[2001-05-04-AJW] Yumiko Hotta vs Kaoru Ito (No Rules Street Fight)

[ohtani's jacket]

Awful then, and awful now. I'd love to say this was an epic war, but it was so far removed from anything that I like in Joshi that I honestly thought it was stupid. I'm not against brawling as an alternative to the go-go-go style of Joshi, but 50 minutes of early 00s garbage brawling is not my idea of a great Joshi brawl. 

[Ma Stump Puller]

I totally get not liking this match. For me though, I think there's a lot to value. 

[warning: long ass post below]

This is a infamous slog of a match, clocking in at 50+ minutes in length and yes, before you ask, there are versions of this that show it in its entirety if you look deep enough. For one, I can't recommend this to the vast majority of people. Unlike other 50/60 minute matches this takes place mostly outside of the ring, and many minutes are dedicated exclusively to the two brawl-walking through the arena or downtime. What the match DOES give you is extremely well done hard violence that gets uncomfortably uncooperative at points, big table spots that go crazy stiff, and a consistent looming sense of dread whenever they go somewhere else to start swinging. Your mind at points almost becomes numb from the amount of times they hurl a chair at each other's heads going about 50 miles per hour, or the fact that Ito spends a good portion bleeding from the face almost endlessly; you become focused purely on whatever awful carnage the two end up doing and when if ever the match will actually stop. The bloated time and action almost lend themselves into a different form of wrestling where you're not necessarily looking for careful psychology or well-done atheticism but instead the next awful gross moment Hotta will dream up in her twisted mind of hers. One could easily sum this up to the awful blob of shicky overviolence that much of Joshi puro had become at the time; this was around the same chunk of years when GAEA were main-eventing purely off Chigusa/Asuka doing these same kind of trashy brawls, Ozaki was also leaning into this as well and much of the next decade would be very much dictated by those same lows of trashy brawling. I could very easily agree with those claims, but watching this match, I didn't get that same vibe from it; the action in the Chig/Asuka matches still felt "safe"; there was a distance between me and them wherein I knew what they were doing was gimmicky and silly, like with the special branded tables or with the fire-blowing, it's silly and distant enough that even the blood has a layer of transparency where they clearly advertise it as a gimmick, like it's just something there as a prop to add drama. I as the viewer have a sense of intangibility wherein like a piece of fiction I can distance myself from it like mist to air or whatever. This just has blood there nearly from the getgo and......never bothers to milk it. In fact after the first half hour you basically blank it out because it's just in your face at all points. The violence here lacks that same sense of gimmick to it. Hotta drags Ito around with a rope and beats her face raw with kicks; the rope is still a gimmick, but in this case it feels much more threateningly real. No one's going to put you through a table in real life, but someone slamming you on concrete or throwing you off a high height? Those are REAL. It's shit that happens to people every hour of every day. There's no looking through it. And yeah sure there's still the occasional goofy bit like Ito doing huge foot stomps off the top of the ladder, but for the most part like a real fight the glamour is completely stripped, in its place a plodding structure where we see everything from the loose brawling to the chair hurling all at a slow drip.

There's some great babyface work from Ito as well as she spends most of this getting her ass kicked; her comebacks are swift but sometimes extended, yet never feel fully confident. She always seems to slip up at the last moment, a flub here and there, maybe even a intentional botch before losing it all back to Hotta who then takes it all for granted with her overconfident control segments. They completely deconstruct the typical hardcore structure by having Hotta do the usual spots but completely nonchalantly, not even trying them as finishes since she in actuality just wants to use the turnbuckle hooks to beat on Ito some more. If this was something of the 90's, one would expect a sense of showmanship there or even extravagance. The kind you'd see from Onita-matches where there's dramatic beats to go with the danger of the spots, but again there's really none of that here. When Hotta wants to swing the turnbuckle hook, she does so like she's done it a million times before; there is no impact to the spot, it's just there with everything else. There's even a really good bit where they have everything positioned at the back of this Kawasaki theatre complex like an actual play; there's even a curtain, only with the pair in front of it. They perform a couple of contrived hardcore spots; a table bump, a foot stomp from the top of the ladder; and when it's done? Hotta is thrown, and Ito dives off it; they plunge from the theatre and back into the miserable pit fight they find themselves both under. And sure this is all (probably) unintentional, but it's a amazing allegory for the complete deconstruction of the 90s hardcore match; even the participants are choosing to willingly leave their comfortable structure to give us something more unseemly, more bizarre. Hotta turns a turnbuckle without ropes into this strange art piece using rope and a ladder; Ito tries using it to climb off, but is then socked stiff in the face and then forced to hang off it and in that moment she's completely lost, drawn into the wreckage of the ring left over. It is within that structure where the finish happens; Hotta wraps a chain around her leg and kicks Ito stiff in the face while she's stuck and then gets the KO count for the victory. I can totally get the issues with this match. It's a fucking mess, and I'd say anyone who's willing to spend 50-something minutes on a match probably has too much time on their hands. For this, though? I thought it was excellent. It's one of the few hardcore matches around this time that felt like it had a soul of sorts, giving us everything it had despite that everything including a bunch of sluggish shit. Hotta feels like the ultimate bully and Ito for one night actually had charisma, what a shocker!