Manami Toyota

[Kadaveri]

12 hours ago, NintendoLogic said:

The thing with Toyota is that she'd largely blow off long-term selling during the matches but would sell her ass off after the match. The idea is that she was pushing herself to her limits to win and give the fans all she had and felt the effects afterward. It's not my preferred psychology, but there's a clear logic behind it.

Even if that is the thinking, I think it's just a failure and I don't value it at all. I can accept wrestlers doing this kind of thing if they don't blow off selling entirely. Joshi workers do tend to sell less than most, but I don't buy attributing Manami's specific antics to the style when I've seen too many performances where Bull/Hokuto/Aja etc... will still sell some amount of pain/exhaustion when on offense, which does get across that they're pushing themselves to their limits amidst great adversity. Toyota doesn't do that. She'll literally go immediately out of being in brutal submissions for 10 minutes to running around perfectly well like the match just started, rendering everything that happened to that point completely meaningless. If the Undertaker threw Manami Toyota off Hell in a Cell she'd be running around hitting dropkicks 1 minute later like it never happened.

I think the typical Joshi philosophy was having as much action as possible within the confines of sound wrestling. As in, how hard/fast can I possibly go at this point in the match while adequately selling the damage I've already taken and maintaining the story of the match? That's what they're going for. The best workers of that style as much as possible achieve skirting close to the line of 'dropping selling too much to up the action' without crossing it, less good workers will cross the line sometimes. With Manami, it's like she simply doesn't acknowledge the line exists.

[ohtani's jacket]

There's no way you can watch one of Toyota's big matches and not come away thinking she pushed herself to the limit. She leaves it out there on the canvas every time even if she waits until the stretch run in some matches. She was actually quite good at short term selling, or "in the moment" selling, but obviously she wasn't great at long term selling, or callbacks to earlier work, barring the odd exception here and there. I tend to focus on the total impact of the match, but I know that other people like consistency from one moment to the next. Long term selling can be admirable, but if you do it in each and every match, how am I not supposed to believe that your leg or knee is a total wreck? Shouldn't you have a permanent limp and hobble around the entire time? Why are you fine at the beginning of the next match? In that sense, there is no such thing as perfect selling. How often do you watch a Joshi match where they do the submission work in the early going and then by the end of the bout it's meaningless? Aside from being a time killer and a chance to catch their breath, most of the time they're just asserting their dominance over the other worker and doing some trash talking. It's rare that there's any sort of strategic focus to the limbwork. 

If Toyota was thrown off the Hell in a Cell, I think she would sell it until some kind of transition onto offense. I think she'd lay around for longer than a minute. I actually think she'd sell it pretty well. Then she'd get whipped into the ropes, catch herself, and launch a dropkick off the second rope. Something like that. 

[El-P]

Long term selling isn't more realistic than what Toyota was doing. There's no immanence in pro-wrestling where everything is equivalent for everybody in every different context.

Also, long-term selling, as great as it can be, can also be a crutch to produce forced drama (WWE Self-Conscious Epic says hello) or tell a more "coherent story" (although there's no "long-term selling" IRL, long-term selling is a narrative cliché, really) but that doesn't mean it makes for a more interesting or better match. 

Anyway, I agree with OJ about Toyota being actually really good at *selling* in the moment, which is the selling that matters the most. Her selling in submission holds is actually awesome, helped by her great flexibility.

The idea that you need to sell everything *after* a shot/submission is a narrow notion which, again, has nothing realistic about it. Whoever does any sport knows that you can be hurting and "no-sell" while you're going on, or sell at points and not sell anymore after a while/almost immediately (because you're warming up, adrenaline and such).

Toyota has her ideas of what greatness is, you don't need to like it, but you can't deny it. Trying to watch for stuff she isn't trying to do is useless. She's expressing her own style through her wrestling, as they would say, and she absolutely reached and produced greatness through it.

[El Dragon]

2 hours ago, El-P said:

Long term selling isn't more realistic than what Toyota was doing. There's no immanence in pro-wrestling where everything is equivalent for everybody in every different context.

