Joshi Spotlight: GAEA Japan- The First Five Years (1995-2000)

GAEA JAPAN- THE FIRST FIVE YEARS:
* So with GAEA’s Fifth Anniversary Show just being posted, I realized I’d done exactly five years of their content, so I figured I’d do the column I’d been thinking about for a while- a summation of their first five years of existence! As the promotion only lasted about ten, it’s fitting to strike at the halfway point.

The story of GAEA Japan is more or less how Chigusa Nagayo, the biggest women’s star of all time, came out of retirement and after a year or so of working with JWP on occasion (she had a fairly adversarial relationship with the Matsunagas, the heads of her old home at All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling, owing to a variety of things), formed a new promotion with her own trainees and a few wrestlers from elsewhere. Within a couple years, the promotion was a pretty big hit, and soon was able to stop working interpromotional matches all over the card as her first class of trainees, a miraculous group all things considered, slowly improved and mostly became good workers. By 1999-2000, GAEA was easily the #1-2 joshi promotion in the world, usually fairly even with Zenjo (AJW), which ran way more shows but probably drew less money to the average show.

I’ve read that a huge part of GAEA’s early appeal was “Doing It Ourselves”, with a women-led company (only the money guy was a dude), countering all the other promotions run by men. That Chigusa, the biggest star ever, was there only helped, as she brought in all the ’80s girls now that they were in their 20s and 30s. GAEA audiences tend to be the most woman-heavy, with lots of amused moms in the crowd.

THE INAUGURAL CLASS:
Chigusa Nagayo: The biggest star in joshi history, a megastar of the 1980s. She retired in 1989, coming back at the 1993 Dream Slam show and working periodically for JWP before training GAEA’s first class and getting a backer for a promotion. She was the head trainer AND booker, while someone provided the money and another did the business.

KAORU: The next most experienced wrestler- she had debuted for Zenjo 1986, but left the company for a couple years before returning in an iffy role. KAORU had some of the laziest performances by a veteran I’d ever seen in some of the early ’90s shows, oftentimes doing the job or getting a midcard match where she has to go 20 minutes with a nobody. But then in 1994 wrestles the match of her life against Mariko Yoshida (a 30:00 draw that turns into an overtime that KAORU quickly wins). She leaves Zenjo a second time and founds GAEA. In GAEA she’s the obvious #2 native, and in the early era is usually paired with another promotion’s wrestler in a “Sub Main Event” type of match. And she wrestles like she absolutely knows she needs to succeed to make GAEA work, and puts on some of the best performances of her career.

Bomber Hikaru: A weak-ass wrestler of dubious experience who is hired out of nowhere by Chigusa, acting as a “mid-tier” veteran below Chigusa & KAORU, but above the green rookies. Her role seems clear- to act as a barrier to them as they rise up the ranks.

THE ROOKIES:
* All of them are given Arena swimsuits in a single block of color- a brilliant move to immediately differentiate all of them. This becomes a GAEA trademark- I see it all the way up to 1999 debuts. To say this class is a big miracle is a huge understatement- you will likely never see this much raw talent in the early years of their careers before or since. Of the class of six, all five were at least “pretty good” within a year- pure insanity. These girls were clearly meant to be the backbone of the company, so they wouldn’t have to rely on “Dream Matches” to fill out the cards, and they wrestle like it- each one fighting to show that they deserved to be there and wanted a shot. Alas, GAEA never succeeds to anywhere near this level ever again.

Meiko Satomura: A try-hard 16-year old rookie kid in red- an obvious allusion to Chigusa, who iconically wore that color in the 1980s. Very fiery but very hammy.
Sonoko Kato: Wearing blue, matching Lioness Asuka’s old color, making her a clear ally/rival to Meiko. Very technically sound but not as outgoing as Meiko.
Toshie Uematsu: Wearing green. Only a little smaller than the other girls but an insanely acrobatic high-flier. This would not last.
Maiko Narita: Wears pink. Don’t get used to her. She retires in a month or two for unknown reasons.
Chikayo Nagashima: Wearing yellow & blue- the only multicolored one. Very acrobatic and gifted.
Toshie “Sugar” Sato: Wearing white- the one with the fewest obvious technical gifts to start.

