Discuss here.

She has always struck me as one of the best wrestlers of post-boom Joshi. My instinct is that she doesn't have enough high end stuff to have a strong case, but I'm not sure that instinct is correct. Really terrific at doing complex finishing stretches and a pretty versatile worker to boot. Everyone should check out the singles match with Satomura from GAEA in January 1999, where she looks like the second coming of Mariko Yoshida.

Easily the best worker in GAEA, she was incredible to watch. One of best wrestler of post-boom joshi sounds perfectly right to me. Her vs Yumi Fukawa was the dream match that never happened.

Match recs for her? Only know her as veteran worker who feuded with Sonoko Kato.

I nominated Nagashima based on decade+ long memories and seeing all the activity in the Satomura thread reminded me "wait a minute, Chikayo Nagashima fucking rocked!" I absolutely preferred Nagashima to Satomura in late 90s/early 00s Gaea. Satomura got most of the love back then from joshi fans and the promotion but I always looked forward to Nagashima matches more than Satomura when new tapes would come. Loss hits it right on, as usual, by highlighting her strength in working complex finishing stretches. She almost reminded me of a joshi version of Dan Kroffat in that sense. She was definitely a dynamic tag wrestler and was able to successfully play underdog babyface and cocky prick heel inspite of her size. I remember when Ozaki took her under her wing and Nagashima really started to develop a cocky heel persona, that I always thought she would have been the perfect female member of KDX.

 

She was probably better in tags than in singles matches. I remember being really really excited for a Lynch tape with a long (like 27minutes) Satomura vs Nagashima singles match from 2002 or 2003 that I ended up absolutely hating at the time. I haven't watched either of them since to be honest.

 

But I look forward to revisiting her early career and I was really glad to see the praise she got in the yearbook threads from Loss.

 

Also, I'll never forget the Dean Rasmussen quote about Nagashima from an old dvdvr "I have seen the future and it wears tiny yellow pants!" That still makes me laugh.

If she tagged under Ozaki I want to see it. What should I seek out?

'99 was her peak. The tag with her and Sugar Sato beating Aja/Ozaki is right up there Aja vs. Meiko for the best match in GAEA that year. She also had a pretty good singles match with Aja on a Oz Academy show too.

 

The last few years she's been really good at shooting herself in the foot when it comes to her performances. She'll being going along and you start thinking to yourself "Wow, Nagashima looks why was I down on her?" Then she'll do something incredibly stupid like a finisher/pop up sequence then you remember why. Definitely someone who should have been better but wasn't because she couldn't kick her bad habits.

Uematsu/Sugar Sato vs. Satomura/Nagashima from '96 is really good and readily available online. Big Japan was fun in the early days. This is a ten minute sprint done right, where everyone's going a 100mph but still hitting really textbook aerial stuff and working offense that would still make sense at half speed. The dropkicks alone here are fantastic.

Having rewatched some Nagashima in the early 00s, I still really like her. A fun mixture of mat work, flying & unique ideas. Sometimes it didn't work and it would get kinda sloppy and other times it would and she'd do a hurricanrana inside a giant bag and it would be the greatest spot ever. Street Fight with Sugar Sato in 2002 is one of my favorite matches of early 00s Japan. Great wrestler. Better than Satomura for a few years there. 

 

On 5/1/2023 at 4:01 AM, elliott said:

Having rewatched some Nagashima in the early 00s, I still really like her. A fun mixture of mat work, flying & unique ideas. Sometimes it didn't work and it would get kinda sloppy and other times it would and she'd do a hurricanrana inside a giant bag and it would be the greatest spot ever. Street Fight with Sugar Sato in 2002 is one of my favorite matches of early 00s Japan. Great wrestler. Better than Satomura for a few years there. 

His work in GAEA is awesome and I agree, at one point she was better than Meiko Satomura. 

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1kE94L6jW6TIoxjnxjYGgR1rGQaiESFIt_1dRDY-ZExI/edit#gid=0 

There's a lot of Chikayo Nagashima's matches here.

Fun tag worker in her prime, pretty great longevity as well to boot considering she's still wrestling in Marvellous to this day having good to solid outings. Will not be in the top 100 as I think she never quite broke the mid-card ceiling she had over her head, her depth of work post-GAEA is a little lacking as well.