With Trapped in the Cagematch, Kim Wong combs through the highest-rated matches according to Cagematch’s voters in preparation for the annual FSM 50 and the year-end Match of the Year extravaganza.
Saya Kamitani vs. Tam Nakano
Stardom Nighter in Korakuen
March 3, 2025
Cagematch ranking as of 10/23/25: 46
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, in Science of Logic, claimed that the “nature of finite things as such is to have the seed of passing away as their essential being: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.” Throughout her career, Tam Nakano sought to inherit the tradition of idols in joshi puroresu that the Beauty Pair, Jackie Sato and Maki Ueda, started in 1976 in All Japan Women’s Pro-Wrestling. Nakano started dancing at three years old, was a member of an idol group, and broke into wrestling’s orbit when her second group, Inform@te, performed at Actwres girl’Z shows. Mayu Iwatani trained Nakano as a professional wrestler, and Nakano had her first match at AgZ Act 8 against Saori Anou. In 2017, Nakano left Actwres girl’Z and joined Stardom, where she would try again and again to bring in wrestlers who could also be J-Pop idols. To understand how Nakano sowed the seeds of her own destruction in those efforts, we need to understand how Nakano’s and Kamitani’s paths intersected over the years.
In 2018, Nakano and Stardom launched its Stardom Idols initiative, wherein Stardom would train the young women to wrestle and provide them with a platform to perform songs and dances. In total, Stardom held three Stardom Idols shows between 2018 and 2019, but the idea fizzled out in its execution. The shows were held at Shin-Kiba 1st RING, and no show garnered more than 260 fans. Stardom Idols would be relegated to a footnote in Stardom’s history except for one thing: Saya Kamitani entered Stardom’s gravity through Stardom Idols.
Since Nakano and Kamitani shared an interest in becoming idols and were in Stardom together, one would expect Kamitani to join Nakano in her faction at the time, STARS. Instead, Kamitani joined Queen’s Quest to follow Utami Hayashishita, who beat Kamitani for the Future of Stardom title in 2020. Nakano turn her focus to challenging Arisa Hoshiki unsuccessfully for the Wonder of Stardom Championship, then teaming with Hoshiki to unsuccessfully challenge Konami and Jungle Kyona for the Goddesses of Stardom Championship, and feuding with Giulia for the Wonder of Stardom Championship. Nakano would also continue to fuse idol culture with Stardom by breaking away from STARS and forming the Cosmic Angels faction with former idol Unagi Sayaka and Mina Shirakawa and by trying to recruit her former Actwres girl’Z colleague, Natsupoi, to her faction.
After Nakano finally beat Giulia and won the Wonder of Stardom Championship in 2021, she defended the title against factionmates, her trainer, and Kamitani. That year, Kamitani beat Nakano on her second try, ending Nakano’s reign at 301 days, and then she surpassed Nakano by holding the title for 480 days. Though Nakano and Kamitani weren’t in direct conflict by the time that Kamitani’s reign ended, they seemed to be circling each other. Nakano had turned her focus to winning the World of Stardom Championship from Giulia and accomplished this goal in 2023. Shirakawa, Nakano’s former factionmate in Cosmic Angels, beat Kamitani for the title in 2023, and then Nakano ending Shirakawa’s brief reign to hold both the World of Stardom and Wonder of Stardom titles.
Later in 2023, Nakano would face a setback when she lost the Wonder of Stardom title to MIRAI and vacated the World of Stardom due to injury after defending it against Natsuko Tora. Meanwhile, Kamitani teamed with Hayashishita to become Goddesses of Stardom champions, holding those titles for 119 days. By 2024, Kamitani’s world would also fall apart as Hayashishita left Stardom for Marigold in May in the aftermath of Rossy Ogawa’s messy departure from Stardom, as her Queen’s Quest faction disbanded in June, and as she lost the High Speed Championship in July. Kamitani would recover and join Tora to reform Oedo Tai into H.A.T.E.
