Mima Shimoda

12/23/70

Tokyo-to Meguro-ku

166

64

8/5/87 Tokyo Korakuen Hall
vs. Etsuko Mita

AJW 1987-97
Free 1997
Neo Ladies 1997-

WWWA Tag
Zen Nihon Senshuken
Zen Nihon Junior
Zen Nihon Tag
UWA Sekai Joshi Tag
JWP Tag

Swimming
Basketball
Arm Wrestling

*Deathlake drive
*Aussie suplex/Tiger suplex hold
*Kakato otoshi
*Moonsault press
Running neckbreaker drop
Kaiten jujigatame
Chair
Assisted springboard plancha
Assisted springboard tope con hilo

Mima

Team with Toyota was called Sweethearts
Team with Mita is called Las Cachorras Orientales
LCO was the first team from a rival promotion to hold the JWP Tag Titles
Made photobook MIMA and video My 10th Anniversary ('96)
License No. 25

Shimoda was a member of AJW's class of 1987, which featured future stars Manami Toyota, Toshiyo Yamada, & Etsuko Mita. Originally, Shimoda was paired with Toyota as an idol team called the Sweethearts, while Yamada & Mita formed Dream Orca. Of the two teams, Dream Orca had more success, capturing the Zen Nihon Tag Senshuken from Reibun Amada & Miori Kamiya (Cooga) on 6/14/89. However, they soon had to vacate the titles when Yamada, who was clearly the star of her team, was injured. Toyota was clearly the star of her team. Just after Sweethearts lost the Zen Nihon Tag decision match to the Honey Wings on 6/1/90, Toyota got a major singles push winning Japan Grand Prix '90 to get her first title WWWA Sekai Single Senshuken shot against Bull Nakano. She had basically left Shimoda in the dust, doing two things in singles at the young age of 19 that Shimoda would never do in her entire career. Mita & Shimoda were put together as a team, and Shimoda got her revenge against the Honey Wings taking the title from them on the undercard of the 11/18/90 Wrestle Marinepiad '90 show.

Early in her career, Shimoda progressed slowly. Her offense was pretty weak, mainly jumping around the ring with low impact moves. She was the lower rated wrestler on her team, so she usually wound up being the bump girl, especially when teamed with the larger Mita. Although she had a run with both Zen Nihon singles titles, she's always been almost exclusively a tag wrestler. In fact her name is synonymous with women's tag wrestling, and that's where she's always done her best work.

Shimoda showed a lot of improvement in 1992, but it wasn't until 1993 that she really got good. The thing with Shimoda is once she got good, she got really good. Although her first six years weren't that great, and she would never have had the chance if they still forced you to retire, Shimoda's body of work since 1993 is good enough to place her in the second ten of best women ever list.

One important change that helped her improve was being positioned as a heel under senpai Akira Hokuto in the Las Cachorras Orientales group. Shimoda would have become a great bump girl and complementary wrestler either way, but this got her to develop her persona, emotions, and charisma. She was no longer just a worker, she was a wrestler with a "nasty" attitude that was becoming a diverse, all around, performer. Ironically, her most memorable moment of 1993 probably wasn't punking anyone, it was the display of emotion that seemed genuine, crying while watching Kandori put her mentor Hokuto away in the only rematch of their legendary Dreamslam match on 12/6/93.

In 1993, Shimoda had a lot of very good to excellent matches, it seemed like everyone did, but she really wasn't on the level where she could consistently make the match on her own yet. Her performance in the Captain Fall Elimination Match on the 10/9/93 Wrestle Marinepiad '93 show proved she had that kind of potential, but 1994 was a better year for carrying Mita in tag matches.

1994 was Mita & Shimoda's first really big year. They had their best tag match to date going nearly forty minutes with their classmates and former partners Yamada & Toyota on 1/24/94, but failed to capture the WWWA Tag from them. However, in March, they captured the second and third best women's tag titles in a three day span. On 3/27, they defeated Mayumi Ozaki & Cuty Suzuki for the JWP Tag in what was actually a disappointing match, while on 3/30, they defeated Yumiko Hotta & Takako Inoue for the UWA Tag in what was actually a surprisingly excellent match. The angle involving the JWP Tag really allowed LCO to display their heel persona, as they would constantly berate JWP representative Masatoshi Yamamoto when his teams couldn't beat them.

The biggest push of Shimoda's singles career came in 1995. AJW was starting to get desperate for new stars, but the dojo wasn't producing pushable newcomers, so they looked to Shimoda & Sakie Hasegawa. Hasegawa never made it because her body broke down. I'm not really sure why Shimoda never made it, maybe their expectations of her singles matches were too high considering she never seemed to have any major singles matches prior to getting this push? In any case, her singles matches were good to very good, but they were never great.

