Welcome to The Piad Project, a retrospective on one of All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling’s tentpole events. The Wrestlemarinepiad shows ran from 1989 to 2002 and featured big title bouts, grudge matches inside a steel cage, and in the case of the first edition, a multi-part sendoff for the legendary Chigusa Nagayo.

I’ll be watching and analyzing each Wrestlemarinepiad card in order.

As is true for many joshi fans, vintage All Japan Women’s holds a special place for me. The pageantry. The violence. The sheer amount of stars. It always fills me with great happiness to revisit that promotion’s prime.

But I’ve mostly only seen it in piecemeal chunks. This series is a chance to view the company through a more chronological lens. 

So, join me on this journey through time, traveling back to the tail end of the ‘80s with a show emanating from the Yokohama Arena.

Etsuko Mita & Toshiyo Yamada  (Tokyo Sweetheart) vs. Manami Toyota & Mima Shimoda (The Dream Orca)

Four future stars face off in the opener, and man they are almost unrecognizable. They are all super young, for one, and each is sporting a far different look than they would when they reached their heights. 

I do quite enjoy each duos matching gear. I’ve long been a proponent of bringing that back to tag wrestling.

This bout is heavy on the mat wrestling early with more submission stuff than you usually see from Toyota. It makes for a slow albeit tense vibe.

The moves are simple as you’d expect from a bunch of rookies. The action is pretty basic as a result. Shimoda is straight spamming dropkicks at one point. There’s a ton of rope-running. It’s four quarterbacks set out on the field with a really small playbook to work from.

Yamada is the most ferocious and urgent of all of them. The way she snatches her arms around her foe and pins them down, it all seems to come from animalistic fury. If you didn’t know anything about these wrestlers, you’d bet big money that Yamada would end up being the biggest name of this bunch.

Overall, there are bursts that hint at what each of these women will become. It’s not a consistent showcase. This is more intriguing as a time capsule than a match itself, but I still enjoyed it.

Kaoru Maeda & Mika Takahashi vs. Texas & Tiffany

Oh man. Wrestling that dips below the passable level can be startling. You get used to a baseline level of quality and then something like this comes along and smacks you in the face with its inferiority and it knocks your head back. 

Americans from G.L.O.W. took on Kaoru Maeda (who went on to win several tag titles as KAORU) and eventual Jungle Jack member Mika Takahashi.  

These teams clearly hadn’t worked together much. The action is rough throughout. There’s a lack of impact. Everything is awkward.  

Texas and Tiffy dished out some classic heel stuff, from double teaming to choking with a cord, but they didn’t do enough to get me invested. 

The best part is a brawl on the outside where like things look like they are about to break into chaos. It’s way too brief, though, and the chaos never really comes. 

Itsuki Yamazaki vs. Noriyo Tateno; Bull Nakano vs. Yumi Ogura (Double Jeopardy Match)

This kind of experiment takes me back to the days of early ‘90s WCW. That company would try stuff out like Battle Bowl that didn’t always land, but I always found it compelling. Here, Zenjo has two singles matches going simultaneously in two rings side by side, a gimmick I’ve never seen done before. 

Noriyo Tateno vs. Itsuki Yamazaki was a battle between Jumping Bomb Angels tag partners. Nakano, meanwhile, took on a rival in the technician Yumi Ogura.

The action was wild and fast with Nakano clanging a metal can over Ogura’s head while The Jumping Bomb Angels are stomping the snot out of each other. The camera operators do their to catch everything, but it’s impossible to fully follow both fights. I was able to follow the double bouts better than I would have expected, although the experience was still disorientating.

Nakano is an absolute masochist here, using all manner of weapons to torture Ogura. Their match is the more vicious of the two that ends with Bull a bloody mess. Yamazaki vs. Tateno, on the other hand, is more of a counter-heavy classic bout. 

I expected a cluster here, but damn was it entertaining. A worthwhile experiment. A mesmeric experience. 

Beastie The Road Warrior, Big Bad Mama & Leilani Kai vs. Reibun Amada, Suzuka Minami & Yumiko Hotta

Leilani Kai I know from when I was watching WWF as a kid. Yumiko Hotta is a badass who I greatly appreciate. The rest of the crew is new to me.

You can tell from their over-the-top, super-’80s promos that Big Bad Mama and Beastie are from G.L.O.W. The All-Japan Women’s squad is strikingly stoic in comparison.

Mama and Beastie are cartoonish, stomping around, laughing like mustached villains. Their style clashes with what everyone else is doing. It’s like a hobbled together band trying to play two different genres at the same time.

A lot of the spots are built around how big Mama is as the Zenjo trio have to try to double and triple team her to keep her down. The stuff and the other comedy bits didn’t land for me. The action never gets out of first gear, either.