After three months away, Nakano returned to a drastically different landscape. Nakano, Natsupoi, and Anou focused on rebuilding Cosmic Angels, and Nakano would wrestle four times outside Japan in 2024: at Stardom’s WrestleMania Week show that year, ROH SuperCard of Honor, SPARK Trailblaze, and at AEW/NJPW Forbidden Door 2024’s Zero Hour. Tora had not forgotten that Nakano had beaten her for the World of Stardom title, and Cosmic Angels were the diametric opposite of H.A.T.E. So, Tora and Kamitani targeted Nakano and the Cosmic Angels, attacking Nakano’s leg before the Angels’ match against Shirakawa’s Empress Nexus Venus for the Artist of Stardom title. Though the Cosmic Angels won that title, H.A.T.E. would not relent on their animosity toward Nakano and would attack her before her matches in the 2024 5STAR Grand Prix. Nakano would end the tournament with no wins as a result.
Tora then taunted Nakano and allowed Nakano to challenge for Tora’s World of Stardom title. This would backfire as Nakano would beat Tora for the title. Kamitani was the runner-up in the 5STAR Grand Prix, and she didn’t have a claim to challenge Nakano to bring the title back to H.A.T.E. After Nakano defended the title against Maika, the 2024 5STAR Grand Prix winner, and Suzu Suzuki, the 2023 5STAR Grand Prix winner, Kamitani beat Nakano in a tag team match, which opened the door for Kamitani to challenge and beat Nakano for the World of Stardom title at Dream Queendom 2024 in December 2024. Kamitani would rub salt into Nakano’s face, to mix metaphors, by demanding that Nakano put the title belt around Kamitani’s waist. After the match, Nakano lamented bringing Kamitani into professional wrestling.
Emboldened, Kamitani continued to antagonize Nakano by challenging her to a tag match with the stipulation that one of the newest Cosmic Angels, Sayaka Kurara, would join H.A.T.E. if Nakano and Kurara lost to Kamitani and Tora. By beating Kamitani and Tora, Nakano earned a wish from Kamitani. Nakano, determined to remove the problem that she helped to create, challenged Kamitani to a Loser Leaves Stardom match.
Kamitani, now Stardom’s main character, had already established her credibility by beating Nakano for the World of Stardom title and defending it against Suzu Suzuki. To further cement Kamitani’s status, Stardom needed a story with narrative and emotional hooks with years of seasoning. Ogawa’s departure gave Stardom the opportunity to combine reality with fiction. Scheduling Nakano in a Loser Leave Stardom match exploited fans’ assumptions that she would lose so she could defect to Ogawa’s new company, Marigold. Nakano and Kamitani also orbited each other for years, from Kamitani’s very beginnings in Stardom Idols, and though they would clash for titles, they hadn’t threatened each other so existentially. This was an escalation in the threat that Kamitani posed to her opponents, and it showed a vindictive streak in her villainy.
I had wanted Kamitani to impress me in the Suzuki match. Overall, she had, but she exhibited an exaggerated lack of seriousness that gnawed at me. Nonetheless, nothing’s as compelling as success, and if Stardom found its footing and climbed upward on Kamitani’s back in the aftermath of the tumult of 2024, then surely there was something of value and interest to me in Kamitani.
Nakano and Kamitani made their positions as clear to the audience as possible. Nakano dressed in white, carrying a sorcerer’s staff to the ring. Kamitani, in contrast, dressed in black, carrying her faction’s flag to the ring. The loser must leave Stardom, so the stakes were about as high as they could get. The disdain they had for each other felt intense; Kamitani took the title from Nakano, and now she sought to take Nakano’s home promotion from her too. Given the stakes, the match also had to prolong the drama for as long as possible; it would be shocking for Kamitani to lose this, so the odds were against Nakano. Therefore, it was incumbent on them both to establish that Nakano was capable of beating Kamitani…until the moment Kamitani won.
As expected, the match started with intensity and on an even playing field. They traded holds and dodged each other’s kicks. Thankfully H.A.T.E. was nowhere to be seen. Kamitani choked Nakano up to the point where she would get disqualified, and Nakano was willing to give up positioning so she could slap the taste out of Kamitani’s mouth.
The framing on this shot
entertained me because it reminded me of this.
H.A.T.E. eventually made its presence known when Tora yanked Nakano out of the ring. I didn’t mind their interference here as much because the stipulation provided the permission structure for their interference. Nakano had a bunch of her fellow Cosmic Angels out for her entrance; if they liked her at all, they probably should have run interference to prevent H.A.T.E. from attacking. Instead, Kamitani got to throw Nakano around Korakuen Hall, bashed her elbow with an umbrella, and hanged her from the ringpost by a chain. (I don’t know why Kamitani had to respect the referee’s count to force her to release Nakano.) To add insult to injury, various members of H.A.T.E. also beat up various Cosmic Angels while they tended to Nakano, who gasped for air on the floor while Kamitani gloated from the top turnbuckle.
