Prologue
It’s never fun to play second fiddle. Whether in real life or in the great sport of professional wrestling, that feeling of being on the cusp of true greatness without being able to achieve it is one of the many human curses that we must endure. In the world of Joshi wrestling, regardless of one’s in-ring skill, it’s not easy to thrive amongst such high-caliber of professional wrestlers that the scene continues to develop.
In many cases, these struggling wrestlers will instead find a lane within the incredible world of tag team wrestling. And while tag team wrestling doesn’t typically get them the highest spot on the card, it does not take away from how great these performers can be. In fact, some of the greatest wrestlers of all time have gotten to that point solely because of their prowess in tag team wrestling.
What I’m trying to say is not every wrestler needs to be a standout singles performer. Sometimes, if you find a great partner, building your legacy alongside them is nothing to be ashamed of. However, sometimes these skilled tag teams are capable of having stand-out performances in a singles setting. Furthermore, many teams can use the chemistry they have together to present incredible singles performances against one another. For decades, this was the main strategy of All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling, the top Joshi promotion throughout most of the 20th century.
AJW first formed in the late 60s, and it only took a few years for them to come up with a groundbreaking formula for elevating their roster: Create a tag team, have them double as Pop Idols, market them as a major attraction to teenage girls, and translate that into two singles stars before forcing them to retire at the age of 25. The success of this promoting technique was staggering, with Jackie Sato & Maki Ueda of the Beauty Pair dominating the 1970s and the Crush Gals mastering the strategy in the 1980s. All four of these women held both the 3WA Tag Team and 3WA Singles Championships, with feuds between the tag team partners creating some of the most monumental title bouts in Joshi history.
However, not every highly successful tag team throughout the 1970s and 1980s would go on to find singles success. This includes one of my favorite tag teams from this era who never really get their flowers. Victoria Fujimi and Nancy Kumi, better known as The Golden Pair, were the second notable pop idol tag team of the 1970s, winning the 3WA Tag Team Championships in 1978 amidst Ueda and Sato’s main event rivalry. Neither Fujimi nor Kumi ever found success as singles competitors. On the same night that they lost their 3WA Titles inside Budokan Hall, both Ueda and Sato walked out with both singles championships in the company at the time.
The Golden Pair has always interested me. Despite never putting up results as singles competitors, the skill they show in their handful of taped matches leads one to believe that it was never due to a lack of merit; They simply had the task of existing during the same time as one of the most legendary duos in Joshi history. It’s the sad yet inevitable reality of the ultra-competitive world of Joshi wrestling.
At the beginning of 2022, this was the fate I predicted for Maika and Himeka, affectionately known as MaiHime, in the World Wonder Ring STARDOM promotion. Their sole reign as Goddesses of Stardom Tag Team Champions parallels the careers of The Golden Pair, who spent most of their tenure seeking the 3WA Tag Team Championships rather than carrying them. Their struggles as singles competitors, which I will elaborate more on later in this article, have also plagued the duo since their 2020 STARDOM debuts, which led me to believe that they found their lane as tournament spoilers, championship contenders, and tag team stalwarts–nothing more, nothing less.
But then, on the final night of the 2022 5STAR Grand Prix, Maika and Himeka had their first-ever singles match against one another, and my perspective changed drastically in the span of nine minutes and 57 seconds.
The Story of Maika and Himeka
Before we get to that fateful night this past October, we must first talk about how Maika and Himeka got to this point. MaiHime first crossed paths when they became two integral members of the Donna Del Mondo faction in the Summer of 2020. While Maika entered the company as a relative unknown coming out of Taka Michinoku’s fledgling JTO promotion, Himeka had already made a name for herself alongside Miyuke Takase as “Beginning” in companies such as Actwres girl’Z and SEAdLINNNG ahead of her STARDOM tenure.
Both women were earmarked for success soon into their time with the company. By the Autumn of 2020, Maika and Himeka were deemed two of the five members of what Rossy Ogawa dubbed “The Golden Generation” of the STARDOM. Alongside homegrown talents Saya Iida, Saya Kamitani, and Utami Hayashishita, Maika and Himeka were prophesized to lead the company into a new era. However, those who know anything about “generational shifts” and “new eras” in Joshi wrestling will know that it isn’t quite that easy.