Her main program in 1995 was against the Rideen Array group (Jaguar, Lioness, & Bison), but in a way that was more Mita's thing because the main rivalry was Mita against her idol Bison. The Rideen Array group had been devalued so badly by AJW, taking legends and making them a mid card enhancement trio, that Shimoda beating them in tag didn't mean nearly as much for her as it should have. The climax of the program was Mita & Shimoda successfully defending the UWA Tag against Jaguar & Lioness in an excellent match on the 9/2/95 Nippon Budokan show, then vacating the titles to pursue the WWWA belts. Shimoda then formed a dysfunctional team with Hokuto, with the angle being that Hokuto basically acted like she was the whole team. They captured those titles almost immediately, defeating Double Inoue (Kyoko & Takako) on 9/24/95, but their reign only lasted four months and the angle didn't really work that well when it came to elevating Shimoda.

Shimoda went back to tag team wrestling as a face, really there weren't any heels in AJW at this point. The league had become a bunch of friendly wrestlers doing spots back and forth. All the veterans could really work, but with no outsiders and no real rivalries in the league, these matches couldn't generate the heat that the matches from the interpromotional period had. Anyway, Shimoda reformed her team with Toyota in 1996. Their matches were basically the top this Toyota style work and spots matches that Toyota was pushing. Since Toyota was the top star and Shimoda was trying to do her style, she was once again overshadowed by Toyota even though their matches were generally excellent. On 6/22/96, the duo succeeded in taking the tag titles that Double Inoue had won from Hokuto & Shimoda, avenging their 52+ minute loss to those two on the Wrestle Marinepiad show from the previous month. They had one classic match in the workrate style, defending the titles against members of Toyota's Freedom Force group Mariko Yoshida & Kaoru Ito on 9/28/96 before losing titles to Tomoko Watanabe & Kumiko Maekawa to begin the big Maekawa push of 1997.

When AJW was desperate for a change in mid 1997, the reformed the team of Mita & Shimoda, this time with Shimoda considered the star of the team as they had put her over Mita in singles during her 1995 push. The main change though was that they had them go back to being heels because it was clear that attendance was going to continue to fall if they didn't start creating some rivalries (of course, attendance was going to continue to fall either way, this just had a chance of keeping it from falling as much as it would have). They didn't just do their old routine, they reintroduced weapons to the league and used them to make people bleed. The league was dying out, but LCO was having some of the best matches of their careers in a feud against the U*TOPS group. Shimoda took over for Toyota as the constant in the great AJW matches, doing great work against Watanabe that overshadowed Maekawa's deficiencies. The highlight of the feud was a cage match on 9/21/97 against Ito & Watanabe that is the best cage match of the second half of the 90's by a gigantic margin.

Their big run as top heels in AJW didn't last long though, as AJW's financial troubles lead to the grand exodus that spawned ARSION & Neo. LCO held the WWWA tag titles when they announced their free agency, and actually their aforementioned cage match came after they had left AJW for free agency. Unfortunately, it wasn't long before they stopped working in AJW all together.

At the time, people were talking about how little depth AJW had. Well, the league LCO joined, Neo, consisted of Kyoko Inoue and a bunch of ex-AJW undercarders that, for the most part, weren't good. When LCO had turned heel again in AJW, they almost immediately made huge improvements over the heel style they had done in the early to mid 90's leading to Shimoda being one of the three best female wrestlers in 1997. Unfortunately, in Neo, they seemed to lose their spark and intensity, falling into a pattern of doing the same old thing rather than continuing to hone their style. It wasn't only that Neo didn't have the depth for them to have great matches, but that they didn't want it like they had previously. They have still had some of the best women's matches, but like everyone else, they are rarely hitting ****.

Even though they were supposedly no longer free agents, LCO seemed to wrestle wherever they wanted anyway. They branched out into GAEA, eventually forming the SSU with Lioness, Aja Kong, & Mayumi Ozaki that led to GAEA doing the best business of the women's groups in 1999. They really didn't seem to be important members to that group though, in fact their matches against Chigusa were totally wasted, and the ridiculously quick times in which they lost to her have become infamous. It seems like they are on their way out in GAEA, but at the same time they have renewed their relationship with AJW, taking the titles from ZAP to make Shimoda a four time WWWA Tag champion. On 7/25/99, LCO and Chaparrita ASARI became the first wrestlers from an outsider promotion to work in formerly isolationist ARSION (technically Hikari Fukuoka was the first, as she had one match there, but that was just to honor her because she was retiring). Although Shimoda made it to the final of ZION '99, ARSION seems to have wasted most of the potential LCO has there by not doing a good job of playing up the outsider angle. Shimoda has also done some wrestling in Jd' this year, working on the heel side under Lioness.

Shimoda is one of the best women's wrestlers in the world, has been for the past four years. She's not improving anymore, but she's not sliding either, so she probably has at least a few more years left in the top 10. If she is wants to adapt to the ARSION style a little bit, incorporating some of the technical wrestling aspect they do so well into her heel style, she could possibly have another big run. Even if she remains stagnant or her ability slides, her output should improve from where it was in 1998 because the quality of the opposition in ARSION is so much better. Also, she'll probably only be wrestling in AJW on "important" shows, which means the opportunity to deliver should be there even though AJW will undoubtedly supply some shaky opponents because their depth is nonexistent.