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Post by MC LevaMark on Aug 1, 2010 0:32:50 GMT -6
Is Toyota really more widely known outside of Japan than Aja and Hokuto? I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of her until I met Rain 5 years ago and it was only because finishers came up in conversation and I learned from Rain that they share finishers(Acid Rain/Japanese Ocean Cyclone Suplex). I could be drawing an incorrect conclusion, but I would think that Aja and Hokuto's respective stints in the Big Two (WWF and WCW)would make them more widely known to American audiences at least, based on viewership of both promotions at the time they were here.
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Post by SHIMMER office on Aug 4, 2010 7:52:30 GMT -6
For NYC: Mike Quackenbush & Manami Toyota vs. Claudio Castagnoli & Sara Del Rey
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Post by Starscream on Aug 4, 2010 19:47:34 GMT -6
Is Toyota really more widely known outside of Japan than Aja and Hokuto? I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of her until I met Rain 5 years ago and it was only because finishers came up in conversation and I learned from Rain that they share finishers(Acid Rain/Japanese Ocean Cyclone Suplex). I could be drawing an incorrect conclusion, but I would think that Aja and Hokuto's respective stints in the Big Two (WWF and WCW)would make them more widely known to American audiences at least, based on viewership of both promotions at the time they were here. Yes, she's more widely known than Hokuto (especially since she's one of the prettier stars of the 90s, she's more accessible to fans used to Divas and the standards for women over here). Hokuto's unattractive features like face paint, screaming and insistence on brutality would be alienating compared to 90s Toyota's good girl who gets hurt a lot. This is of course, going outside of the bubble of womens' wrestling fans. If any fan who isn't necessarily a women's wrestling fan knows anything about joshi, it's usually one of the Toyota vs Aja Kong matches that gets hyped up as the best women's match ever. It's never Kandori vs Hokuto I which is, arguably behind Chiggy vs Dump, one of the most heated joshi matches ever. Frustrating. Hardly anyone was paying attention to WCW's GAEA expansion (that put more women's wrestling on Mondays than ever before) and Bischoff never gets credit for the eye opening gamble. Hardly anyone was paying attention to Nakano, Aja and ASARI in WWF. I heard the reason it was scratched because men didn't want to follow women who could possible upstage them and Aja was TOO violent.
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Post by John Hyperion on Aug 4, 2010 20:56:42 GMT -6
If any fan who isn't necessarily a women's wrestling fan knows anything about joshi, it's usually one of the Toyota vs Aja Kong matches that gets hyped up as the best women's match ever. It's never Kandori vs Hokuto Hokuto and Kandori is always said to be the best. Always. Never heard anyone push others.
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Post by Starscream on Aug 4, 2010 21:35:27 GMT -6
Among people who don't know much about joshi or womens' wrestling in general who are just checking it out, all they know is Aja vs Toyota. I guess it's a gateway drug of sorts. Once they get deeper into joshi (if they choose, I remember some guy on some message board talking about how Aja vs Toyota at Big Egg sucked and that it was "nothing special": MASSIVE war between he and I ensued) then they recognize the other classics. I've never, ever heard anyone talk up the heated matches of the 80s, few people want to time travel. Most of the non-womens' wrestling fans (flighty fans just checking out the novelty) are alienated by how much Shinobu looks like a dude and I've heard it said that Hokuto is "ugly" they're way more into Toyota.
This isn't joshi fans of womens' fans in general I'm talking about. ..this is just the general, regular ol' wrestling fan on the internet. They know Toyota and Kong but they only vaguely know Hokuto.
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Post by MC LevaMark on Aug 4, 2010 23:08:22 GMT -6
Even after 5 years of frequenting the wrestling sites, I'm still not as in the know about foreign talent as most of the rest of you. I have so much to learn.
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Post by royaldc on Aug 4, 2010 23:42:09 GMT -6
Hokuto wrestled on national American television. Toyota never appeared on American television. More people in America thus know who Hokuto is.
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Post by MC LevaMark on Aug 4, 2010 23:48:20 GMT -6
Hokuto wrestled on national American television. Toyota never appeared on American television. More people in America thus know who Hokuto is. That was my thinking as well, based on my own personal experience having been seeing her on WCW programming, as well as Aja and Bull and the others on WWF/E programming, and not really being in the loop on the internet for most of that time and therefore not ever having seen or heard of Toyota until I met someone who was very familiar with her work.