GAEA’S FIRST YEAR (April 1995-April 1996):
* GAEA’s “Memorial First Gong” is on April 16th 1995, and features mostly the rookies fighting each other in the early going, but capped off by experienced wrestlers so they could actually draw an audience. Chikayo wrestles Uematsu for an insane 20 minute dropkickfest that seems to establish to the fans that “these girls can go long”. Toshie immediately impresses with superstar acrobatics- she can do insane stuff like run up an opponent’s chest in the corner and flip backwards to splash them in that position. Meiko & Sonoko are clear stand-outs from a match perspective, almost immediately being put in situations where they impress. Another big surprise is KAORU, who wrestles a match against LLPW’s Yasha Kurenai that I love (****). Chigusa teams with JWP Ace Dynamite Kansai against Devil Masami & Mayumi Ozaki in a huge brawl that goes almost thirty minutes. A colossal main event that is par for the course.

GAEA moves through the year doing more of the same kind of stuff, intermixing all the wrestlers, often pairing veterans with kids, along with a Chigusa main event. A recurring feud is Chigusa against Devil Masami. Unfortunately, while Devil was one of the best in 1993-94, she has lost a step here and is unable to carry Chigusa, who has a long of ring-rust, injuries, and other stuff holding her back. She’s typically sweating her ass off in this period, looking quite bad, relying on her sense of timing to make matches decent. She hits *** or so pretty routinely, but needs a lot of help to clear that. A lot of the traits of this period start to annoy me, particularly the “GAEA MDK Sleeper”, with Chigusa and her opponents lazily slapping loose sleeperholds on each other for minutes at a time and treating these like match-ending dynamic contests. Maybe I just have a bug up my ass about the sleeperhold, though, lol. I just find it the most dull move ever- no real technique to it- just people hugging necks and acting like the biggest thing ever has happened. They MOSTLY get this out of their system after a year or so and suddenly nobody’s doing sleepers anymore.

A recurring element is Mayumi Ozaki- she’s having issues in JWP and becomes a regular villain in GAEA. She & Chigusa have one of her “Dress Up Wild Fights” mid-year that I think is the best Chigusa match of ’95- another **** one (though starts weak and only gets great by the end). We’d see more of her.

GAEA’s SECOND YEAR (April 1996-April 1997):
* GAEA’s second year sees the rookies improve enough that they had all developed regular, recurring offensive moves and were having ** matches as a routine- this doesn’t sound that great until you remember the kind of matches most 2nd-years were having in joshi promotions. Two new rookies debut, but in a recurring trend, both are washouts- Rina Ishii (wearing salmon/puce swimsuit) and Maiko Matsumoto (brown). Neither gets more than “almost okay” and are gone in a couple years. Same with Makie Numao, who is a “kickpad wrestler” who skips the Swimsuit Zone entirely but is so rarely featured on the GAEAISM YouTube channel they practically erased her. The only success comes in Jan. 1997, with Sakura Hirota (wearing pink) debuting and using ass-focused offense for her first year or so of matches. She eventually shifts into a popular Comedy Wrestler and still wrestles to this day. Bomber Hikaru gives it up by this point, sadly right at the point where all the Class of 1995 kids should be moving past her in the hierarchy.

GAEA debuts its first and only singles title in November 1996- the AAAW World Title (a pretty clear slap to Zenjo’s WWWA World Title). Chigusa wins it and holds the belt for a full year. They get tag titles at the same time, with the AAAW World Junior Tag Titles (indicating it’s for the rookie generation) going to Meiko & Sonoko. Eventaully the belts just drop the “Junior” thing and go to anyone who can win them.