Also, long-term selling, as great as it can be, can also be a crutch to produce forced drama (WWE Self-Conscious Epic says hello) or tell a more "coherent story" (although there's no "long-term selling" IRL, long-term selling is a narrative cliché, really) but that doesn't mean it makes for a more interesting or better match. 

Anyway, I agree with OJ about Toyota being actually really good at *selling* in the moment, which is the selling that matters the most. Her selling in submission holds is actually awesome, helped by her great flexibility.

The idea that you need to sell everything *after* a shot/submission is a narrow notion which, again, has nothing realistic about it. Whoever does any sport knows that you can be hurting and "no-sell" while you're going on, or sell at points and not sell anymore after a while/almost immediately (because you're warming up, adrenaline and such).

Toyota has her ideas of what greatness is, you don't need to like it, but you can't deny it. Trying to watch for stuff she isn't trying to do is useless. She's expressing her own style through her wrestling, as they would say, and she absolutely reached and produced greatness through it.

Having your leg worked over extensively for 15 minutes and then running around hitting dropkicks the moment you go on offense is certainly less realistic then having difficulty running after having your knee bent to pieces, and I don't know how to take the idea that we should just ignore it because "she's expressing her own style". She can express her own style, and I can absolutely deny her idea of greatness is actually great. 

She's had some solid performances in my watching. She's also had 30 minute matches that I would have finished bottom 3 if it were in a "Set" like the DVDVR ones, and that were basically unwatchable by the end. It's possible the more footage I watch I'll get more impressed by, but at the moment, she wouldn't be in my top 250, let alone top 100. Would be a nice surprised if she can win me over though.

[El-P]

17 minutes ago, El Dragon said:

Having your leg worked over extensively for 15 minutes and then running around hitting dropkicks the moment you go on offense is certainly less realistic then having difficulty running after having your knee bent to pieces, and I don't know how to take the idea that we should just ignore it because "she's expressing her own style". She can express her own style, and I can absolutely deny her idea of greatness is actually great. 

I mean, she certainly went way overboard at times, and she absolutely isn't (wasn't, because I haven't watch any of that stuff in probably 15 years) one of may favourites stylistically in this era, but to me the "she doesn't sell" bits doesn't bother me that much because selling certainly wasn't one of her priorities. She had others, in term of pacing, offensive-minded style, a sense of acceleration and culmination of bigger and bigger spots until the apex, a sense of desperation and fighting spirit that absolutely had the audience she was working for go batshit insane for her, the intensity of the work, the bumping, the velocity... Yes, she was not about long-term selling most of the time and yes she could get grating with the way she would run around without much transitions, but she brought up so many other elements at an insane level (that I'm not sure I've seen a lot since). I'm not sure what I'd think of it with my eyes of today, maybe I'll enjoy it less than before, maybe I'll see other stuff that make me enjoy it more, I have honestly no idea.

[Jetlag]

I was thinking that I hadn't watched a single Toyota match in the last 5 years. But then I checked, and apparently I watched her vs. Bison Kimura in 2019. Bison made the match fun. I think I've seen enough Toyota for a lifetime.

[ohtani's jacket]

If the people who are championing women's wrestling this time round don't like Toyota then I guess there's not much hope for her. I don't understand how people can go through the footage and not understand her better, but if that's how people feel then there's not much that can be done about it. 

[El-P]

She was one of the only 4 women who made it last time. She'll probably do fine. She will get people supporting her case.

[ohtani's jacket]

Only four women made it last time? WTF.

[elliott]

13 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

If the people who are championing women's wrestling this time round don't like Toyota then I guess there's not much hope for her. I don't understand how people can go through the footage and not understand her better, but if that's how people feel then there's not much that can be done about it. 

Honestly I expect to vote for her in the top 50. But I'm still in the poking and prodding asking people questions stages of the project before making the full cases for folks. 

[El Dragon]

2 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Only four women made it last time? WTF.

