirai tries to fly and do wild stuff and Baszler tries like hell to stop her via targeting a limb.

Both attacks are wonderful in their own right.

Shayna Baszler’s attack on the arm is stellar stellar stuff. She’s like a shark taken human form, constantly going wild whenever Io gets close enough to let her sniff even a single drop of blood in the water. Shayna has a way of countering pins into armbars in a way that I’ve found exhausting and phony when people like 2010 Davey Richards have done the same, but that she manages to make feel cool and dangerous. Equally and especially gratifying is the way in which Baszler completely zeroes in on the left arm for the rest of the match, not only delivering something fairly new with such a focused attack on Shirai, but feeling like a real challenge in a way that Io hasn’t had in some time at this point.

Yet again on the other end of the match, the high flying attacks of Io Shirai have a recklessness, force, and utility to them that feels unmatched in wrestling outside of one of her spiritual peers in Kota Ibushi. It is yet another performance from Io Shirai in which I think to myself that someone could call her the best wrestler in the world here, and I wouldn’t care enough to fight it, and might even be won over for a moment or two. In part, that’s also because of her selling of the right arm from Baszler’s attacks. It’s always hurt, she throws likke eighty percent less elbows than she normally might to sell it (please everyone in wrestling take notes), and eventually learns her lesson about pins where she holds onto Shayna after a move. Pure technique that might have beaten other wrestlers is abandoned in the favor of pure artillery and attrition, opting instead to simply bomb out Baszler.

Io drops Shayna with a god damner of a jumping Tombstone Piledriver as a set up instead of German Suplexes, with the fear of God put into her after her previous tries at it, and then puts on an especially impactful feeling Moonsault to keep the title.

The best Different Style Fight in STARDOM history, hitting at the core of what makes those matches work, which is as much a styles clash as it is the simple story of a wrestler called into question and answering emphatically.

***1/4

Io Shirai vs. Viper, STARDOM 6th Anniversary Show (1/15/2017)

This was for Shirai’s World of Stardom Title.

I liked this a whole lot.

Viper, to her credit, was not bad here. Her rope running was kind of awkward early on, and she made a few unfortunate nearfall selling faces (she also made good ones throughout the match, to be fair). Mostly though, her role here is simply to exist as she is. Not super great but a big wrestler with good looking offense where she uses her size real effectively. That doesn’t always lead to great matches, and in fact I can’t recall another match throughout her career even on the same level as this match, but against a wrestler as great as Io Shirai, it does.

In the nicest possible way, she is raw material in the hands of a master craftswoman.

Yet again, Io Shirai turns in an incredible performance. The energy, the striking, the unbelievably hard bumping that turns Viper from a likeable wrestler into a real threat for a few select moments, and especially just in terms of the composition of the thing. It’s so beautifully put together. The immediate attempts to lift Viper that don’t pay off until the end, the way Viper’s offense gets bigger and more impactful, the way Shirai’s gets more and more desperate, the way Viper starts to take bigger chances and only finally loses once one of them fails, it’s maybe not immaculate, but there is so much to love here. It’s yet another one of these Io Shirai performances in the mid to late 2010s where I cannot blame anyone nor would I argue with anyone who comes out of this saying to themselves that this is the best wrestler in the world.

Most of all, the finish is absolutely perfect.

When Viper finally misses off the top, Io crowds her and pours it on. The Moonsault to the back finally sets up Shirai pulling off the German Suplex to Viper that she tried and failed to do multiple times throughout the match. It’s a perfect sort of a finish, not only paying off a repeat spot but giving the overall big vs. small theme an appropriate climax. It is not, however, the coolest possible finish, which is what they opt for instead. After one regular German Suplex, Io instead hauls Viper back up and in a massive figurative and literal flex, wraps her up in the Package German Suplex to pin her.

It’s a wonderful sort of a victory for a character and a wrestler like Io Shirai, the world’s most confident woman and perhaps its most confident wrestler period. Once is a victory a different wrestler would have and that maybe one would expect out of this match coming in, but twice is the kind of statement that just feels right coming from the Ace.

A month after a far more heralded match, this is an Io performance that I enjoyed to a much greater degree. One of the most fun matches of the year to me.

***

Io Shirai vs. Mayu Iwatani, STARDOM Year End Climax 2016 (12/22/2016)

This was for Shirai’s World of Stardom Title.

In the interest of complete honesty, I’ve never entirely understood the acclaim around this match that seemed to spring up as soon as it was over. I didn’t at the time, I didn’t a few years later when I watched it a second time, and I still don’t today.

Maybe it’s one of those cases where a lot of people are seeing something for the first time. This got a lot of wider spread acclaim at the start in ways that better Io Shirai matches didn’t, and while that sort of thing will always annoy me, I do understand it to some extent. The same sort of thing happened a few years later, where it seemed a lot of people began watching deathmatches during Masashi Takeda’s 2018 run. I hate it, of course, but I do get it. I also don’t think that’s entirely it in this case. I know people who adore this match who I either know for a certainty or who I suspect had seen Io Shirai, or at least Peak Io before this match.

Something about it just doesn’t work for me.

I used to think it was the leg work, but on this watch, I didn’t actually care all that much. Yes, Io should have never worked Mayu’s leg even for a few moments. Mayu Iwatani does not have it in her to sell a limb all that well long term. That being said, she really did give it a try for a little bit and given that Shirai never went back to it, it’s not the end of the world. I honestly didn’t care too much about the leg here, and so I know that isn’t it.

I think it’s just Mayu, honestly.

I don’t like her.

She’s a weird and offputting presence to me, and I do not believe in her as genuine on any real level. Something about her unlocks some bullshit Jim Cornette ass part of my brain that I despise, but that constantly screams that this is not real. That’s not to say she can’t be in great matches, such as this, or even contribute to them. Her elbows are especially good here and she’s a perfectly fine tackle dummy for the real star(s). But in matches built around the impulse to want to see her succeed, I almost always wind up finding those matches lacking, simply because I do not want to see her succeed. She offers up nothing, she does not feel like an actual wrestler at this point so much as she does someone pretending, and that gut feeling is only doubled down on when her opponent is generational superathlete and ultramagnetic Io Shirai.

All that being said, on some level, this is still great. Mayu Iwatani, for all her faults, is not quite bad enough here to ruin anything. Certainly, a better wrestler in her role would make for a better match, but Io’s also faced a lot of worse wrestlers in title matches in 2016 as well. It’s a fun athletic match full of a lot of really cool moves and nearfalls and while Mayu is completely dwarfed here, she’s exactly enough of a replacement level wrestler to undermine yet another God level big match Io Shirai performance.

I’m not going to tell you it isn’t great. I am going to tell you that I’m not positive it’s a top five Io Shirai match in 2016, and I am definitely going to tell you it’s not the best World of Stardom match that these two will ever have together.

***