A bigger deal is Mayumi Ozaki debuts the first of one of many (MANY) Evil GAEA Stables- OZ Academy. She convinces Sugar Sato & Chikayo Nagashima to walk away from Chigusa and join her- an act of betrayal designed to break Chigusa’s heard and draw sympathy. This also brilliantly splits the Rookie Class- Meiko & Sonoko are infuriated by the betrayal, and become ardent GAEA defenders (a job they’d keep for the next 3-4 years), tearing into their rivals, who are also punished by Chigusa frequently, even as Ozaki (backed by JWP goon Carlos Amano) helps them cheat. GAEA by this point turns from a “Outsiders vs. Homegrown Talent” promotion to a “Feuds with Heel Stables From Within” one (though most stables have freelancers & invaders in them as well).

Another big deal: the return of AKIRA HOKUTO! She kinda/sorta planned to retire, then all of a sudden returned for a bit, then disappeared and showed up again in GAEA Japan. This is on paper a huge “get”, though Hokuto never once becomes a major recurring force in the 4 years of her GAEA stuff I’ve seen- frequent injuries, getting married, etc., always mars her and she’s never as big a deal as “the most over person in 1992-94” should be.

The 1995 rookies are all quite good, though Sugar is struggling with clumsiness and botching more than the others. Chikayo is arguably the most competent physically but is not getting the focus Meiko & Sonoko are. KAORU, unfortunately, has doused that fire that was under her ass and never really lights it again- she’s ready to “coast” the rest of her GAEA run. A major issue is a reliance on “just doin’ mah spotz” and then casually getting up and leaving the ring- a mindless spot-bot. It’s frustrating because she has a demonstrated ability to surpass this, but generally does not.

An interesting note from this time period is that the women all move to WCW! WCW hires Madusa Micelli away from the WWF, she dumps their Women’s Title in the trash, and starts a WCW women’s division, comprised mostly of herself and GAEA wrestlers. So suddenly out come Akira Hokuto (both as herself and the masked “Reina Jabuki”), Chigusa (as the heel “Zero”), Meiko, KAORU Toshie and others, wrestling a women’s tournament and doing a lot of D-shows in 2-3 minute matches. Toshie, the rookie with no key feud, wins the WCW Women’s Cruiserweight Title on a WCW D-show and carries the belt with her to Japan, holding it long after WCW quits women’s wrestling entirely!

GAEA’S THIRD YEAR (April 1997-April 1998):
* Problems develop in late 1997 as GAEA develops the match style that’d be called “The GAEA Sprint”- instead of doing traditional 12-18 minute matches on top, they would instead just skip the early going of the match (weardown holds, taunting, establishing “tiers”, etc.) and just start throwing bombs immediately. Matches would lack flow entirely and would just have people hitting nothing but big moves until someone got pinned. The matches would be exciting and wow the fans, but eventually all become the same- a match with all peaks and no valleys is just a PLATEAU, you know?

Chigusa wins the AAAW World Title and defends it frequently in pretty subpar, brawl-heavy matches designed to hide weaknesses. In particular, she shows up in a heel persona named “Zero” and wrestles Super Heel Devil Masami in a messy, sloppy brawl where Devil wins the belt off of a reversal from the top rope (I went *1/2 for the match). Meiko Satomura is still obviously the most focused-upon rookie, but is getting a BIT much with her screechy hamminess. Like YES, okay, you’re trying hard and want to be noticed, but tone it DOWN a tad, ‘kay? She also becomes pretty bad for finisher spamming- her Death Valley Driver was initially scoring pins, but she started having people kick out of multiple ones per match, diminishing its value. Sonoko Kato meanwhile starts getting injured a fair bit, and the one I would have said was the most promising overall of the Class of 1995 is now acting as “filler” in tag matches and slowing down a lot.

Toshie loses her WCW Women’s Title to Yoshiko Tamura of Zenjo in a fantastic match (***1/2), bawling to put over the significance that belt had for her. By this point, the girls entering their third year have all come up to be good enough to hit *** or so routinely, pushing further in big matches. This is again remarkable given their experience levels. Even Sugar, who struggled the hardest, comes into her own and becomes kind of a favorite of mine for adopting Ozaki’s “heel shitass” characteristics, and doing good work with double-teams with Chikayo and hitting a dragon screw into a figure-four, Ligerbombs, and other “communal offense” done very well. The OZ kids win the tag belts in March 1998. The only rookie of note is Hiromi Kato, wearing black- she doesn’t last long enough to make a dent.