Yeah, it was a talking point for a while. Only Kong, Toyota, Hokuto, and Bull made it last time, with Chigusa (110), Jaguar (114), Dynamite (125), Meiko (130), Ozaki (133), Devil (135), and Kandori (146) getting somewhat close. I imagine at least half of those make the top 100 this time if the push is strong enough. 

[El-P]

15 minutes ago, ohtani's jacket said:

Only four women made it last time? WTF.

Yep. 14 made it in 2006 (Hokuto highest at 15). In 2016, only Hokuto, Bull, Aja & Manami made it back. Aja was the highest at 49 (!) and Hokuto was second at 52. Yep.... 

[El-P]

1 minute ago, El Dragon said:

I imagine at least half of those make the top 100 this time if the push is strong enough. 

Hopefully more than this. Plus Yoshida plus plus plus...

[Boss Rock]

I remember when I first joined the board I would comb through the 2016 list and see where each wrestler landed in 2006. It certainly seems like joshi took the biggest hit in between votes.

[elliott]

My hope isnt just for the top tier making the top 100. It's the next tier pulling votes too. I'd love it if someone else is going nuts for Takako Inoue or Chikayo Nagashima. I dont expect them to make the final top 100 but itd be awesome to see them challenging for the top 200 or 250. 

Yoshida needs to be in the top 100 for sure. 

But anyway, Toyota was an awesome pro wrestler. Those Aja Kong matches everyone loves arent carry jobs they are 2 brilliant wrestlers with incredible chemistry having world class matches. I'll have more to say about her as the project wears on but imagining 90s Joshi without Manami Toyota is a less fun universe. 

[Boss Rock]

I'm in mostly the same boat. She has her flaws and annoyances but I can't picture a ballot without her on it somewhere.

[El Dragon]

Just now, Boss Rock said:

I remember when I first joined the board I would comb through the 2016 list and see where each wrestler landed in 2006. It certainly seems like joshi took the biggest hit in between votes.

The big blows tend to have been Joshi, Lucha (More on the basis the highest of the highs felt like they finished significantly too low, Negro Casas in particular), and World of Sport (Only Breaks made it). I think the availability of Joshi in comparison to WoS makes that make sense to me.

[El-P]

5 minutes ago, elliott said:

Yoshida needs to be in the top 100 for sure. 

She was in 2006 and I take full credit for that one.  

[elliott]

1 minute ago, El-P said:

She was in 2006 and I take full credit for that one.  

You deserve it! Hahaha! 

[Kadaveri]

1 hour ago, El-P said:

Hopefully more than this. Plus Yoshida plus plus plus...

Oh Yoshida's gonna rank for me and I'll write a lot about her at some point. Her Arsion run where she'll float between a purely mat/technical style to incorporating more power moves depending on her opponent/how the match develops is exactly what I want from a wrestler. Much better than Toyota

But back to Toyota, and to make something clearly, my issues with her selling aren't concerns about 'realism'. I don't really care about realism in wrestling. What I care about is making matches compelling, stuff being meaningful, keeping things fresh and adapting appropriately according to the situation. For example I absolutely loved AJ Styles vs. Brock Lesnar where AJ's flying around staying out of Brock's grasp and attacking his legs to slowly chop the beast down. That's a cool narrative and shows AJ has a brain and is constructing a match that it makes sense for him to have specifcally against Lesnar. Is it realistic? Of course not, realism means Lesnar crushing him in 5 seconds. I don't care.

Toyota's style of "sell absolutely nothing once you go on offense" doesn't irritate me because it's not realistic, it's irritates me because it ruins matches for me. It's not compelling at all. Especially when you watch a bunch of them, and you start to notice that in singles (in tags she's different) Manami has basically the same approach to every match no matter who it is or what her opponent does. Her opponent gets on offense, often submissions, Manami will scream like she's being tortured to death and contort herself all over the place. Eventually she'll turn things around and she'll sprint around hitting loads of dropkicks/big moves as fast as she can without selling even 1% of anything. It's the same thing every time. You could work her legs for 10 minutes, work her left hand, just slap her in the head for ages, it's all irrelevant as what comes next will always be her running around hitting moves like it never happened. Her opponents are irrelevant to her. The story of a match to that point is irrelevant to her. Sure, she's an incredible athlete and the speed at which she hits her moves is astonishing, but she might as well just do segments called "exhibition of Manami Toyota hitting moves super fast" and skip the whole wrestling match thing. It'd be of equal substance.

