- Wed, 30 Sep 2020 03:02:17 EST Z96aJ4e0 No.6451050 Reply >>6451039

NEO - 8/1/2010

NEO Tag Team Championship: Yoshiko Tamura & Ayumi Kurihara (c) vs. Triple Tails (Kana & Io Shirai)



NEO was basically one of the top two joshi companies (along with JWP) of the period post-AJW's closure and pre-Stardom. They ran into a lot of problems in 2009 because Haruka Matsuo (who they had been building as their homegrown next gen ace) retired and business tanked. Then they lost a lot of other talent over the next year with some young wrestlers leaving and having already lost some of their old guard (Misae Genki) or were in the process of losing them (Kyoko Inoue left, Yoshiko Tamura, Yuki Miyazaki and Tanny Mouse were all going to retire at the end of 2010) and with no luck in recruiting wrestlers to replace them it folded at the end of 2010.



Ayumi Kurihara was largely a freelancer but one of the bigger names on the scene at the time and was still young so she got brought in and slotted into basically being the protege of Yoshiko Tamura (NEO's ace) with them winning the tag titles and holding them for close to a year. They main evented the last NEO show with Kurihara beting Tamura for their top belt.



Kurihara's kind of a case of "what if" like a lot of the Dark Ages joshi. Her career was basically at a time where joshi was basically at its lowest point and by the time business started getting better and stabilizing (seriously the 2000s is just a shit show of bad attendance and dead and shortlived promotions) she was too beat up to keep going and retired in 2013. She was a regular in Shimmer and probably would undoubtedly have been a big name if she'd kept wrestling. I could definitely have seen WWE or Impact snapping her up by like 2015.



It's a shame that a lot of that Dark Ages stuff seems to have disappeared because there's a lot of very good wrestlers whose careers are largely contained in what's now kind of a forgotten and overlooked period. NEO - 8/1/2010NEO Tag Team Championship: Yoshiko Tamura & Ayumi Kurihara (c) vs. Triple Tails (Kana & Io Shirai)NEO was basically one of the top two joshi companies (along with JWP) of the period post-AJW's closure and pre-Stardom. They ran into a lot of problems in 2009 because Haruka Matsuo (who they had been building as their homegrown next gen ace) retired and business tanked. Then they lost a lot of other talent over the next year with some young wrestlers leaving and having already lost some of their old guard (Misae Genki) or were in the process of losing them (Kyoko Inoue left, Yoshiko Tamura, Yuki Miyazaki and Tanny Mouse were all going to retire at the end of 2010) and with no luck in recruiting wrestlers to replace them it folded at the end of 2010.Ayumi Kurihara was largely a freelancer but one of the bigger names on the scene at the time and was still young so she got brought in and slotted into basically being the protege of Yoshiko Tamura (NEO's ace) with them winning the tag titles and holding them for close to a year. They main evented the last NEO show with Kurihara beting Tamura for their top belt.Kurihara's kind of a case of "what if" like a lot of the Dark Ages joshi. Her career was basically at a time where joshi was basically at its lowest point and by the time business started getting better and stabilizing (seriously the 2000s is just a shit show of bad attendance and dead and shortlived promotions) she was too beat up to keep going and retired in 2013. She was a regular in Shimmer and probably would undoubtedly have been a big name if she'd kept wrestling. I could definitely have seen WWE or Impact snapping her up by like 2015.It's a shame that a lot of that Dark Ages stuff seems to have disappeared because there's a lot of very good wrestlers whose careers are largely contained in what's now kind of a forgotten and overlooked period.