Zenjo’s Toshiyo Yamada joins GAEA midway through the year (likely because she was gonna get cut loose by AJW at some point)- in 1993-95 this would have been a great “get”, but injuries have slowed her down considerably and she never had the mind or personality for major success, so by this point she’s just “filler”. She sort of occupies the same zone KAORU does as “mid-tier veteran”, filling the card on GAEA shows jobbing to veterans (Chigusa, Devil), but beating rookies. She never really has a great match again. In particular, she feuds with a jealous KAORU over that same midcard spot and have a whole lot of sub *** matches.

GAEA’S FOURTH YEAR (April 1998-April 1999):
* Chigusa finally defeats Devil to win the AAAW World Title back in August 1998. The match was another lumbering affair. Ozaki finally leaves JWP once and for all and becomes a Freelancer for good, but still does most of her stuff in GAEA. Meiko has problematically gotten even worse at over-acting, getting a bit tiresome- she & Sonoko Kato have a thirty-minute draw that’s probably meant to showcase them, but is instead kind of a bore. Hokuto misses most of 1998 due to injury, as well. Toshie Uematsu is faltering as well- injures destroy her knees, and she spends her fourth year having to basically learn out to wrestle “for real”- ie. use timing and building to moves instead of spamming highly acrobatic stuff. It’s rough going for a while, and her big thing is to add a straight right hand to her offense. This kind of creates a sense of malaise in the company for me, made worse because a lot of new promotions are starting up following Zenjo going nearly bankrupt in 1997- ARSION & Neo Ladies are both making a go of it.

Aja Kong, still an ARSION wrestler, comes to GAEA and becomes a permanent fixture, teaming with Ozaki to win the tag belts from Ozaki’s own cronies in August 1998. But this has far greater implications by the end of the year, as she starts teaming with Ozaki’s crew regularly, and then by year’s end LIONESS ASUKA comes out, and when Chigusa holds out her hand… Asuka strolls past her and joins the heels! An enraged Chigusa attacks but is beaten horribly, and the heels soon add freelancers Las Cachorras Orientales to the stable, calling themselves Super Star Unit! This was massively exciting for what had become a really boring company to me, and I was way into it! For… a few months, as it was pretty clear that now every GAEA match would just feature tons of heel interference all the way through, with a miracle pin or a cheating pin at the very end. It got to the point where the entire promotion felt like one single “Best of 113 Falls” match. This becomes an issue as it never really goes away from this point on- the next 2-3 years are just a continuous run of “Evil Heel Stable vs. Chigusa & Her Kids”, with the stables swapping wrestlers like nWo factions.

The angle at points was tremendous, though- Chigusa & Lioness eventually have an Attitude Era-style brawl for the rights to book GAEA- Lioness wins, humiliating Chigusa and doing things like forcing her to come out as a miserable-looking “opening match rookie” (she demolishes another SSU minion in seconds in a show of defiance). This lasts for months, with SSU dominating the feud (they win every single match but one on their first show as “bookers”) and Chigusa even loses the AAAW Title to Aja Kong for years, but Chigusa takes the opportunity to train in the US, and comes in slimmer and more athletic than she’s been in years, then kicking the crap out of her opponents! She debuts a new leather-clad look and successfully defeats Lioness for booking rights to GAEA later in the year, using a huge fireball to stun her!

Meiko becomes a highlight once more after kind of peaking- Aja mostly takes the kid under her wing in a series of matches where Meiko scores a lucky pin on Aja in a tag match, and Aja responds by beating her in a World Title match- probably GAEA’s best ever match- a ****1/2 affair that sees Aja utterly dominate for 2/3, only for Meiko to score a miracle kick that has Aja on the backfoot for the entire rest of the match, desperate not to get pinned or submitted now that she’s stunned. We also get a lot of excruciating 10-minute “Sakura Hirota takes comedy bumps then starts trying for the last 1/3 of a match” bouts that take a while to get good. Ozaki is kind of the biggest disappointment- in 1993-95 she was one of the best performers on any given card. By 1999 or so she is INCREDIBLY bad, just having mindless garbage brawls with sloppy-ass offense and almost no selling. Like she realized with her “Dress Up Wild Fights” she could get the same reaction for easy weapon brawls that she could for body-destroying bump-filled matches and so switched to throwing the worst spinning backfists in wrestling history.

