Jaguar Yokota

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[Timbo Slice]

Probably the only female worker I'll consider for my Top 10. When I went back and started going through the AJW Classics, she stood out heads and shoulders above everyone else. Didn't like much of her stuff in Jd', but there were few wrestlers better than her in her prime. She'll be way up there for me.

[Childs]

I've never gotten the intense love Yokota inspired in some corners. And I don't mean that as a knock on her. She was very skilled--way ahead of her time as an offensive wrestler especially. But her performances have always left me a little cold. Right now, I couldn't envision putting her on my ballot over Masami or a few others from the same era. She's someone I'll probably try to revisit for this project.

[ohtani's jacket]

My number one pick. I remember I wrote an impassioned defence of her that impressed at least one person. I have no idea about her this time. It's hard to muster the same kind of enthusiasm for Joshi as I had then as it's in the past and done and dusted. I suspect I will have Chigusa higher this time round.

[Moonsault Marvin]

I was watching joshi matches on Youtube last night, and I came across a 1996 match between Bison Kimura and Jaguar Yokota, in which Jaguar was working a masked gimmick named Li Hua. It was a really violent match with Yokota cutting herself at the end and dripping her blood in Kimura's face. What was the story behind this gimmick and this part of her career?

[El-P]

I was watching joshi matches on Youtube last night, and I came across a 1996 match between Bison Kimura and Jaguar Yokota, in which Jaguar was working a masked gimmick named Li Hua. It was a really violent match with Yokota cutting herself at the end and dripping her blood in Kimura's face. What was the story behind this gimmick and this part of her career?

 

Oh man, totally forgot about this stuff. Jaguar was kinda trying to go back to the 80's with Jd' at the time I seem to remember. Which meant : bloooooood. Kimura was a blood worker anyway, quite a terrific brawler. FLIK could give you more infos if he see this, as I really don't remember the specifics. I got into Jd' a little bit later, although there was always a very 80's element to it, with blood thirsty heels (The Bloody anyone ?).

[Superstar Sleeze]

If we were just going based off coolest names in wrestling, Jaguar Yokota and Lioness Asuka would be number one and two.

[pol]

I've been wondering who started the animal name thing among the Japanese women. There are a ton of them.

[Jetlag]

So, Jaguar. I will now weird out possibly everyone on this board by saying the following: after thinking about Jaguar very hard for a bit, I developed this theory that the Crush Gals ruined joshi with their pathos. Kind of like the Beatles ruined popular music.

 

Late 70s-early 80s AJW is some of the most fascinated wrestling I've watched. I really like the weird mix of matwork, throws, and lucha, the focus on nifty takedowns and throws aswell as the brawling which often comes across like a vicious mauling. Because it's so under explored you never know what you are getting from the workers. Jackie Sato was a great ace and Jaguar stands out as a brilliant wrestler amongst the bunch.

 

Jaguar was def. guilty of many tendencies that later gave so many people headaches when watching the praised 90s joshi. But Jaguar strikes me very much as a "wrestler's wrestler" type. She gets praised for having an ahead of the time moveset, and she is def. in there with Gran Hamada, Mighty Inoue and Hoshino as a really fun stumpy legged 80s proto highflyer. She does so many things in her matches that I would love to have become standards, such as the struggling over basic holds, ability to destroy a limb in very compelling ways or neat defensive spots. Couple this impressive skillset with her relentlesness and sheer intensity, and you get a really compelling package.

 

Now to get back to the initial Crush Gals diss. This probably sounds like a cliche, but when they showed up and got popular, the focus stopped being on the wrestling. The fans who had initially shown up to watch Jackie Sato were replaced by rabid schoolgirls. When I first watched the 70s footage, I noticed how quiet the crowds were. I'm not trying to say that the folks who went to AJW shows in 1980 were gentlemen connoisseurs of grappling or something, but it seems their enjoyment of the action was very close to how people who went to AJPW or NJPW shows enjoyed wrestling. The wresters were stoic. Now compare Chigusa vs. Dump to Jaguar vs. Monster Ripper. Chigusa match is about babyface crying and breaking down while the heel is grotesque. The visuals are just as deafening as the heat. These matches are beloved because they are so in your face and shock rock, but I don't think they are great. Now Jaguar vs. Monster Ripper is about Jaguar using her wrestling, being tenacious and cutting down the beast. Of course Ripper is also grotesque (but still in the normal realm of typical big freakish wrestlers) and Dump is a copy of her. Compare Jaguar vs. Jackie Sato to Chiggy vs. Lioness... former match is fast paced, yeah, but it's just a rough as fuck wrestling match where they turn a basic body scissor spots into holy shit moments... later match is all about emotional tension. Or to go back further, compare to Jackie Sato vs. Vickie Williams... match has interference and foreign objects, but resolves to Sato scoring an impressive takedown and stomping the crap out of the heel.

