Talk about it here.

This is a beautiful pro wrestling match. Hokuto is still selling the effects of the match with Kandori and has her arm taped up. Yamada treats it like the neon sign it is and goes right for it, and at one point, Hokuto even has to have her arm re-taped. Hokuto's selling may be the best I've ever seen. She pulls off a LOPSIDED German suplex because she can't use one of her arms. I'm really excited about continuing to watch Hokuto in '93.

Hokuto's selling may be the best I've ever seen

Yeah, as awesome as angry, pissed off Dangerous Queen can be, she was just as good if not better playing underdog babyface girl, fighting from the bottom to overcome.

I fell asleep the first time I tried to watch this and almost skipped over it. I'm glad I didn't because it was really good.

 

I liked how few momentum shifts they worked into it. There's basically the "feeling out" (with a nastiness to it -- Hokuto's crazy looking "snap" piledrivers) --> Yamada taking over and working the arm --> Hokuto applying another bandage to the shoulder and taking control after the breather --> Yamada spin kicking her in the fucking teeth --> finishing stretch.

 

I can sometimes be taken out of joshi because the comebacks and transitions occur so regularly, but I thought this was structured and laid out really simply and I enjoyed it quite a bit as a result.

Bumping to add how great the post match was too, loved Hokuto just casually steping on Yamada as she's exiting after laying her out on the floor. Wish we'd have gotten the singles between them 8 months earlier but it was worth the wait.

Finally managed to track this down. Honestly, it was a huge disappointment. I don't know what match everyone else was watching, but in the one I saw, Hokuto's arm barely seemed to be inconveniencing her. Even when she went out to get it re-taped, she did it as casually as if she were going to get a sip of water. And when Yamada went after the arm, she didn't show anywhere near the urgency she did against Kandori.

Well, when you find the match we watched, make sure to let us know and comment on it.

My tone was probably excessively snarky, so I retract that. Regardless, I was quite underwhelmed by Hokuto's selling. The "lopsided German" looked like a regular old German to me. And her overall treatment of the arm pales in comparison to her performance a month prior. When Kandori went after her arm, she frantically scrambled for the ropes like her life depended on it. When Yamada went after her arm, she was basically all "Hey, cut it out, will ya?" The your-turn-my-turn finishing stretch was no picnic either.

I really liked seeing Hokuto still having issues with her arm and selling it during match. Made the match for me that she continued doing that based off previous match.

This was terrific, a real give-and-take struggle with Hokuto going all-out as a sympathetic babyface. Great blend of mat wrestling building to an incredible somersault dive by Hokuto into the bigger moves.

I liked this because the action was good as would be expected from these two, with Yamada's kicks and Hokuto's dives always making things fun. I didn't love it though as it seemed like they dropped the injured arm as a focus very early and then fell into a my turn/your turn routine, almost what I'd expect from a Toyota singles but not on fast forward. Loved the post-match action, but not enough here to make it anything particularly memorable

 

***1/4

The build here was cerebral, with a quiet intensity. Yamada's offence featured plenty of strikes and submissions zoning in on the injured arm. She had the best of it early on, with Akira selling the damage as expertly as usual. The Dangerous Queen had plenty of her own firepower to fight back with. The battle progressed nicely with consistently good work throughout. They didn't need to go full out with thrills and spills. There was an easy quality to everything, with two greats at the peak of their powers.

 

Bad blood afterwards. Hokuto just casually steps on her opponents head on the way back to the locker room like it was nothing!

Great match. While Hokuto doesn't emote as much as say someone like Kobashi does selling the limb, she pretty much refuses to use it or that side of the body the rest of the match which is admirable. Yamada sometimes has this unheralded matches that really deliver and that happened here. This utilized the hot finish based of the groundwork of the arm work and mat wrestling starting out. Cool stuff. ****

I loved Yamada attacking the arm early, and I thought Hokuto sold it just fine. But this being AJW, they had to get to the finish about halfway through, which included suplexes that a person needs two good arms to execute, so all the previous work was forgotten and the match just became a nearfall exhibition.

 

I've never seen a promotion other than this one where the nearfalls have absolutely nothing to do with the rest of the match, as if they exist in their own separate universe entirely. It would probably be better if they just worked their matches like a skill exhibition focusing on nearfalls and had judges at ringside who scores based on how well they were executed and how they tied up the opposing wrestler. Even the postmatch brouhaha didn't really save this for me.

 

Don't get me wrong, these bouts are still infinitely more watchable than the dreck that passes for American women's wrestling at this time (May 1993). Then again, what isn't?