At least the “GAEA Sprint” was mostly out of everyone’s system- at one point they were even doing a “GAEA No-Sell” variant of the sprint, where people would eat a finisher and pop up to no-sell it, getting a huge pop every single time. Excited by the idea, wrestlers seemed to do this constasntly until all the top matches were like this, and that led to the whole thing getting increasingly awful to watch (as matches would feature almost nothing being sold until a random finisher won it), but they all got it out of their systems after only a handful of months. This seems to be a regular “Chigusa Thing”- seeing something get over, running it into the ground, then repositioning and dropping it.

GAEA’S FIFTH YEAR (April 1999-April 2000):
* The Super Star Unit angle runs its course in the most half-assed way possible. Ozaki merely cuts a promo after a match saying “I’m tired of it” and forms a new stable named Nostradamus… with everyone in SSU except Lioness & LCO, then brings out Akira Hokuto (off from a year-long sabbatical) as a new member, then brings in FMW’s Bad Nurse Nakamura as “RIE” and Kaori Nakayama as well- both positioned as low-tier pin-eaters. So now GAEA is a three-way stable war, but LCO soon abandons Lioness themselves, leaving her more of a sympathetic figure. Sonoko Kato meanwhile starts recovering from injuries a bit and eventually allies with Asuka, angering Meiko, her old partner. She adds some killer new moves, like Kowloon’s Gate (the old “Bull’s Poseidon” move, draping someone over their back and landing ass-first, like a better version of Hangman Page’s Deadeye). She’s starting to get wrapped up like a mummy by this point, however.

The year ends with Aja Kong defeating Meiko in another title match, but the story is very different now. Here, Aja only barely succeeds at holding Meiko back, having to fight desperately the entire match to avoid getting submitted or pinned, and not because Meiko “got lucky”- Meiko is now legitimately stopping her every step of the way, coming off more as an equal who’s “made it”. Chikayo & Sugar actually defeat Aja & Ozaki in a great ***3/4 AAAW Tag Title switch in July 1999. Rookie Saika Takeuchi debuts- the star of “GAEA Girls”- an infamous documentary showing violence and verbal abuse as part of a theatrical show of how hard Chigusa wanted pro wrestling to be perceived as. Wearing lime green, she lasts only a couple years.

Also, guess what? STABLE CHANGE! Nostradamus becomes Himiko at some point. It drops Aja and adds Devil Masami, then Ozaki’s male goon “Police”. This doesn’t matter at all and barely changes anything.

Yamada remakes herself wearing Mad Max/Flintstones gear but wrestling mostly the same kind of matches. KAORU has devolved into a truly brainless “Spot-Bot” by this point, developing a new “brawling-heavy” style with lots of TLC-style bumps just strung together in meaningless, showy bouts. But she has a miracle **** match with Aja Kong (SO FUNNY how everyone is mysteriously having all their best matches with Aja Kong, innit? It’s almost like she’s the real GOAT talent in joshi puro!) and that introduced a lot of Western fans to how wild the style could get.

Toshie Uematsu is largely forgotten by this point. She’s kind of improved a bit but the booking largely doesn’t focus on her at all. A surprise highlight was Chikayo Nagashima, who had spent a lot of the past few years buried in a tag team having good matches but not showing a lot of personality, and suddenly she zooms out like “NOTICE ME!”, snapping up the #2 Class of 1995 spot that Kato’s starting to drop due to injuries. This is coincidentally right around the time Sugar Sato starts gaining weight due to injuries and is unable to alter her style to match it, just getting killed out there. At least Sakura Hirota is now developing a “Cosplay Hirota” character that ends up becoming her biggest success, and her most amusing thing in-ring- her matches now appear shorter and funnier, THANK GOD. Those were the biggest chore to sit through in GAEA.

