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Aja Kong


Grimmas

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Aja is the type that I think does better than she should in these types of things because she has an in-ring style that's more accessible for people who don't like Joshi. And there's plenty to like about her for sure - she was an excellent world champion taking on all comers for 2 1/2 years, which is really where the bulk of her case resides. Outside of that, her two-year chase of Bull produced some genuinely great matches and she had one-offs against wrestlers like Satomura, Kyoko Inoue and Yoshida after 1995 that I think were also excellent. I have no doubt she will make my top 100. But I'm not 100% sure she is in the first tier for Joshi. It's possible she is, but she has quite a few annoying habits, the most obvious of which are the crowdhugging brawls and excessive garbage can shots. I don't think Aja as #1 overall in the world of Joshi is a ridiculous idea, but I also hope people who like her on the surface will give some others a chance too. I'll come back with some recommendations.

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Aja was good at being Aja. She was never a favourite of mine as I much preferred the role Kansai played in JWP or even Devil for that matter, and Bull was a better worker who didn't necessarily have better matches. The one point I would put in Aja's favour is when AJW transitioned into their own version of 6/3/94, 6/9/95 style matches she was very good at structuring those main events. Personally I don't think her opponents got enough credit for how hard they worked from underneath, but Aja played her role well and I can understand why she was popular.

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In my initial review, I'm finding Aja has too many structural and emoting issues for me to put her in my top 100 list. There doesn't seem to be a sense of proportion to her matches and her offense tends to go over the top for me. Working an undercard person means you don't really have to break out 3 piledrivers for a near fall as well as one on the outside of the ring. I think if she did less and paced it better, her work would be more enjoyable. As it is, she tends to do the same things regardless of the level of opponent and it lessens the impact. I think her facials are weak in that the expression hardly changes as the match progresses, including at times when she should be selling in a hold. There were brief times where she would break out a grin on offense that was effective but it was so muted and infrequent that it wasn't as effective as it could be.

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She had no problem emoting for the audience she wrestled for. They all knew what her character was and why she was stone faced. You may like expressive, emotive workers with great selling and facial expressions, but that doesn't fly for an ace working from the top in Japan. When she was an up and comer, she would get on the house mic and over emote, but The Woman doesn't do that. The Woman chastises other workers for not being strong enough and so forth. She's meant to be a tough stoic character and managed to portray that well.

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I haven't done the legwork on Aja yet, but I think this discussion raises an interesting question.

 

How much credit do you give someone for working a style that the crowd appreciates or what they want to see even if certain elements of it goes against what you think good wrestling is?

 

The logical conclusion to this is Davey Richards or some really successful garbage wrestler. What's the difference between Aja working a match that's perfect for her crowd and Davey working a match that's perfect for his? They both take quite a bit of care and understanding. I think we, as a community, brutalize some people for that and then use it to downplay and rationalize away things we don't like when it comes to others.

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You don't have to like Aja being stoic. It can be a reason for voting other people above her if you value facial expressions and great acting. I find her one dimensional myself, but I think it's a bit presumptuous to say she did something wrong. It's not really the case that Aja has emoting issues, it's that Goodear has issues with her emoting.

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I haven't done the legwork on Aja yet, but I think this discussion raises an interesting question.

 

How much credit do you give someone for working a style that the crowd appreciates or what they want to see even if certain elements of it goes against what you think good wrestling is?

 

The logical conclusion to this is Davey Richards or some really successful garbage wrestler. What's the difference between Aja working a match that's perfect for her crowd and Davey working a match that's perfect for his? They both take quite a bit of care and understanding. I think we, as a community, brutalize some people for that and then use it to downplay and rationalize away things we don't like when it comes to others.

 

I agree people get hypocritical with that line of reasoning, and I include myself in that. But I'll say that for GOAT, I won't vote for wrestlers who succeeded doing what they intended and satisfied the audience but pursued an aesthetic I dislike. So for example, no Manami Toyota despite how remarkable a performer she was in some ways. If I dread watching you, you're not making my list.