It’s bland and bad and doesn’t have nearly enough Hotta. 

Crush Gals (Chigusa Nagayo & Lioness Asuka) vs. Akira Hokuto & Mitsuko Nishiwaki 

The next three bouts are meant to celebrate Nagayo’s retirement. All Japan Women’s required their wrestlers to retire at 26 during this era, no matter if they were in their absolute prime as Nagayo was here.

This first one saw her and her tag partner go up against a couple of youngsters including Akira who would go on to be a legend of her own.

It’s a hard-hitting, super-charged match with the Crush Gals mostly dominating. Some of the kicks those two dole out are nasty. Not a whole lot to this, though.

One of the more interesting parts of listening to the crowd. They are on fire for the Crush Gals and react to everything Nagayo does. 

This is not the greatest match by any standards but was some of the most intense stuff on the card. 

Crush Gals vs. Yumiko Hotta & Suzuka Minami

The next match begins before the sound of the final bell of the last bout can even fade out. Hotta is in there throwing hands, frenzied.Hotta and Minami fare a lot better than Hokuto and Nishiwaki for a spell and then Chigusa and Asuka dispatch of them quickly.

This felt like tacked-on bonus action. Cagematch doesn’t even list this on the match card.

I guess they were trying to get as much Nagayo as they could on the show, extending this retirement sendoff. 

Chigusa Nagayo vs. Bull Nakano, Lioness Asuka, Yumi Ogura (Chigusa Nagayo Retirement Series Match)

Following classic joshi tradition, Nagayo went through a gauntlet as her final match. She would, of course, unretire in 1993, but in this moment, she was in goodbye mode. 

She brawled with Nakano who left the red-clad warrior reeling. (This part was a handicap match it seems with Asuka in Chigusa’s corner). 

Ogura took advantage of her fatigue along the way and scored an easy three-count. This was super brief, and even with Nagayo having wrestled so much already, it’s surprising Ogura’s path to victory was so much of a stroll.

Then it was tag partner versus tag partner as Lioness Asuka stepped in and gave Nagayo hell including hitting her with one of the most intense Giant Swings you will ever see.

This is some of the most compelling stuff on the show, equals and friends going at it with a crowd howling around them. I would have much preferred just seeing a Nagayo-Asuka singles match, but this loaded cluster of bouts had far more pageantry than that option.

International Super Battle Royal

Two rings. 30(?) wrestlers. All the chaos you can handle, bro.

Battle Royals are generally a cluster, but this is a special case. 

The talent is here for sure with the field including Bull Nakano, Aja Kong when she was still known as Aja Shishido, Akira Hokuto, Leilani Kai, Mima Shimoda, Yumiko Hotta, and a young Manami Toyota. But it’s a challenge to take in what’s happening. For much of it, the canvas is a mess of bodies like a pit of snakes slithering atop each other. The cameras struggle to catch all of it.

Pins are allowed, so we get a lot of eliminations were a group of wrestlers dogpile somebody and oust them that way. Same goes for weapons, I guess, because Nakano and her crew bring in a number of foreign objects to bludgeon folks with.

The drama doesn’t come often.

A pack of wrestlers lifting Big Bad Mama out is a touch exciting. Things pick up when Nakano and the other heels start wailing on people with kendo sticks. The best moments are when it’s down to Mitsuko Nishiwaki and Nakano. Their mini-match is miles better than the rest of the bout. 

A drawn-out spectacle meant to prop up Bull Nakano. Fast-forward to the end of this unless you are a true completist. 

Lioness Asuka (c) vs. Madusa Miceli (WWWA World Championship)

Former AWA world women’s champ gets a crack at Asuka here with AWA icon Nick Bockwinkel reffing the action.

Medusa’s promo is pure ‘80s, complete with a slur casually thrown in there. She sets up the story of this match with one key line: “I’m the no. 1 American champion, and I come here to be Japan’s no. 1 champion.” 

Madusa heeled it up big here, starting things off by throwing a bouquet of flowers at Asuka and then brawling with the champ’s entourage. 

The action started slowly with the focus on measured mat wrestling. There was a lot of stalling as well, as the two wrestlers looked to build up the tension between them. That will work for some fans more than others.

Things got more interesting for a moment as the fight devolved into more of a brawl, but then it was back to locking in holds while Bockwinkel checks in to see if anyone wants to quit.

In one of the most dated aspects of the contest, Bockwinkel spanks Madusa for breaking the rules. Yikes.

This bout felt long but without that grand feeling of an epic. The short bursts of this becoming a slugfest hinted at what this match could have been. In the end, it was too sloppy and ill-structured to be something great.

It was cool seeing two queens of their respective continents go at it, regardless. And again, listen to the crowd as you watch. Electric stuff. What a time this was.