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Post by Starscream on Aug 5, 2010 2:49:04 GMT -6
Hokuto wrestled on national American television. Toyota never appeared on American television. More people in America thus know who Hokuto is. Toyota was over based on word of mouth in the internet wrestling community around 1998-2001. If the puroresu tape traders didn't even like womens' wrestling they knew all about Toyota vs Kong at Bigg Egg Universe. Hokuto was facing Madusa at WCW during the tourny but how many casual fans turned the channel when womens' wrestling came on during the nWo show? Hardly anyone I talk to about the old days even remembers that WCW had Japanese women wrestlers. They didn't watch. Remember the "Toyota to ECW" rumors in the late 90s? People who didn't even care for womens' wrestling knew about her, even with her not being on TV. I'm talking more along the lines of "smarks"; before I started liking joshi all I would hear about was how awesome Toyota was and how great her match with Aja was (on "mainstream" sites like 1wrestling). I doubt any of the casual fans retained any knowledge of who any of the Japanese women were in WCW or WWF. They all probably turned the channel to watch Sunny or something. I'm only speaking about how Toyota was hyped and referenced among traders who didn't even like womens' wrestling after WCW's GAEA work and definitely after WWF's short dabble with AJW.
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Post by royaldc on Aug 5, 2010 9:05:35 GMT -6
Do you really believe that the "internet wrestling community" and tape traders and joshi fans in America combined are a larger segment of the population than those who watched Nitro?
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Post by SnakeEyes on Aug 5, 2010 22:22:45 GMT -6
Let's not forget that Toyota also won Observer match of the year twice. AJW was sooooo good back then.
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Post by royaldc on Aug 5, 2010 22:32:16 GMT -6
That she did. She's a phenomenal performer. But the Observer is read by less than 10,000 people worldwide. Akira Hokuto wrestled on TNT during 1997 and was seen by literally millions of Americans over the course of her WCW run.
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Post by MC LevaMark on Aug 6, 2010 2:20:00 GMT -6
I'm certainly not trying to downplay any of Toyota's accomplishments, and I certainly mean no offense to you, Leonite. I'm just thinking that to say that she eclipses Hokuto and Aja in reputation outside of Japan based on internet buzz and tape trading while they performed on the nationally televised stage here in America in the prime of their careers, is a bit of a stretch, imo.
A lot of people I know didn't even have internet access until mid to late 1999. Most of them weren't even aware of the Internet Wrestling Community until I had discovered it and told them about it near the end of 2005. The only stuff that I (and my friends by proxy since I was the only one buying the magazines) knew about ECW was what I read in the Apter Mags, and judging from the pictures and some of the storylines that were written about in said Apter Mags, I had no desire to ever watch ECW if the opportunity presented itself because it looked barbaric and borderline X-rated compared to the mostly family friendly fare in WWF and WCW prior to the Attitude Era that I was used to.
Some places were quicker to adopt the internet than others, and it would seem that you were in a place that took to it faster than I did. I have no idea what the ratio of internet users to non-internet users was at that time on a national/worldwide scale, but I'm fairly inclined to believe just by historical precedent in other matters of varying social importance that there were likely more "have-nots" than "haves"; which leads me to conclude that the "have nots" would have been more apt to have watched Raw, Nitro, and the respective companies' pay per views (assuming they even had cable, which if they couldn't afford that, they likely couldn't afford internet either), which says to me that Hokuto and Aja would be more recognizable to a larger group of people in America than Toyota.
I think it mostly boils down to personal experience. Leonite and many others here give me the impression that they are quite internet savvy and have been so for a very long time and therefore, because internet buzz and tape trading is something they are familiar with, that shapes their opinion. I, on the other hand, am a self-admitted "Johnny-Come-Lately" in the realm of the Internet Wrestling Community, who had to rely completely on what he saw on USA, TBS, TNT, and anything I could pick up at Sam Goody, Suncoast, and video rental stores which only had "The Big Two", as well as whatever I read in Apter Mags, to shape mine. Two very different worlds and schools of thought. One no more right or wrong than the other. Just different.
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Post by tswdm on Aug 6, 2010 17:21:27 GMT -6
Remember the "Toyota to ECW" rumors in the late 90s? No, actually. And I can say with a lot of certainty that you don't "remember" it either.
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Post by Ryan on Aug 6, 2010 20:43:43 GMT -6
For NYC: Mike Quackenbush & Manami Toyota vs. Claudio Castagnoli & Sara Del Rey Not quite my Quack vs. Toyota dream match, but I'll take it!
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