The Crush Gals, Nagayo, the most popular woman pro wrestler in Japan and on a mainstream basis, was put together in a tag team with Tomoko Kitamura, who was known as Lioness Asuka. The current Asuka partially got her name from Lioness. Unlike Sato & Ueda, the short-lived Beauty Pair, which made women’s wrestling hot mainstream in the late 70s, the Crush Gals combined the singing with great wrestling, following Yokota where the standards in the ring were elevated. They used all the moves the male technical wrestlers used, worked at a faster speed, and also incorporated martial arts. The pair also recorded albums that were a big hit for a short period of time.
At the time, about 15 million viewers in Japan would watch the Fuji Network show weekly on Saturday afternoons. Even though Toyota headlined large arenas and was part of a package that drew some of the biggest women’s wrestling crowds of all-time, TV ratings were much lower when she was a top star with the shows being moved to late night time slots. At times during her heyday, the shows, consisting of recently taped matches, topped four million viewers. But with the audience more male oriented by that time, the number of teenage girls wanting to be wrestlers dwindled from The Beauty Pair and Crush Gals heyday, and thus, the quality of athletes to choose from declined, which is why the company and Japanese women’s wrestling in general never had the depth of young girls with the athletic appeal and right look to be stars like they did with the mid-to-late 80s auditions which led to the 90s in-ring peak period. The Crush Gals were often the source of ridicule to the hardcore wrestling fans as just being girls and a marketing gimmick in the day when the appeal of Japanese pro wrestling was the idea that the wrestlers were the most powerful and toughest fighting athletes in the world.
Every year, a tryout would be held for young girls, usually high school age, that wanted to join All Japan women. In 1986, when the Crush Gals and women’s pro wrestling was still at its peak, thousands of girls sent in applications to become pro wrestlers.
The women were put through athletic paces, the drills designed to see who would quit mentally and whose bodies would give out physically. It was endless getting up and down, doing light weights in different movement for reps and running till they dropped. High school athletes who had done structured sports had a huge advantage.
The 1986 training class was particularly fruitful. Four of the women became key stars in the 90s, Toyota, Yamada, Mima Shimoda and Etsuko Mita.
Toyota was known early on for her incredible spring in her legs and great stamina, in the sense she would never tire. Perhaps the best example of this was her 1995 Match of the Year, a 60 minute draw with Kyoko Inoue. When she was being trained, she drilled dropkicks hard, and caught trainers’ eyes by being able to deliver as many as ten in succession while maintaining good height and proper form. Later, she became a specialist in the missile dropkick off the top rope, and sometimes would do a sequence of four in a row, one from each corner. She popularized the dropkick off the top rope to the floor, a move considered so dangerous it’s rarely done today even by the best high flyers. She came up with her own unique suplexes, popularized the springboard plancha and brought back the nearly dormant rolling cradle hold that was the staple of Earl McCready.
In 1989, shortly before her 18th birthday, she and Shimoda, who was 18 at the time, were put together as a tag team called the Tokyo Sweethearts. After teaming together on some undercards, and I don’t believe they had ever even wrestled on TV and they were just doing early matches on the cards, they had a prelim match on May 6, 1989, in what was among the biggest women shows historically up to that point in time.
It was called WrestleMarinpiad, meant to be the women’s version of WrestleMania. But it was more importantly, at least at the time, the retirement of Nagayo, “The Day The Music Died,” the handle I gave the show that ended up sticking. Toyota & Shimoda wrestled Yamada & Mita in a tag team match that stole the show, which drew 12,000 fans and $521,250, by far the largest women’s gate ever. To the fans in the arena, Toyota in particular started to be noticed. A few months later, when the commercial tape of the event was released, and became a huge seller since it was Nagayo’s “last show,” (she did stop wrestling at that point, but 28 years and many retirements later, she still wrestles today), and Toyota became a star to everyone who watched the tape.
She started climbing the ladder at that point, winning the Japanese women’s title, a secondary belt for women on the way up on November 18, 1989, and then the All Pacific title in 1990, which was the next step up.
A lot of different things were tried. Toyota & Yamada wrestled frequently in that era and had tremendous matches. They were put together, and management felt they had something that Toyota & Shimoda didn’t have. Toyota & Shimoda had similarities while Toyota & Yamada were completely different. Yamada, with her hard kicks and submissions was a shooter and Toyota was a high flyer and suplex specialist. Toyota was also a super seller, and Yamada’s hot tags with hard kicks would then pay off. The two first won the UWA world tag team titles, which was for what was still one of the world’s strongest promotions in Mexico. Then they won the WWWA tag team titles, the biggest belts in Japan, beating Kong & Kimura.
In 1992, when All Japan Women and JWP, the rival women’s group, started working together to build business, the two legendary programs were Hokuto vs. Shinobu Kandori and Toyota & Yamada vs. Kansai & Ozaki. The matches were altogether different, but are considered two of the best series of women’s matches in history.
Toyota never wrestled in the U.S. until 2010, for the CHIKARA promotion, and her first matches in the U.K. were recently.
In some ways, no woman wrestler could match her career legacy. From 1992 to 1995, she had 23 five-star matches, a run that may have been unprecedented by anyone, man or woman. Some have argued that nobody in history had a run where they were, on a nightly basis, wrestling at that level.
She popularized the type of match where she would do long matches, surviving all kinds of big moves, and the story of the match would be the attrition. When should would win, or lose, in her biggest matches, she’d sometimes lie on the mat in exhaustion when it was over, selling the idea that you had just seen an epic contest and she had given everything she had.
During the 1990s, she placed four times in the top ten in the Wrestler of the Year award, once as high as third, an unprecedented for any woman. She won Most Outstanding Wrestler in 1995, the only woman ever to do so, and also placed second three times. Only two women’s matches in history ever won Match of the Year, the April 21, 1993, Toyota & Yamada vs. Kansai & Ozaki match in Osaka; and the Toyota vs. Kyoko Inoue 60 minute draw on May 7, 1995 at Korakuen Hall. She and Kong also had the best match on the biggest women’s show of all-time, a 1994 Tokyo Dome event that drew 32,500 fans during the Five-Star tournament, which Kong eliminated her in. Besides her four WWWA world titles (the all-time record), at the time that belt was considered the No. 1 women’s belt in the world, she also won the Japan Grand Prix in 1990 (at 18), 1995, 1998 and 1998, which was the women’s equivalent to the modern G-1 Climax tournament.
She lost the WWWA title for the final time on July 6, 2002, just months after All Japan Women lost their network time slot. At the time, due to a real estate crash, the owners of the promotion, the Matsunaga family, went broke, and the end of the promotion was near. As great as the wrestling was, Japanese women’s wrestling was really a fad that had three boom periods, and exists today on a much-smaller level based on fumes from the glory days. When she lost her title, she announced to the live crowd that it was her last match with the company. The fans left started crying with the announcement, and begged her to stay. But it was time, as Nagayo’s Gaea promotion had become the top women company, and Toyota added one run as AAAW champion, when it was the top woman’s belt.
Toyota was never a great drawing card on her own, and was not as charismatic as some of the women stars of her era or the era before it, but no woman, and perhaps no man, put on the caliber of matches she did, night-after-night.
In 2002 when voted into the Hall of Fame, it was noted that she had spent years working a nearly 300-match a year schedule, a schedule that left many wrestlers shot by five or six years into their career, but at the time, in her 16th year, she was still considered one of the three best woman wrestlers in the world.