The first sign of Maika and Himeka’s struggles in STARDOM was seen at Yokohama Cinderella, the company’s first major PPV event, where they challenged fellow Golden Generation members, Saya Kamitani and Utami Hayashishita for the Goddesses of Stardom Tag Team Championships.
Saya and Utami, collectively known as AphroditE, were both supernovas upon their respective debuts in STARDOM. The super rookie of 2018 and the super rookie of 2019, their status in that Golden Generation club was absolutely bulletproof in comparison to their three counterparts. Maika and Himeka’s challenge ended in defeat for the outsiders and would set a precedent for the duo going forward; Anything they do, AphroditE will always be one step ahead.
As 2021 came around, the gap between Maihime and their Gold Gen contemporaries expanded greatly, and not in their favor. While Saya Iida was sidelined with a knee injury that kept her out of action for a whole year, Saya Kamitani defeated both Maika and Himeka on the same night to be crowned the winner of the 2021 Cinderella Tournament. Even more impressive, Utami’s run as World of Stardom Champion, one launched off the back of her 5STAR Grand Prix Final victory over Himeka, would be considered one of the most dominant reigns in recent memory.
It was only at this point, with their fiercest rivals busy thriving as singles competitors, that Maika and Himeka could find their footing in the tag team division. They won the titles from the Oedo Tai duo of Konami and Bea Priestley, cementing themselves firmly atop the tag team mountain. This was what it was all building up to! The team went on a reign of terror, unlike anything anyone has seen before, so much so that the company retired their jerseys as a sign of respect for the greatest tag team-
Nah, I’m just playing. They lost the belts in 49 days.
Maika and Himeka’s title run was woefully short-lived considering their natural chemistry as a tag team. Unfortunately, MaiHime was now not only competing for the spotlight with their Gold Gen adversaries but with their own faction as well. The duo only managed to successfully defend their belts twice before losing them to their Donna Del Mondo stablemates, Giulia and Syuri, two singles competitors who happened to be in-between things to do and set their sights on the tag team titles to keep them busy.
Despite once again being overshadowed by their peers, Maika and Himeka were quickly able to put their proficient teamwork to good use. The duo won the Artists of Stardom Championship Belts alongside Natsupoi in October 2021, ending the record-breaking reign of the Cosmic Angels in the process.
While this was by far Maika and Himeka’s most successful championship run to date, it is also not very relevant to today’s story. There was a dance, bad gear, a rivalry against Cosmic Angels that never wanted to end, some strange tension between Himeka and Natsupoi that was momentarily resolved in a 10,000,000 Yen Ladder Match, and much more that I don’t have the time to get into. The important thing to note is that when the reign ended in May 2022, things looked as dire as ever for Maika and Himeka.
Without the trios division to focus their energy on, it quickly became clear just how far behind Maika and Himeka had fallen, with their status as major threats to major titles becoming less and less evident. For Maika, her two failed attempts at winning Utami Hayashishita’s Red Belt in 2021 were made to look even worse upon her unsuccessful challenge against Saya Kamitani for the White Belt in May 2022. And, despite challenging for the top titles far less than her teammate, Himeka was clearly struggling as well. Her April 2022 match against Syuri for the World of Stardom Championship emphasized the message that she simply was not Red Belt material.
The Story of Maika vs. Himeka
With the 5STAR Grand Prix on the horizon, and Giulia the clear favorite to win it all, it seemed as if Maika and Himeka were nothing more than two unnoteworthy additions in the background of the summer’s hottest tournament. While the duo was known to play spoiler against the top contenders of the 5STAR Grand Prix, Maika and Himeka needed to present something greater to stand out amongst the 26-woman, 158-match tournament that was contested over two months. So, in what must’ve been fate–or at least a very good booking decision–the final night of the tournament was set to hold the first-ever singles match between Maika and Himeka.
So, now that we’re all caught up, let’s talk about what made this match so special. For starters, before the bell even rang, I think there was something powerful about the match on paper that enhanced the in-ring presentation. In the match prior to MaiHime’s first singles meeting, both women were officially eliminated from the tournament by Tam Nakano, who defeated SAKI and all but assured her entry into the 5STAR Grand Prix Finals. The duo, who were tied at a record of seven wins and four losses, were once again set to be an afterthought on a major stage, this time by Tam Nakano and the eventual tournament winner Giulia. However, that expectation of an inconsequential match was immediately shattered as soon as the bell rang.
