Mayumi Ozaki

[Grimmas]

Discuss here.

[ohtani's jacket]

Previously one of my all-time favourites and perhaps my pick for the best actor in all of wrestling. Haven't thought about her for a long time. Even when I was a fan, you had to gloss over the fact that she botched a lot of moves. That's easy to do if you buy into her character, but I'm not all that keen on revisiting her unless it's new stuff I haven't seen. The JWP promotion really was wonderful though. It was such a tiny indy but the girls were like a close knit family. I have fond memories of the promotion and watching the TV.

[El-P]

What Dan said. Oz ! The bitchiest.

[Jimmy Redman]

This bird is great. I've really enjoyed her going through my joshi binge. She's a pipsqueak little thing but she will out-bitch everyone else in sight, throwing in these really cool little heel touches while everyone else is running around dropping bombs.

 

I'd love to see more of her too, if anyone has recommendations.

[WingedEagle]

Bull, Hokuto, Kong, Toyota, perhaps Nagayo. Those are the only joshi performers who will rank ahead of her on my list. But Oz will absolutely rank. A personal favorite heel performer. Brought so much subtlety to the table. Only question is how high I can justify her.

[ohtani's jacket]

On pure talent and ability alone she'd be in my top 30. The two problems with Oz are that she was sloppy at times ala Tenryu and that she's produced 15 odd years of dreck since 2000. The latter I don't really care about since I was always more concerned with how good workers were at their absolute peak, but it's a long period to ignore. As an actress (in wrestling), I think she was unparalleled. As a character, there were few better. As a seller, she's in my top five all-time men or women. I would sooner vote for her than most workers who will end up in the official top 30, but again it's whether you can excuse the second half of her career.

[donsem43]

I'd love to see more of her too, if anyone has recommendations.

 

Pretty much all of her street fights from around her peak are pretty good if not great. The ones with Kansai get the most talk but my personal favourite is the 2/28/99 one vs. Mima Shimoda in Oz Academy. Also checkout her 7/18/99 tag with Aja vs. Sugar Sato/Chikayo Nagashima in GAEA, which I don't think made the '99 yearbook.

 

Her more recent stuff is frustrating to watch cause there are so many run-ins and interference spots that it just becomes annoying to watch. In the rare time were there isn't much of that crap you can still see that Ozaki can be a good worker, but that doesn't happen often enough.

[Bierschwale]

 

I'd love to see more of her too, if anyone has recommendations.

 

Pretty much all of her street fights from around her peak are pretty good if not great. The ones with Kansai get the most talk but my personal favourite is the 2/28/99 one vs. Mima Shimoda in Oz Academy.

 

I've never seen a match that made me think of Christmas more than Mima-Oz.

[Noah's_Savior]

Ozaki is the first on my list for career watch throughs to see where I land on her beyond personal bias, she was my first favorite joshi wrestler when I first started watching 90s joshi.

[elliott]

I know she went the garbagy brawling route in the 2nd half of her career, but I'm wondering if anyone is super familiar with that era and can point to anything worth watching? The first half of her career guarantees her a spot on my list.

Even if this was a top 50 list instead of a top 100, Ozaki is a lock. She's one of the great workers of her generation during her peak. Able to work compelling matches with legends above her station like Chigusa or Hokuto, youngsters on the rise like Takako or Nagashima. She the driving force in some of the legendary all time great tag matches. She could excel working the 100mph uber workrate style Joshi is often known for, but few were better at projecting character and emotion in her matches. During the interpromotional peak era of Joshi with some of the all time great performers, Ozaki manages to stand out in a sea of legends. She might not be Akira Hokuto, but there's an argument that Ozaki is the 2nd most interesting wrestler of the interpromotional era. 

Also apparently she was Sasha Banks' favorite wrestler. So bonus points are probably due. 

[Alex]

1 minute ago, elliott said:

Also apparently she was Sasha Banks' favorite wrestler. So bonus points are probably due. 

Pretty sure it's Eddy Guerrero.  I may be misremembering, but I think I saw that her favorite joshi wrestler was Toyota.

Anyway, OZ Academy is stuff I need to watch.

[Kadaveri]

1 hour ago, Alex said:

Pretty sure it's Eddy Guerrero.  I may be misremembering, but I think I saw that her favorite joshi wrestler was Toyota.

Anyway, OZ Academy is stuff I need to watch.

Her favourite overall wrestler is Eddie Guerrero yes but she was also a huge Joshi fan as a teenager. She once answered "who are the greatest female wrestlers" with "It doesn't get much better than Akira Hokuto and Mayumi Ozaki circa 1992" and has talked more generally about being on internet forums downloading 90s Joshi  rather than doing schoolwork

It's a shame every interviewer does nothing but ask her the same questions about Eddie but never someone like Ozaki. Sasha's heel mannerisms and 'creative cruelty' when she's on offense are quite similar, I bet there's an influence there.