And I'll accept that she did have audiences go batshit for her, with a big caveat. Over time it becomes just the frantic movefests they're reacting to, and nothing else. An example of this I've rewatched recently is the 01/04/92 show which has two big matches. 1. Manami Toyota vs. Toshiyo Yamada in the semi-main and 2. Akira Hokuto vs. Kyoko Inoue going last.

Watch the Toyota-Yamada match, and you'll see for the first 20 minutes or so that crowd is dead as hell. You can see the fans in the front row turning to each other chatting and not paying much attention. It wasn't like this a year back, but by now Manami's style has trained audiences that nothing in her matches means anything until her sprinting movefest starts. That's what they're waiting to see. The match as a whole, they honestly don't seem interested at all. I'd be much kinder to this if they'd just get straight to the crazy moves right at the beginning and not waste my time. Sprinty spotfests have a place.

Then we have the Hokuto vs. Inoue match right after, where you'll see this isn't just part of the style or that crowd being bad. They're really engaged throughout this whole thing, in fact they're about as loud in the first 5 minutes of Hokuto vs. Inoue as they were at any point in the Toyota-Yamada match. They're invested in the outcome, Kyoko is really over as a babyface and they're rooting for her to win, and the wrestlers react and play to that and get the crowd into it even more without doing anything that spectacular yet.

Now I get that Manami's way of having matches is 'her style' and that she's consciously chosen to abandon certain fundamentals of wrestling in favour of other priorities. That doesn't mean it's great. After all that though, there's still a chance she makes my Top 100 because the Aja & Hokuto matches are so great and despite her aggravating habits in singles matches she's still been in some of best tag matches ever. The nature of tag matches either hides the serious flaws in her style, or she just doesn't feel the need to indulge in it in this context. I'll have to think that one through more though.

[El-P]

15 minutes ago, Kadaveri said:

And I'll accept that she did have audiences go batshit for her, with a big caveat. Over time it becomes just the frantic movefests they're reacting to, and nothing else. An example of this I've rewatched recently is the 01/04/92 show which has two big matches. 1. Manami Toyota vs. Toshiyo Yamada in the semi-main and 2. Akira Hokuto vs. Kyoko Inoue going last.

I actually wrote about it a long, long time ago. I loved Hokuto vs Kyoko, which was a MOTYC to me and hated that particular Toyota vs Yamada match, which I thought was a complete debacle. A rare instance of two workers who had a classic match the same year a few months later (the hair match) but totally laid an egg there.

Again, Toyota was never a favorite of mine. There's plenty great joshi workers from any era I'd rather watch. But I still consider her a great worker. 

As far as Yoshida being better than Toyota, of course she was.  

[Noah's_Savior]

For someone who in the 90s held the mentalities that she was the best and that she couldn't get hurt cause she was young, her habits (good and bad however you see them) make more sense. Toyota is on my early list of wrestlers I need to deep dive, I watched most of her highly recommended stuff when I was just getting into wrestling that wasn't WWE and was watching a bunch of japanese matches with no context because reddit said that was the best woman to ever lace up boots. Right now she'll probably land around 60-100 for me just based on my personal tastes but time will tell.

[ohtani's jacket]

I watched the 1/4/92 Toyota/Yamada match for argument’s sake. I didn’t see any huge problems with it. I quite liked the opening with Toyota taking on Yanada at her own game and the pair jostling for position. You don’t see that type of thing very often in a Toyota match, especially Toyota having to defend herself after a takedown. It’s not the type of action that’s going to pop the crowd, but I didn’t have a problem with that since it’s a long match that ends in a Toyota chant. I guess they could have chain wrestled for a bit before resetting and circling each other. That may have drawn some applause, but I don’t think it would have added anything to the match.  