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Aja was my first favorite joshi wrestler, on the basis of seeing 1 whole joshi match for my first few years of smarkdom. Since I've been watching Yearbooks, Dynamite Kansai has passed her from a match quality and personal enjoyment standpoint. I like Aja quite a bit still, but her flaws are more apparent. I *don't* have a flaw with her emoting or lack thereof. The Japanese women tend to wear their emotions on their sleeve in contrast to the stoicism of their male counterparts, so when you have one exception like Aja who DOESN'T emote that much, she stands out that much more.

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Top 50 for sure. Work is too good in my eyes.

 

To answer Matt's question about working for the crowd, the answer is that there's a larger number of people who hate the style Davey represents. Joshi crowds went toward the Toyota style because it was exciting, so Aja, who worked the "better" style that people like Kansai, Hokuto and Bull worked had to adapt to what the crowd wanted to keep up. That's why many people saw the 6/6/97 Kawada/Misawa match as a turning point for AJPW's style due to what Kobashi did. In many ways, Aja's style died with the rise of Toyota. She just did what she could to keep up.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I was thinking that another feather in Aja's cap is that she was still good and had more strong years even after her run as WWWA champ was over. Compare that to someone like Toyota, who really felt like a has been the moment she dropped the title. (I realize Toyota had some standout matches after that, but they were rare.)

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Do you mean after Toyota dropped the belt in 2002 or '96? The degree of difficulty in Toyota continuing to have good matches isn't the same as with Aja, so it wouldn't factor into my consideration of the two, but there's no argument that since the bottom fell out of Joshi that Aja has had the better in ring career. I'm not sure whether you'd call it great. If not for Satomura, I doubt too many people would be paying attention.

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They still kept her pretty strong from '97-99 since was one of the few who didn't leave in the exodus. She put Ito over in the '97 Grand Prix then won it herself in both '98 and '99. During '97-98, she probably had as many recommended matches as Aja. Chigusa then tapped into something good with Aja in GAEA. AJW could have put the belt back on Toyota in '97, and maybe should have, but were trying something new.

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  • 4 weeks later...

I've gone through a lot of Aja, and here are my impressions:

 

Pros

  • Well, obviously her brutal offence is the most eye-catching thing about Aja. I think she has an all-time great splash (just looks like she's crushing girls with it), her suplexes look killer and reckless in a good way (unlike some of her kicks), and I love the Uraken, especially when it comes out of nowhere.
  • She might have the best cut-offs in all of wrestling. What I love about them is just how pissed off she appears that her opponent even tried to make a comeback. Probably my favourite spot of hers is when she'll allow her opponent to go toe to toe with her in a slap exchange, almost like it's for sport, then get bored and just slap the shit out of them.
  • She definitely had the aura of 'the woman', and carried herself like the baddest bitch on the planet. I half believe she was.
  • I like her as a tag team worker too. I liked the way she'd tweak her own signature stuff to include her partner, or work herself into her partner's signature offence. I'm thinking right now of slingshotting opponents into Bull's lariat, but I know there were other examples.

Cons

  • I think a lot of her faults are really borne out of the things she is so good at. For example, I definitely think she could have moderated her offence a little. I think it was Goodear who brought this up earlier and I agree. I'm not knowledgeable enough about joshi to understand the status of all the different girls, but there were times when it seemed she was letting lesser opponents kick out of too much shit. She could also overuse the Uraken, and, as I mentioned above, some of her kicks in particular looked needlessly stiff. OJ made a good point about her opponents not always getting enough credit for working underneath, and shit, I wouldn't have wanted to be in some of these girls' shoes (poor Hotta).
  • Minor criticism considering the role she played, but there were times when I wish she'd have been better at showing vulnerability. Not taking offence, as she definitely didn't have a problem with that, but just general selling that she's in trouble, garnering sympathy etc.
  • That stupid biscuit tin or whatever it is.

To me, Aja is one of the best monster wrestlers/big (wo)men wrestlers there's been. Not my favourite joshi worker, and likely not the one I'll rank highest, but she will do very well on my list I suspect. I also wanted to touch on the idea that she wasn't a good emoter. I disagree, and thought she emoted fine for the position she was in. The fact that she was so stoic made it stand out all the more when she'd bust out a taunt or whatever. I marked out when, after tapping some girl out (can't remember who it was) who had been trying to work a cross armbreaker all match, Aja gave a cheeky little wink. Her general stoic demeanour makes stuff like that stand out all the more.

