Arisa Nakajima Squeezes the Life Out of Mio Momono

Nakajima and Momono get more out of 15 minutes than most do in 20-25.

Hey y’all, apologies for the late(-late-late) essay. If for whatever reason you’re not hooked into the stream of consciousness that is my Twitter account, my mom’s been in the hospital for three weeks, we nearly lost her twice, and we’re trying to figure out what the near- and long-term future looks like, which hasn’t left much space for things like wrestling. In fact, it’s been kind of hard to approach wrestling at all, and every time I’ve tried, I’ve been downright antagonistic towards it, unfair beyond clowning on Raw, so I kept putting this match off because I like entering into BIG EGG matches with an empty mind and a clear heart.

So, in a way, it’s nice that we’re doing a 2023 retrospective, because I, the editor of a forthcoming professional wrestling website, have largely not kept up with this great sport – I haven’t even seen an episode of Collision. Even if I were as plugged in as I’d like to be, joshi often slips me. I don’t know why! I love joshi wrestling. Calling it a “style” isn’t quite right given the nuances of various promotions and eras, but stacked up against every other kind of wrestling, it’s either this, 1980s NWA, Onita’s FMW, and 1997 WCW that I could watch forever.

Unlike the NWA and WCW, joshi wrestling is not a comfort food. It’s the most engaging kind of wrestling that I’m familiar with, something that sends my brain spinning off in a million directions, whether that’s character, spectacle, innovation, or emotion. If I were to put 10% more effort into watching it, joshi is probably the only thing I’d tweet about. Nobody would like me. I like being liked, but I’ve got my finger hovering over a lot of IVP Videos offerings. 

I cottoned to joshi because it was fast and brutal, women in impossibly cool outfits being as cruel to each other as possible. In the opening minute of this match, Arisa Nakajima and Mio Momono change momentum lightning fast, exchanging stomps that would cause most people to reconsider the choices that led them to the end of either woman’s boot. This match rocks, and it only gets better when Nakajima takes firm control. 

Something I really like about her control segment is that a lot of it focuses on Momono’s core, with a submission exchange largely worked around a body scissors, and a dodged dropkick resulting in her challenger landing stomach-first on the bottom rope. When Momono goes for German suplexes later, she can’t – that’s a move that requires core strength, and hers has under attack when Nakajima isn’t kicking her in the face.

That’s hard to do! We’ve been in a somewhat prolonged renaissance of technical wrestling, but so far as specific targets go, the core has largely been disregarded in favor of limbs. It makes sense – submission wrestling largely focuses on the arms, legs, and neck because those are more easily understood by an audience that’s been trained to think of abdominal stretches and bear hugs as rest holds as compared to the more dynamic movement inherent to something like a chokehold, a crossface, the Sharpshooter, and so on.

Maybe the match isn’t long enough for me to make such a big deal of this, but it takes five attempts to Momono to lift Nakajima for a German, and you get the sense that her short bursts of frantic energy are as short as they are because her ability to breathe has been compromised. Kicking out of the kind of suplex Nakajima clinches the win with also requires a significant amount of core strength. Momono is mostly fantastic on the sell, so she and Nakajima manage to compress everything into a tight, 15-minute package where a match on American TV might go 20-to-25 “luxuriating” in the body work.

I’m glad this match gives us the lean, with as little fat as possible. It’s a blast from start to finish, no breaks, every motion other than an early missed headscissors purposeful, precise, and pitched with victory in mind. You see a game plan unfold, Momono nearly foil it with babyface fire, then have it snuffed out. A delectable morsel of a match, 15 minutes where the world didn’t feel like it was crashing down.