Matches like this make my job more difficult than they should be. I was always taught that if you can’t express how you feel without swearing, then you aren’t expressing yourself properly, something I now believe to be a load of nonsense because this, this match right here, Kana vs. Arisa Nakajima, was f****** awesome.
JWP, short for the Japanese Women’s Pro-Wrestling Project, was a promotion born out of the success of All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling in the 1990s. However, it was also a promotion that took advantage of AJW’s strict rules regarding its performers, such as the “three no’s” of no drinking, no smoking, and no boys to maintain a clean-cut image, and the main rule JWP and other promotions like them benefited from, AJW wanting its roster to retire by the age of 25. That rule seems ludicrous by today’s standards, but JWP gave Joshi stars who weren’t ready to hang up their boots a home, and by 2013, JWP had survived the dark ages of Joshi wrestling, and AJW had been dead for over eight years.
The ace of the promotion was Arisa Nakajima, who had spent basically her entire career with JWP after signing with the promotion just a few months after her in-ring debut. She would achieve basically everything there is to achieve in JWP by 2013, but she would encounter a freelancer who had her number, Kana. During one of her many JWP appearances, Kana captured the JWP Openweight Championship from Nakajima. In response, Nakajima became a lot more serious and brooding, and eventually she was granted a chance to get her title back from Kana at JWP’s last major show of 2013.
Kana wastes no time in sneaking up behind Nakajima at the start, hitting her with a German Suplex and spraying her with purple mist, and before you know it, we have a dogfight on our hands. The first third of the match is spent in the crowd as both women beat enough tar out of each other that they could resurface a road. Chairs are thrown, crowd members are pushed, the signs telling the fans where to sit are almost knocked off the wall. Even if things are nailed down, Kana and Nakajima would find a way to throw it at each other.
Then the action gets to the ring and it’s nearly 20 minutes of two warriors struggling to keep it together. They secure submissions but can’t hold them, throw strikes that don’t drop their opponents, and headbutt each other to the point where Katsuyori Shibata’s ears started perking up. In the end, it’s Nakajima who just about keeps Kana down after a bridging German Suplex, barely beating the 30 minute time limit, and winning back her JWP Openweight Championship in the process. Like a lot of Joshi matches from this time, it isn’t easy to find, but seek it out regardless because it is a sight to behold.
