Joseph and Colette Discuss Chigusa Nagayo vs. Lioness Asuka

The Crush Gals explode! BIG EGG stays united.

This week, we covered a 1989 classic between Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka, The Crush Gals. A cultural phenomenon as a tag team in the mid-1980s, this was the last clash between the two within the realm of All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling, which represented the end of an era due to the company’s self-sabotaging forced retirement policy. We discuss that, the legacy of the Crush Gals, and the match itself.

Joseph: Chigusa Nagayo Gets So Close, but So Far
Colette: The Crush Gals EXPLODE … and the Fans Along With Them

---

Joseph Anthony Montecillo
This week, we're sort parachuting in to cover the end of an era with the final major Crush Gals singles match from their peak run in 80s AJW. Technically, they'd wrestle one more time in a brief 5-minute skirmish as part of Chigusa's retirement gauntlet. But given that we're coming in at the end of something, I was curious what your general experience was of this particular time period of AJW.

Colette Arrand
Like a lot of what we cover here, I'd consider myself a dilettante. I love AJW in general, but in terms of its 1980s product I know a lot of the players, but not all of their greatest hits. My introduction to a fair number of women from this era was the old WWE Classics on Demand channel, which would put up "weird" matches that featured Dump Matsumoto and Bull Nakano, or "The Dump" and "The Bull" as Gorilla Monsoon called them. But to get into this era of AJW in particular, I feel like I need a guide, and not necessarily because the product is inaccessible or the wrestling isn't my speed, but because there are literally links missing between it and my digging in. Like, with this match in particular, there's no record of it on Cagematch. It's a big match! Extremely important! And while a user-maintained database is hardly the end-all-be-all of wrestling knowledge, the fact that this is missing from that record suggests, to me, that 80s joshi is something that's still kind of waiting to be discovered by fans outside of Japan.