GAEA ZONE-X 3/15/1997

Chikayo Nagashima & Sugar Sato vs. Maiko Matsumoto & Rina Ishii

They went hard for 1 minute, then Ishii got pinned from a roll up. It was a cool rollup, but I thought having this go 3 or 4 minutes longer still couldn’t have hurt. Still, the emotional reaction after the match proved this to be a stepping stone for Matsumoto and Ishii.

Toshie Uematsu vs. Makie Numao

Pretty cool match. Numao got Uematsu with some hard kicks, but mostly Uematsu was beating her down with boots to the face and hard as fuck dropkicks inbetween some mat scrambles. I really liked how Uematsu avoided Numaos Dragon Sleeper, and there were a handful of neat transitions and technical moves. GAEA rookies continue to impress.

Chigusa Nagayo vs. Sakura Hirota & Hiromi Kato

Nagayo has been quite the reliable rookie cruncher. Can Hirota and Kato do well in a 2 on 1 situation? No. No they can’t. This is about 40 seconds of Hirota and Kato flying into Nagayo (and Kato even trying to Torture Rack Nagayo!) before Nagayo takes them both out with Ikeda style running punt kicks to the face and then drops Hirota with another earth shattering powerbomb for good measure. A fun 56 second match if you are not Kato or Hirota.

 KAORU & Meiko Satomura vs. Akira Hokuto & Sonoko Kato

Another excellent match from the GAEA crew. This was centered around both the rookies trying to to prove themselves to the veterans aswell as Satomura and Kato fighting each other fiercely. All the Satomura/Kato exchanges felt BattlARTS worthy. As usual, all the exchanges involving KAORU and Hokuto were really fun, unpredictable and made sense. There was also plenty of violence with Kato and Satomura kicking hard, Hokuto trying to boot peoples heads off and at one point trying to shatter KAORUs eardrum. KAORU was also pretty vicious attacking Katos bandaged shoulder with nasty armbars. The finishing run was really extravagant and felt like an AJPW match. It was between Satomura and Kato with Hokuto and KAORU coming to drop bombs on one to help out the other. There were some great nearfalls centered around Katos wounded arm and it was just really excellently executed intricate stuff. Great ending to cap off a great match.

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