 

Crush Gals matches are centered around crowd connection over anything else. I found that Lioness Asuka is pretty good when working early 80s style matches and bloody awful afterwards. Chigusa was always bad, I watched her vs. Jaguar from 83 and was tearing my hair out about how bad it was. I felt that Chigusa matches are centered around building towards the crowd connection spot, rather than building toward something in the match narrative. Hence these matches are such a mess. Jaguar matches feel like a fight that build towards a finish and not the dramatic crowd connecting with wrestler moment. You don't see the annoying clapping or forced character work in Jaguar matches. Post-Chigusa wrestlers tried to recreate the effect, resulting in so much joshi being a disjointed mess. Hokuto was kind of like that too, but I think she fixed the formula by centering the crowd connection spots around injury stories. Eventually Meiko Satomura comes around and is back to being an aggressive stoic badass rather than whiny crying babyface.

 

So that's that. Just me trying my best to rationalize why I like Jaguar so much despite much of her work having the same "go, go" characteristic that later stuff has that I don't care for. All that considered, for this project Jaguar is on the bubble for me right now. I've watched a ton of her stuff and found a lot to love, but I think her resume is a little thin for somebody who gets dropped as Top 10 and even #1 contender. Granted, she still looks ridiculously good in 90s stuff and after and clearly leading lesser workers, but I am annoyed about her early retirement and can't find any great matches from afterwards. Still, she has a hell of a peak.

[ohtani's jacket]

The school girls were just as rabid in the mid 70s as they were in the Crush Girls era, but they lost interest after Ueda retired in '79. The late 70s to early 80s period you're talking about was a holdover from the Beauty Pair era. A lot of the time when you watch a random bit of footage from that era, they're touring Guam or Okinawa or somewhere more southern like Kyushu. You'd have to look for a Tokyo crowd from that footage to really compare it with the Crush Girls boom. Jackie was always fairly stoic, though. Chigusa morphed into the same sort of worker as well. It was only really in the early-to-mid 80s that she was an energetic babyface. Satomura was the same in the 90s through to early 00s. She used to cry and do that thing where she'd swing her arms about. I remember the Quebrada guys used to give her a lot of flak for that. Jaguar was more bad ass than any of them. She had an intensity and a fire that was unmatched by either Sato or Chigusa. Satomura never reached that level either. Early 80s Joshi brawling isn't really my thing. It's just as repetitive as the Dump's Army stuff to my mind. Asuka had some decent stuff post-Crush Girls peak but was pretty much the female version of Nobuhiko Takada. Chigusa was a great worker circa 1986.

[Clayton Jones]

Alright help a joshi novice out. Other than the famous Lioness match, what are some key Yokota matches I should be starting with? I just watched her VS Wendi Richter from August 82 which was a good little babyface performance but I'm shooting in the dark on 80s joshi.

[Jetlag]

3 minutes ago, Clayton Jones said:

Alright help a joshi novice out. Other than the famous Lioness match, what are some key Yokota matches I should be starting with? I just watched her VS Wendi Richter from August 82 which was a good little babyface performance but I'm shooting in the dark on 80s joshi.

Her best 80s work that I recall is against Jackie Sato, Monster Ripper, La Galactica, Chino Sato, and Mimi Hagiwara. Also check out her 90s-2000s work, especially the 1996 match against Asuka, which I thought was better than the 80s classic. There are some hidden gems in her JD' work against the likes of Cooga and Megumi Yabushita.

 

I did a Microscope on Jaguar Yokota here mostly focusing on her 70s/80s work:

 

Some saint has uploaded a ton of JD' to the internet archive and I intend to comb through it for more cool Jaguar matches. Her veteran work is really good.

[Clayton Jones]

Awesome, thanks! Yeah I figure I'll be able to navigate the 90s on a bit easier.

