My good friend, Asian Coogar

[gordi]

It is! She is! 

I was surprised to find that I am bigger than Kyoko. 

If one more person responds to this thread, I'll give details 

[El-P]

Wow, that's crazy Jaguar is still active. She must be pushing 60. On the picture kinda Kyoko looks smaller than she was at one point.

[G. Badger]

Those pics with Kyoko and Jaguar are awesome! Jag especially as she is one of my faves. You always have great photos and fun stories - I'd love to hear the details

 

[Jetlag]

Jaguar had a match in Wrestle-1 earlier this year where she hit some sharp looking spin kicks. She's been working consistently the last couple years, but hasn't made tape much for such a legendary wrestler.

[gordi]

[gordi]

[gordi]

The guy in the second picture above is Maeiwa. He's another member of Kuuga's drinking crew. He promotes events in Osaka, including Big Japan Pro Wrestling. He's invited me to come to a few BJPW shows, but I have a personal Murphy's Law that I am always busy on those days. On Sunday, he invited me to a ワールド女子プロレス・ディアナ (World Joshi Pro Wrestling Diana) show. I knew basically nothing about the promotion, but since I had just returned from vacation in Canada I had a free day and I figured I might as well...

Turns out Diana is Kyoko's promotion and since Jaguar trained Kyko, she's involved, too. They don't seem to get much exposure overseas... or in Japan, for that matter. 

I'm really glad I went. It was my second time seeing both Kyoko and Jaguar live, but my first opportunity to meet them. The lady running the gimmick table was an old friend from the Osaka Pro days, so I got a signed towel as well. I think this particular show may have been a co-promotion with Chigusa's promotion, Marvelous, since there were a few wrestlers from there on the card as well.  

I had a really good seat, particularly considering it was free, and the action spilled right into where I was sitting a couple of times. 

Jaguar Yokota teamed with Megumi Kinoshita against Tomoko Watanabe and Mei Hoshizuki. Jaguar and Kinoshita were surly, mean, nasty heels all the way. It was a lot of fun. 

The Main Event was Kyoko Inoue and Takumi Iroha vs Kaoru Ito and Sareee. Kyoko vs Ito was like a local joshi version of Vader vs Hansen or something, just a nasty, stiff, hoss fight. As El-P said, Kyoko was looing in good shape, tan and happy, and she moved really well. Kyoko vs Sareee or Ito vs Takumi Iroha were both really good David vs Goliath match-ups, and the two young girls worked really fast with a lot of counters and dodges when they were in there together. Ito's double foot stomps on Kyoko were sick. Sareee looks like someone who could be a star with more exposure, she is obviously talented and charismatic. Takumi Iroha was my favourite, though, she looked to be having the time of her life in there and she has a very kicky style. Just an excellent back and forth all-action match. 

According to Eivion over on DVDVR: "Takumi is a former Stardom wrestler who left to be mentored by Chigusa in Marvelous five years ago. She was already more or less a super rookie with the talent she showed back then. She has only gotten better. Sareee has been getting a good push this year among the promotions she works. She is a double champion holding Diana and Sendai's main titles."

Other matches were:

Ayako Sato vs Rina Yamashita, which spilled over into my section and sent my chair flying.

Madeleine vs Fairy Nihonbashi (whom I met last time I went drinking with Kuuga). I was happy to see her again. She works a comedy style. 

Haruka Umezaki vs Sho Sekiguchi (which I missed because I had a hard time finding the venue).

 

 

[G. Badger]

Oh man! These are awesome photos!

When I saw Kaoru Ito on the first one (the towel, I think), I said to myself "oh Ito too!? That is sweet!!" Very glad to hear that her and Kyoko were still kicking each other's butts! : D The main event sounded really good. Definitely have to keep an eye open for Takumi and Sareee too. 

That all sounded like a real fun time. Plus you can't beat that it was free! Thanks for sharing!!

[gordi]

Thanks, Badger! I would definitely go out of my way to see Kyoko and Ito fight again. They match up perfectly.

[gordi]

I didn't manage to make it out to the final Dotonbori Pro shows or parties of the year, but I did make it out to the Osaka Pro revival show on the 28th.

The woman to Billyken Kid's right is my new friend Chizuki. She's a web designer who has a side hustle organizing English events and lessons of various kinds. She's set me up with a couple of lucrative gigs in the past couple of months. The guys to his left are, respectively, Esteve and Gorge.

As usual when I make new friends, one of the first things that Chizuki learned about me was that I am a crazy pro wrestling nerd. She had told me that she liked pro wrestling but didn't have anyone to go to shows with, so we'd been talking about hitting a show for a while. Esteve and Gorge attend one of her English conversation get-togethers in Osaka. They are both in that intermediate stage where they have been in Japan for a few months on student/work visas and are trying to work out if they are going to stick around after those visas expire, and how to make that happen. 