[Alex]

38 minutes ago, Kadaveri said:

Her favourite overall wrestler is Eddie Guerrero yes but she was also a huge Joshi fan as a teenager. She once answered "who are the greatest female wrestlers" with "It doesn't get much better than Akira Hokuto and Mayumi Ozaki circa 1992" and has talked more generally about being on internet forums downloading 90s Joshi  rather than doing schoolwork

It's a shame every interviewer does nothing but ask her the same questions about Eddie but never someone like Ozaki. Sasha's heel mannerisms and 'creative cruelty' when she's on offense are quite similar, I bet there's an influence there.

I'm well aware that she loves Joshi, I just wanted to make the correction.  I agree with you that Ozaki influence is totally there.

[Kadaveri]

3 hours ago, elliott said:

I know she went the garbagy brawling route in the 2nd half of her career, but I'm wondering if anyone is super familiar with that era and can point to anything worth watching?

With great regret, from what I've seen Mayumi Ozaki may be the worst wrestler of the last decade who's regularly pushed as a main event act. Truly dreadful stuff.

Best to consider her career over by 2003 honestly.

[Reel]

A lot of the recent stuff with constant interference by the dude in the police shirt and the rest of ozaki-gun can get pretty grating, and that's the bulk of her matches at this point.

[Matt D]

11 minutes ago, Reel said:

A lot of the recent stuff with constant interference by the dude in the police shirt and the rest of ozaki-gun can get pretty grating, and that's the bulk of her matches at this point.

All I can say is that I looked at some early 00s stuff five years ago so I'd have something to talk to Stacey about when Ozaki came up on the podcast and that was what was going on then too.

[Cap]

I almost always come away from the Ozaki matches I have watched thinking more about Ozaki than anyone else in the match. I don't mean that in a "she overshadowed everyone" kind of way as much as as to point out everything she does jumps off the screen. I know it is genuine with her because when I first started watching Joshi nobody I was talking to at the time was explicitly hyping her up to me. She was never one of the names that people were going out of their way to praise. 

I really like rough around the edges wrestling generally, be it organically rough around the edges or contrived, and Ozaki seems like someone who's work is rough around the edges in both ways. I really like her brand of violence and the personality she gives it. Her facial expressions both on offense and while selling do so much to get who and what she is in a match over and to really elevate the wrestling itself. The greatest example of this might be the street fights with Dynamite, esp the 3/17 match, which is an all timer to me where Ozaki pulls more than her weight with her absolute sociopath performance. She also seems relatively versatile, flexing her singles, tags, traditional, plunder, and even death matches muscles at one point or another. 

She is penciled in on my list now and I'd be surprised if she fell of it.

[jushin muta liger]

Only recent stuff that I've seen of Ozaki that is decent/good was Dynamite Kansai's retirement match and the match she had with Arisa Nakajima for the JWP Openweight Title. Been so backlogged with wrestling that I haven't seen the Exploding Barbed Wire Bat Match with Hiroyo Matsumoto and the big match she had with Saori Anou.

[soup23]

Barbed wire bat match was fun spectacle but I was kind of shocked to see it show up on people's year end list last year. The Saori Anou match I thought was really great with an awful finish and in some ways shows the worst of late era Ozaki as she bulldozed the entire match, set Anou up for a courageous comeback and then pulls the rug out from under her feet in a finish that doesn't do anyone any favors. Ozaki is a tough candidate for me. She has been in some of my favorite matches in history but also has been in some absolutely maddening matches that I have loathed. 

[ohtani's jacket]

One of my favorite wrestlers of all-time. One of the great actors in the history of wrestling and one of the best sellers. That's the image I have of her, and frankly I could go the rest of my life without seeing another match of hers. I feel like I know her as well as I know any other wrestler. Her flaws are the same as every other Joshi wrestler's flaws, though they're sometimes  magnified by her smaller stature. If you want to deep dive her work, familiarize yourself with her JWP work both pre-split and split. 

[club]

Ozaki is such a versatile charismatic performer. She’s at home working as a sympathetic underdog or as a psychotic brawler. When I look at my favourite Ozaki singles matches (vs Super Hell Devil Masami, Hokuto, Dynamite Kansai) there is real effective variety to her performances. She’s also the worker that consistently stands out on the big interpromotional tags of the era, stuff like the Dead Heat 4vs4, Thunder Queen and her tag with Cuty vs Double Inoues at Dream Slam. Can’t not see Oz in my list.