Review: Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling '26 (Part 1)

Since this is my first review on the blog, there are some things I should establish::

Firstly, I am an emotional viewer of media. If something makes me feel an emotion, that means more than anything technical or "objective" quality could. I am neither blind nor stupid, and I notice quality, but making me feel something is worth more.

Second, I will give each match a score after I give my thoughts. If you are paying attention, you may notice a trend. If you do, good job. The point of that trend is that I want you to read the text of the review. Scores are meaningless; I just include them as a joke.

Thirdly, no GenAI has been used for tbis post or any other on this blog. I was an English major in school, and even if my writing skills have sunken considerably since those days I still would rather have my mistakes be my own rather than pass off something created from a prompt and something barely a step above procedural generation. If my blog sucks, at least it's authentically sucky!

Those three things established, let's dive in with an overview and the first three matches.

Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling '26
1/4/2026, Korakuen Hall

It's entirely possible the year started TOO strongly for Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling. Their first show of the year should set the tone, but in many ways it set the bar so high they may struggle to be this good again for the next 12 months. It isn't all perfect, and there are questions I still don't know the answers to, but I am looking forward to finding them out.

Shion Kanzaki Debut Match
Chika Nanase and Uta Takami vs Ren Konatsu and Shion Kanzaki

The two finalists of 2025's NextGen tournament team up to welcome a new wrestler in Shion who has been teamed with last year's most promising debut in Ren. Shion is already very good for someone who had her first match in all the ways that matter. She has a great look, her selling and fighting spirit are right where they should be, and her future looks bright.

What struck me the most about this match, though, is just how special Ren Konatsu is. She showed up to her debut ready to take chances and try some high risk stuff right out of the gate, which is something Shion did not do in the match. I'm not saying anyone has to, and you definitely shouldn't risk injury before you're ready, but Ren being ready to try from day 1 is a big statement on where her ceiling is.

Uta won a pretty standard tag match by submitting Shion with the Koala Clutch. This was a very fun opener, and I'm looking forward to seeing where all four of these wrestlers are in a year. Welcome to TJPW, Shion Kanzaki!

Score: 8/10

HotShot (Yuna Manase and Toga) vs HIMAWARI and Kira Summer

HotShot is a team I like a whole lot. Yuna mentoring the young powerhouse in Toga and bringing out her more aggressive side is worth the investment, and her shouting encouragement from outside while Toga tries to get to the ropes is always very compelling wrestling. It's like a combination of a tag team and a take on a manager, which is a dying concept in wrestling that we could stand to bring back I feel.

HIMAWARI and Kira share a birthday (December 18th) and they both have a lot of potential as wrestlers that they seem to be working hard to unlock. They play off each other very well, I feel, and could possibly be a tag team if we weren't instead doing Bumping gRitters.

All of this is to say that this match was a lot of fun. The four wrestlers all worked well together, and Toga eventually won with her version of the Rock Bottom. I like everyone in the match, and it was a fun bit of action. Nothing to complain about here.

Score: 8/10

Ironman Heavymetalweight Championship 4-way Match

Mahiro Kiryu(c) vs Aja Kong vs Rika Tatsumi vs Shino Suzuki

I wrote an entire post about how Mahiro has made the Ironman title feel more important than it actually is, so I won't repeat myself. What I did leave out was the role of Rika Tatsumi trading the belt back and forth with her and taking it just as seriously in terms of elevating the belt. With them both in the match this third-match-on-the-card had investment above its spot. Suffice to say that I was on the edge of my seat for this one.

Aja Kong, 40 years into her career, is trading on her name and status as a bona fide joshi legend to elevate TJPW just by being there, and she gets to have fun in the process. This match saw the other three team up to attack her then turn on each other over and over. Aja even took the time to do Mahiro's apology spot, so you knew she was here for a good time.

Aja pinned Shino off a backdrop driver to win the match, but then Rika pinned Aja by holding Mahiro down on top of her, which meant Mahiro got her belt back. Unbeknownst to us watching at the time, a singles title match between Mahiro and Aja was set up by backstage comments, so that should be a good test of the new and improved Mahiro if and when it takes place.

Score: 8/10

Next time on the blog, the middle three matches of the show. A real welcome to TJPW for Shion, a very fun odd-couple team, and the only match I thought was underwhelming.

Mahironman - How to Treat a Championship

There was a time in US pro wrestling where championships meant something. The idea in story was that the champion would see a bigger cut of the house, and in actual fact would sometimes do media tours to promote the company, even if only on a local scale. Having the belt also meant, in theory anyway, that the fans would pay money to either see you win or to see you lose depending on how they felt about you or how your character was being portrayed. This art has died to a great extent, though an exception can be found in AEW's Mercedes Moné and her "belt collector" gimmick. But even that doesn't quite succeed in the way championships once did. Having a title was meant to elevate a wrestler, and a great wrestler could make a title seem more important just because they have it.