Esteve is from France (Imagine! A French guy who likes pro wrestling). Gorge is from Monterrey,  home of the Arena Coliseo de Monterrey, but he has never been to a live Lucha Libre show. In fact, this was the first live pro wrestling show for all three of my new friends. 

A lot of the O-Pro guys think about Mexico the same way I used to think about Japan when I was living in Canada: That far-away foreign land with the amazing pro wrestling that they really love and all that delicious food and unique culture and interesting history and all those slightly-exotic women... and a lot of them have spent time in Mexico on wrestling excursions. 

So a lot of them were exceptionally pleased to meet Gorge, in a similar way to how I marked out meeting Asian Cougar for the first time at a Vancouver Indy show all those years ago. Billyken, Tsubasa, Matsuyama Kanjyuro, and maybe others spoke to him extensively in Spanish. Gorge was pleasantly surprised and they all seemed quite chuffed to have the opportunity to use the language that they'd picked up over there. 

I'd bragged to Chizuki about how I knew a lot of the boys from the 2009-2014 period where I'd been a regular at Osaka Pro shows and drinking parties and how everyone was so kind and friendly. It would have been a perfectly poetic kind of Murphy's Law situation if nobody had remembered me or if they'd all been too busy to say hello or whatever.

 

[gordi]

But of course that wasn't the case at all. Everyone was just as happy to see me again as I was to see them, and they absolutely bent over backwards to make my new friends feel welcome. Anyone who remembers my endless Osaka Pro posts here and on DVDVR and elsewhere from that 2009-2014 period will doubtless remember my old friend Kenji, who was Osaka Pro's number one fan and ambassador and my regular drinking buddy back then. He took a day off from work to come out and meet us. It was great to see him again. 

Kenjo bought calendars from Kushikatsu Oyaji as gifts from Esteve and Gorge. It's a secret, but the guy under the mask is Japanese indy mainstay Kengo Takai, a/k/a Perro. (Here's me with Perro in 2009):

I'm pretty sure Shirokuma is also someone I know working a different gimmick:

His in-ring character is truly delightful: A big playful teddy bear, basically. (I'm almost sure it's Mihara a/k/a Yonel Sanders under that mask...):

Ah... memories.

It was almost overwhelmingly nostalgic for me to see everyone again, and I took a lot of joy in listening to Chizuki, Gorge, and Esteve giggle at the comedy stuff and oooh and aaah when the action picked up. 

The main event was an absolute corker: GAINA & HUB defending their tag titles against the indy dream team of Gamma & Super Shisa. It was also really cool to see Buffalo & Tsubasa back together working heel as Infinity in their black outfits. 

The best thing, though, was to share something I love with some new friends, (and also to have my new friends meet my old friends,  and also just to see so many old friends again). There were a lot of new faces in the small crowd, but also a lot of people I hadn't seen for about five years and in every case the reunion was a very happy one. 

There was even one Osaka Pro fan who knew Chizuki from her English events, a very nice young woman named Mie:

We all got packages of Wakame (a strong-tasting, in this case dried, seaweed that is quite nice with sake) and after the show (after Kenji and I helped break down the decorations while everyone else waited) we all went to a very nice Mexican restaurant in the Fukushima area of Osaka, a nice 18-minute walk from Noda Citizen's Hall (where the show was held). 

That was a pretty cool meal, with Japanese, English, Spanish, and French all being spoken at various times by various people (Gorge speaks French fluently. I cracked he and Esteve up with my basic Canadian high school French). The food was excellent, the conversation even better. I caught one of the last trains home. 

[gordi]

I made it out to the Doutonbori Pro Wrestling Shinnenkai (first party of the year) at Kemura & Flower, a Chinese restaurant and bar in Minami a/k/a Namba a/k/a Naniwa, the entertainment district of Osaka. It was all you can drink for three hours, with the staff bringing plate after plate of food to the tables, as usual. Kuuga and Kazuaki Mihara (a/k/a Shiro Kuma, the erstwhile tag team partner of Shigehiro Irie and the current Doutonbori Pro Tag Champ alongside Katumi Oribe and also the current Kyushu Pro Wrestling tag champ alongside Naoki Sakurajima a/k/a Setoguchi) were there, along with MMA fighter and promoter Testuo Kondo. We took up the whole restaurant, there were old friends at every table, and I ate and drank so much that I thought I was going to rupture my stomach. I spent the whole train-ride back to Nara sweating uncontrollably. I'm OK now, though. I'll post some pictures up on DVDVR. I can cross-post them here if anybody would like that, it's just a little easier to get them up on that site first.