I thought Toyota’s selling was beautiful throughout the match. She doesn’t get enough credit for how well she sells. Would it have been better if she grimaced or sold the leg after the dropkicks? Maybe. She actually runs around the outside of the ring at one point trying to shake it off. If you watch closely, the dropkick attacks are really only short adrenaline bursts. She’s very good at selling the affect effects of the energy she puts into those attacks. You can see her frustration grow with each failed pin attempt and it gets harder and harder for her to get up after every nearfall. The thing about the legwork is that it really wasn’t a focal point of the match. It’s not like Yanada spent an inordinate amount of time working over the knee and Toyota blew it off. She was stretching Toyota at best, and it was the accumulative effect of wrestling such a long match that Toyota wound up selling. And as I mentioned above, Yanada did exactly the same thing when she switched to offense after being stretched by Toyota because that’s what all Joshi pro wrestlers.  

Things fall apart a bit wth the restarts, and the latter half of the match has too much bomb throwing, but it also earns a Toyota chant from the crowd, and they clearly support her desire to not let it end in a draw.   Is it a good match? It’s long and repetitious to an extent, but I’d hardly call it a train wreck and I don’t think it’s a very good example of poor selling from Toyota or questionable match structure. It’s just longer than it needed to be because of the narrative that they’re inseparably close as rivals and competitors.  

I will watch the Hokuto/Kyoko match later.

[ohtani's jacket]

I watched the Hokuto/Kyoko match. That was a hideous costume that Kyoko wore. I was glad when she ditched the mask because the last thing you want from a Kyoko Inoue match is a bout where you can't see her expressions.

The beginning of the bout was more of a crowd pleaser, though the work wasn't anything special, and Hokuto did a front flip that people would hate if other workers did it. This match was during the weird period where schoolgirls were still coming to the shows, and for whatever reason they liked Hokuto and Kyoko much more than Toyota and Yamada. I don't think that had anything to do with the match or the wrestlers' work. They were cheering for Kyoko from the get-go, and later on they made their own original cheer for Hokuto. Kyoko sold her leg the way you're supposed to in this match and then she completely blew it off. Just like every Joshi pro wrestler does. Kyoko's selling in this match was actually kind of weak, but she was young. Hokuto was the better seller at this point. There were a few notable things about her. Firstly, her transitions onto offense were smarter than her peers, and she didn't do the same pop-up selling as Toyota. They could both counter with a missile dropkick and Toyota's would be a million miles an hour and Hokuto's would be slow and deliberate. I could see how that would have a lot more resonance for folks. That said, I thought Toyota's overall selling was better than Hokuto. Where Hokuto shines is her intensity on offense. Very few Joshi pro-wrestlers can match the impact with which she delivers her moves. She blows two nearfalls in this match, which I don't think she should get a pass for, but she is better on offense than the other three. Perhaps that's what makes the ending anti-climatic and unrealistic. I didn't really buy the finish myself. Pretty much my entire feeling about this show was that both pairings had better matches against each on different cards. I don't think Hokuto and Kyoko showed up Toyota and Yamada, though. It's pretty close to which was the better match. I can't decide because I viewed it through the lens of the argument that was presented. However, I will say that Hokuto was nowhere near as good as Dangerous Queen Hokuto and this match did little to push the arguments being presented thus far. 

[Tetsujin]

More Toyota love here. Not somebody I can see myself putting her in the top 10 ir anything closer like other joshi stars like Kong or Hokuto, but I don't think she'll be outside my top 75 or so. I love her inmediate selling, I love how cool she looks while attacking and how much value she gives to her unlimited arsenal, something very difficult to me. I understand and even share the main issues people can have with her style, but I don't think those hurt her case as an amazing worker deserving a spot on the list. Just not as high as she could have been.