[Kadaveri]

37 minutes ago, Clayton Jones said:

Alright help a joshi novice out. Other than the famous Lioness match, what are some key Yokota matches I should be starting with? I just watched her VS Wendi Richter from August 82 which was a good little babyface performance but I'm shooting in the dark on 80s joshi.

Here's 10 other Jaguar matches I'd recommend to get a feel of her in a variety of contexts:

1. Jaguar vs. Chino Sato - AJW 01/04/80
2. Jaguar vs. Jackie Sato - AJW 12/16/80
3. Jaguar & Jackie Sato vs. Jumbo Hori & Nancy Kumi  - AJW 1981
4. Jaguar vs. Monster Ripper - AJW 1982
5. Jaguar vs. Devil Masami - AJW 07/19/82
6. Jaguar & Devil Masami vs. Chigusa Nagayo & Lioness Asuka - 06/28/84
7. Jaguar vs. La Galactica - 02/27/85
8. Jaguar & Lioness Asuka vs. Etsuko Mita & Mima Shimoda - AJW 09/02/95
9. Jaguar vs. Lioness Asuka - JD' Star 04/14/96
10. Jaguar & Devil Masami vs. Candy Okutsu & Dynamite Kansai - JWP 06/15/97

 

[Clayton Jones]

You guys rule. I'm 5 minutes into the Sato match and my mind is already sufficiently blown.

[KB8]

That Jaguar/Jackie Sato match from 12/16/80 is so great. Probably the match that sold me on deep diving 80s joshi in a more broad sense. 

[Grimmas]

This thread and her placement was one of the biggest retrospective mistakes of 2016. She's a #1 candidate and look at how little she was discussed?

From the late 70s she was head's and feet above almost anyone in wrestling and was forced to retire early. She had a match while in retirement that ruled, and when she finally returned, guess what? She ruled again!

Even today she is still really decent, which is kind of insane to think about.

[Noah's_Savior]

Yokota also becomes one of the best wrestlers on the roster relatively quickly too, by the time she's three years in she's already one of the best. As for the animal name theme in AJW with Yokota I'm going to guess it had to do with AJW's two touring buses being Red Phoenix and Blue Jaguar cause you don't get to the boatload of animal names until the later parts of the 80s.

[SegundaCuerda]

Coming from the watch party, and my first post in the forum!

Great stuff, I think I watched like two or three Jaguar matches from AAA before, and now after seeing some of her AJW 80s work I'm amazed.

I love how she does a lot of big moves but everything feels organic, her facial expressions are amazing, she's small but feels like a monster that may win at every moment if she has the chance. The contrast between violent/intense stuff like Galactica match and very technical stuff like the match against Lioness impress me. Great worker. Need to watch more of her and more 80s Joshi but it feels like a safe bet she'll be on my list.

[El Dragon]

So, the first watch party was pretty eye opening for Jaguar, and she has quickly became someone I’d be shocked if she doesn’t make my list. Just from the six matches we watched, I’m pretty sure there are a lot of wrestlers who made the list in 2016 who didn’t have 5 performances better then her performances on those matches. 
 

Need to watch more to see how high, but she’s a shoe in foe the list, and if she has a lot more on top of that, she’s a top 50 player. And to think we got robbed of her 26-35 career by a silly rule at the time.

[Jmare007]

The watch party was a perfect introduction to her. I'm not sure I'm gonna be that into the style, as crazy as it felt it being early 1980's they were doing a whole bunch of stuff and not a lot was able to breathe. But Jaguar stood out at pretty much everything: facial expressions, intensity, selling, playing her role ("heel", face, dominant, underdog, etc.) and some of the stuff she was pulling off was pretty damn crazy for an 18-20 year old kid in a the early 1980's.

The Monster Ripper match was fucking outstanding and my favorite of the ones I was able to watch in the WP.

[MichaelZ]

Her versatility stood out to me. Working on top, working underneath, selling and struggling, mounting a big comeback, matwork, brawling, or big bombs, she did it all at a very high level in everything we watched. She also had just amazing innovative offense and kept delivering surprises. Top notch wrestling and a great start to the watch parties. 

[NotJayTabb]

I'm looking forward to watching more Jaguar now for sure. I can't say for sure that I'd put her in my top 100 in 5 years time just based on one 2hr viewing session, but if the rest of her output is in that ballpark, I think she'd be undeniable 

[elliott]

How did everyone like the Lioness match?

[NotJayTabb]

Its went down very well, total change of pace from the Galactica match before it, really dug the sense of struggle