There’s a certain beauty to watching tag team partners wrestle one-on-one. While I already went over the Beauty Pair and Crush Gals in the 1970s & 80s, it must be mentioned that this never ceased to be the case. From Ayako Hamada and AKINO’s clashes in Arsion from the early 2000s to Mayu Iwatani and Io Shirai’s incredible singles meetings throughout the 2010s, tag team partners understand one another so well that it can translate into fierce battles when pitted against one another, and that’s exactly what happened on October 3.
Maika and Himeka went to war, going to extreme lengths to try to obliterate one another. The two power wrestlers threw the most impactful lariats they could muster, yet neither was willing to leave their feet. Maika was able to grab a slight edge by using her superior submission work but Jumbo refused to fall behind when things spilled to the outside, hitting a gnarly big back-suplex on the bare floor. Each piece of offense was almost immediately met with an equal and opposite reaction, and it was clear that both Maika and Himeka were giving their all to defeat one another. Within the first five minutes, it became clear that the compounding damage both women had taken rendered the 15-minute time limit practically obsolete.
As the match approached its second half, you begin to notice small things that really cemented how important this match was to both of them. Himeka’s JP Coaster, a move that has almost exclusively been no-sold for the year leading up to this point, was treated as a viable finish to the match because of how well Maika did selling it. Himeka’s explosive sprinting felt handmade for this first encounter against Maika, who used the momentum to deliver one of her best powerslams to date. Maika’s patented Superplex was brilliantly stopped and reversed into a spontaneous Running Concussion Bomb from Himeka, something that has been her calling card throughout this year’s tournament. Then, in perhaps my favorite part of the entire match, Himeka became the first woman to ever kick out of Maika’s Michinoku Driver No. 2, the move that claimed Maika nearly every major victory she’d had since 2021.
Perhaps the only weak moment of the match was the actual finish, which saw two less-than-stellar forearms put both women on their backs, ending the bout in a Double Knockout. Yet, even then, with a finish that could be considered underwhelming, the message was clear that not only are Maika and Himeka championship material, but they also share a chemistry with one another unlike anybody else in STARDOM today. And if that’s what they can do at the tail-end of an unwinnable tournament, I’d sure love to see what they could come up with if a major singles title was on the line.
Maika and Himeka went on to win the Match of the Tournament Award for the Red Stars Block. When their names were announced and they came to the ring, their smiling faces and joyous cheers were a far cry from their fierce demeanors just an hour prior. In their post-match interview (translated here by the wonderful @ItsDanaNow on Twitter), Himeka summed up what made their match so special.
“Pro wrestling isn’t just about fate, it’s also about bonds, and we could prove that in the ring. I realized again that pro wrestling is great, that I love it.”
Himeka
Epilogue
Outside of that stellar performance, it can’t be denied that MaiHime had a rough 2022. Beyond what I covered earlier, both Maika and Himeka failed once more at claiming top singles championships in the second half of this year, pushing their combined record in Wonder & World Championship matches to a staggering 0-7 since 2020. Then, in their first Goddesses of Stardom Tag League outing as a duo, they failed to win their block yet again. Instead, it was once again AphroditE who made it to the finals, though they ended up losing to Yuu and Nanae Takahashi, known together as 7Upp.
The task of existing during the same time as wrestlers like Giulia, Syuri, Utami, and Saya Kamitani is far from an easy one. Despite that, Maika and Himeka were appointed members of the Golden Generation for a reason. While they haven’t found the success that some of their contemporaries have thus far, it feels foolish to not believe that one or both of MaiHime are future World/Wonder of Stardom Champions in the making.
And even if singles gold isn’t on their horizons quite yet, I think it’s safe to say that STARDOM’s tag team division would be lucky to have a Golden Pair as its centerpiece.
Check out the first-ever match between Maika and Himeka: Stardom World
For more on STARDOM, check out the latest episode of the Five Star Network’s Stardom Quest podcast.
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