And that brings me to the DDT Ironman Heavymetalweight Championship. To explain for anyone I link this to who doesn't follow Japanese pro wrestling, the Ironman belt is a joke. It was created to parody WWE's hardcore and 24/7 titles, and the general gimmick is that anyone, and anything can win the belt at any time so long as a referee is present. Past champions have included a ladder (three times!), assorted non-wrestlers, and even the belt itself was once its own champion. It once had an officially recognized title change take place in a dream! By any real metric, this title is meaningless... with the exception of the metric of how the champions treat the title. And with that, I segue into Mahiro Kiryu.

Mahiro's gimmick as a wrestler is that she doesn't have a gimmick. She likes mahjong, she's a bit nervous around her more colorful peers in Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, and she apologizes a lot for the things she has to do to survive the crazy world she finds herself in. And she has a cat that is potentially more popular than she is. Oh, and she is, as I write this, the current and defending Ironman Heavymetalweight Champion. She has held the belt enough times that I have genuinely lost count in a very short time frame. She keeps losing it and finding ways to get it back. You would think this has a cheapening effect on the belt, but the amazing thing is that the opposite has happened. This... toy, this bauble that was once co-held by the subscriber list of DDT Pro Wrestling's YouTube channel, is very serious to her and the other wrestlers that vie for it. And, as a viewer, that engages me.

It's very hard to express just how much this "Mahironman" story has elevated Mahiro and the Ironman title at the same time without a person actually seeing it play out, and of course viewer opinions may vary. But I will try. Mahiro underwent a massive boost in confidence by holding the title. She has a (comedic) reputation as a killer for shredding a sheet of paper and drinking two beverages to reclaim what is rightfully hers. This title has taken her from a somewhat popular lower midcard wrestler to someone whose name you could put on the marquee. "Come see how Mahiro Kiryu tries to keep ahold of the belt this week!" The idea that this timid girl who apologizes a lot could sell tickets on her own would have been unthinkable at the start of the year, and that's no knock on her. It just wasn't her role. The belt elevated Mahiro, and Mahiro elevated the belt. Even as it continues to be lost and won in comedic ways, suddenly it matters, and that's an amazing thing.

We are about to have voting for TJPW's "Best Bout" list, where the fans vote for what they think were the best matches of the year, and it's a pretty tough vote because this was a banner year for the company in terms of just amazing in-ring performances. But one thing that won't get recognized in that voting is the Mahironman run because no single element of it was a "best match of the year" candidate. But it was my single favorite thing to happen in wrestling in 2025, and it deserves to be honored. And thus I wrote this post. Thanks for reading, and see you in 2026 for a review of TJPW's "Ittenyon" show!

The Biggest Problem With US TV Wrestling

The title of this post is pretty declarative, so let me state up front that I am far from an expert on this or, for that matter, any topic. This is just the way I see things, sitting on the sidelines, not actually watching US wrestling at all. With that out of the way, let me get to the thesis statement. If you ask me, the biggest problem with US TV wrestling can be summed up with a single sentence, and it's this:

The fans are not the primary customers.

Let's take WWE as the major example. They are currently operating under a deal with Netflix wherein they make $500 million a year just for broadcasting on that service. Let me write that out: $500,000,000. To put that into perspective, the currently overpriced tickets where someone paid $2,000 to sit front row? It would take 250,000 of those to equal the amount of money they are getting from Netflix in one year. That person who spent $900 to sit in nosebleed and watch the show on giant screens? 555,556 of them to equal the Netflix deal. So, as an individual fan, your opinion does not matter, however much they say it does. How could it? AEW has a similar thing with their Warner Bros. deal, but AEW is still Tony Khan's playground, so appealing to him has a chance of working.

"If the fans aren't the customers, then what are they?" That's a great question, and the answer is that the fans are the product. Netflix paid a bunch of money to get a different market looking at their site, seeing ads because Netflix is now ad supported, and buying subscriptions. This is true of any business where you are not paying for something but they are making money anyway. It's a universal truth. If you aren't the customer, you're the product. It's true with Google, it's true with Facebook, it's true with Twitter, and it's true with WWE and AEW. Your PLE (Premium Live Event, modern terminology for pay-per-view) money, your ticket... ultimately it means very little. I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news.

But it's not all bleak. The one power you have is to make yourself unavailable as the product. If you think the show sucks, don't watch it! There's a ton of wrestling content in the world to watch equally free to you but without supporting the show you don't like. Hate watching is a losing battle, because you're still being used as the product. If you want to spend your money to support individual wrestlers, buy their merch. Go to shows if you can. Watch a streaming site where you are the customer! All of these things are better than giving your time to a show that doesn't respect it, and you'll feel better about yourself too.

On that note, this blog is not ad supported, so if you read this, you are not the product. And I don't want your money, so you aren't the customer. This is just a place where I can get the thoughts out of my head and then broadcast them to the world and anyone who wants to read them can. I hope you enjoy reading these ravings and they give you something to think about.