After absorbing a fair amount of abuse from Kamitani, Nakano showed that she wasn’t ready to leave Stardom just yet. Kamitani provoked Nakano to hit her, and Nakano delivered 20 uninterrupted seconds’ worth of elbow strikes.
So, it was a great contrast when Kamitani showed that she was mostly unfazed by Nakano’s flurry and responded with just one elbow strike that blasted Nakano to the mat.
Clearly, a stand-up battle in the middle of the ring wouldn’t work for Nakano, so she had to raise the stakes, first with a dive from the top turnbuckle to the floor, then a running knee strike on the apron to drive Kamitani’s head into the ring post, followed by bending Kamitani over the second turnbuckle while choking her. It’s not quite the same level of violence as hanging Nakano via a chain, but it was a great visual.
The referee broke Nakano’s chokehold on Kamitani, which gave Kamitani a chance to recover. With renewed strength, Kamitani fought off Nakano’s German suplex attempt on the apron and countered Nakano’s charge with a headscissors from the apron to the Korakuen Hall floor.
Back inside the ring, the younger Kamitani stirred first and blasted a still staggered Nakano off her feet with a missile dropkick from the top rope. Kamitani unloaded with three straight fisherman suplexes, and Nakano retaliated with four straight German suplexes. However, the match is still even, after they blocked each other’s spin kick and exchanged slaps to the face. Nakano got an offensive burst in with a suplex after catching Kamitani’s leg, and Kamitani responded with a spin kick to the face and a spinning kick to Nakano’s back. Nakano arose for a Tiger suplex from the top, which resulted in another thudding landing from Kamitani.
From here, Nakano and Kamitani pushed themselves into overdrive, kicking out at one in defiance while their respective factions watched from ringside. Nothing was left in the war crates: spin kicks, backdrop drivers, Tiger suplexes, poisoned ‘ranas, fisherman brainbusters (Kamitani’s Star Crusher), and running knees to the head were unleashed, building the match to a fever pitch from disbelief (can you believe that all of this is still not enough) and anticipation (if that’s not enough, what will be).
Even the potential of the two factions’ presence ringside was paid off when Cosmic Angels attacked H.A.T.E. after Kamitani tried to cheat Nakano of her career in Stardom by bashing her head with a black plastic crate. The Angels effectively wiped out H.A.T.E. with a dive, which teased the possibility that Nakano could beat Kamitani. Here, we come back to the idea that Nakano and Kamitani needed to lay the groundwork for a viewer to believe that Nakano could win, and they’ve successfully laid the groundwork for that with their escalation. Nakano capped this work with an incredibly dangerous looking Falcon arrow brainbuster, Nakano’s Violet Screwdriver.
It’s not enough.
It’s not enough?
It’s not enough.
In the end, H.A.T.E. triumphed because good is well-intentioned but naïve. H.A.T.E. created enough of a distraction that the referee left the ring long enough for Tora to hit Nakano in the back with a stick and Kamitani to hit Nakano’s head with a metal chair. After all that, Kamitani stared Nakano down and kicked her in the face to win the match.
Well, damn.
Kamitani’s mannerisms, while still exaggerated, didn’t include anything quite as goofy as the staggering around in the match against Suzuki. She told a great story about being one step ahead of Tam Nakano physically and strategically. Nakano was a great foil, a veteran who realized that her path to victory lay in taking Kamitani to the deep end of the pool and hoped that only she could swim. To Nakano’s disappointment, Kamitani matched her stroke for stroke there too, and, to torture the metaphor, had a crew ready to throw her a life-preserver. Kamitani got a major notch in her belt from beating Nakano again, cementing her presence as the company’s showcase wrestler.
Watch this match. It’s one of the best of the year.
The match and the show can be watched on Stardom World.
Next time: What do you do when your career’s been given a reprieve after you lose a Loser Leaves Town match? You do the only thing that you can: beat the living daylights out of your friend, as Tam Nakano and Saori Anou did in my personal vanity pick for the match of 2025.