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  • 1 year later...
  • 5 years later...
26 minutes ago, elliott said:

With the talk in the Toyota thread about her blowing off selling, I'm wondering how folks feel about the criticism that Aja bumped around too much for smaller opponents given her monster persona. 

That it's as irrelevant as people saying the same thing about Vader. It's what contributed to make Aja so great for the style she was going after. 

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42 minutes ago, elliott said:

With the talk in the Toyota thread about her blowing off selling, I'm wondering how folks feel about the criticism that Aja bumped around too much for smaller opponents given her monster persona. 

That this is wrong and it comes from transferring the roles of men's wrestling into Joshi when they're not the same. Joshi very rarely has giants/superheavyweights that are common in men's wrestling, because they just aren't many women who're actually big enough to play that role. The size difference between Aja and e.g. Manami Toyota is on the Stan Hansen-Toshiaki Kawada scale (if Kawada were a few inches taller). Her 'monster persona' is more about her ruthlessness and skill in inflicting brutality than just her size.

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I think with Aja, she was big enough that she could be a convincing monster but she didn't necessarily tower over everyone to the point where opponents getting the better of her didn't look unrealistic.

As it stands, she's my highest-ranked joshi wrestler just barely edging out Hokuto. I'd like to see more of her later career but she's a pretty strong "peak+longevity" candidate. She's not very good now based on her recent AEW showings, but she had a great match as recent as 2018 against Shida. She's a pretty strong top 20 candidate.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I ranked Aja 29th in 2016 and I feel great about that. She finished 49th overall with an average vote of 39 so I'm still ahead of the curve even if she's a little low. The Aja watching I'm planning on doing will all come from the last 15 years so I can get an idea of how long she's been great. Her peak is undeniable and what I've seen of the post peak is pretty undeniable too. I don't quite have her in my top tier of women wrestlers, but she's like the top of tier 2. 

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As with Bull, I'm fairly new to Aja, but she's freaking incredible so while she may go down once I check out more people, she's currently my working number 2. The 3/27/94 tag with Bull against Akira Hokuto and Shinobu Kandori blew my mind, as did the 10/89 tag vs Marine Wolves. 4/25/92 vs Bull is insanely great, and there are a bunch of other singles and tag matches which have been amongst the very best of the limited amount of joshi I've seen since I started watching recently. 

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45 minutes ago, Marksman said:

as did the 10/89 tag vs Marine Wolves.

You know until some YouTuber uploaded this 2 months ago I'd never seen anyone even mention this match and there was total consensus that Aja had zero noteworthy matches until 1990. Wild that something so great was just sitting in someone's tape collection for so long.

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I had Aja at number 57 in 2016, which is probably too low, but I wouldn't put too much stock in any of my joshi picks from five years ago, because as a style (broad, I know) it'll be represented waaaaay differently in five years. Aja was always one of the joshi candidates that resonated most with me - as someone who had struggled a bit with joshi for over a decade - just because she did a number of things that I guess you'd call "outliers" stylistically. I've watched more joshi over the last year than I had in probably the previous twelve combined, and at this stage I'm not even sure how accurate that is, but I do think she's more accessible to people who otherwise don't love joshi at large. It's not even that I love joshi myself, I just feel like Aja stands out less now than she did before. All the things I liked about Aja before are still there, though. She's a wrecking ball and her peak was great. She has a shit load of good-to-great matches. She's more versatile than I think some would give her credit for. She's Aja Kong and I don't think there's a whole lot more than needs to be said about her. 

 

AJA KONG YOU SHOULD WATCH:

w/Bison Kimura v Manami Toyota & Esther Moreno (AJW, 4/29/91)

v Yumiko Hotta (AJW, 1/24/94)

v Manami Toyota (AJW, 11/20/94)

v Meiko Satomura (GAEA, 9/15/99)

v KAORU (GAEA, 2/13/00)

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