By year’s end, though, GAEA hits on something that REALLY draws some attention- the CRUSH GALS REUNITE! Chigusa & Lioness start agreeing on things after Himiko engage in tons more cheating and weapon-brawls, even bringing back the double-team Crush Gals Karate Punch to blow the audience’s minds in one match. They have some interviews talking about old times and come out to their 1980s theme song in front of an adoring crowd in GAEA’s biggest show ever at their Fifth Anniversary Show- CRUSH 2000 is now a thing, defeating Devil & Akira in a tag match that eventually gets very good and sends the fans home happy. This gets national attention in Japan (one of the biggest acts of the 1980s reuniting), and seems to set things off on a good note to put over the next five years. The Crush team decides to take over guardianship of all the GAEA natives, but this infuriates the veterans, who apparently form their own mega-stable against them. So… another GAEA vs. Heel Invaders feud. YIPPEE.

THE FUTURE OF GAEA:
* So obviously, in retrospect, we know that GAEA only in fact LASTS another five years- it dies in April 2005. The reputation of the promotion is somewhat iffy- while it was the biggest promotion in the women’s side of things for a while, it got a rep as “The Joshi Retirement Home”, with tons of veterans taking up shop there. This came at the detriment to a lot of the native wrestlers who had trained with the company and should have been expected to be elevated. When I got into joshi puro in the early 2000s, I remember reading a LOT of criticism about “selfish veterans” and how they should all be doing jobs.

This is of course a big question- GAEA needed the veterans to sell tickets. So they had to persuade them somehow, which meant either spending money or letting them look strong. If you’re a veteran who debuted in the ’80s, do you want to come in and hurt your name value by doing jobs to Class of 1995 wrestlers? This is a balancing act nearly every promotion has to deal with at some point, and there’s no simple answer. It seems obvious that Meiko has grabbed the “brass ring”, and Chikayo is in the process of grabbing it, too. But their contemporaries have faltered- Kato is always hurt (and this gets worse- she’s utterly gone by next year for ages), Toshie flagged a lot as a talent and got left behind by the booking, and now Sugar is suffering. So that’s only two girls who are anywhere near “ready” and there’s still an army of senpais above them (Yamada, KAORU, Ozaki, Devil, Akira, Chigusa, Asuka)- many of whom aren’t even GAEA employees but Freelancers (Ozaki, Asuka) who aren’t anywhere near as likely to be okay with doing big-time jobs.

GAEA defaulting to the same old story every single time hurts them throughout the years- when SSU first formed, I was greatly excited, as I had found GAEA boring as hell during all of 1998 and was seeing this great big shot in the arm… but things descended into samey madness. Endless “all the heels rush in” matches, leading to SSU breaking up for no reason, Nostradamus debuting, then changing their name for no reason and being basically the same thing, then ending up with another heel army to set off the sixth year. Hurting just as bad is the utter lack of success with rookie generations. The only other person after the Class of 1995 to succeed that I’ve seen is Sakura Hirota, and that’s as a comedy wrestler! And I can only find one other person in a quick search- Ryo Mizunami, who debuts a bit later. The brutal workload of GAEA, plus the fact that any rookie in the company has not only five “veterans” from 1995, plus a legion of people with 10+ years experience apiece above them in the pecking order, makes it little surprise why this happens, but it’s still incredible that not a single person seems to have any staying power or even shows a bit of promise.

Cheating and looking a bit ahead, I see that Dynamite Kansai & Devil Masami become permanent GAEA fixtures in 2000 as JWP dies for the first time. Kato misses a ton of time and is gone after 2001, never returning. Sato is also hurt for most of 2001 or so, sticking it out until GAEA dies. Takeuchi retires in 2001. The “next generation” pushes pretty much go only to Meiko & Chikayo, and even THAT is delayed by longer than you might think was necessary.