Trapped in the Cagematch: Mei Suruga vs. Rina Yamashita (September 5, 2025)

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.

Mei Suruga vs. Rina Yamashita
ChocoPro #472 Game Changer
September 5, 2025
Cagematch ranking as of 12/02/25: 44

It’s easy to dismiss ChocoPro because 1) it’s a small joshi-oriented company operating out of Tokyo and 2) it grew from Gatoh Move, which famously held its shows in Ichigaya Chocolate Square, a drafty square room in a residential building. It feels like it’s about two steps removed from apartment wrestling, hardly the most respectable form that women’s professional wrestling has ever taken. While no one could seriously claim that ChocoPro will challenge Stardom for joshi supremacy, ChocoPro shows no signs of slowing down since it made its return to Korakuen Hall in 2024 after an eight year absence. As a Tokyo-based promotion, ChocoPro doesn’t stray often from its home turf. Every ChocoPro is available due to the company’s #NoPayWall Initiative. Looking only at the shows outside Ichigaya Chocolate Square, the attendance is stable (or stagnant, if you’d prefer to be unkind), even if the company seems like it’s one bad flu season away from failing to meet its modest attendance targets for Shinjuku FACE or Shin-Kiba 1st RING:

Lest we forget, Gatoh Move had a working relationship with AEW; Gatoh Move’s co-founder, Emi Sakura, and Mei Suruga, Sakura’s trainee and featured player in Gatoh Move (and now ChocoPro), both wrestled in the Japanese half of the AEW Women’s World Championship Eliminator Tournament that led to Hikaru Shida’s title defense against Ryo Mizunami at AEW Revolution 2021. And former AEW Women’s Champion Riho was once the inaugural Gatoh Move Super Asia Champion and still wrestled in Gatoh Move’s shows even after she made her AEW debut. So, while it’s easy to dismiss ChocoPro, perhaps we do so at our own peril? Is their standing in the wrestling ecosystem that different from Pro Wrestling ZERO1, SEAdLINNNG, or even Marigold in 2025?

Just so we are viewing this through factual lenses, here are Marigold’s and SEAdLINNNG’s attendance for comparison against the 600 fans ChocoPro claimed for its 2024 show in Korakuen Hall.

Marigold

SEAdLINNNG

*SEAdLINNNG held more shows than what I’ve listed at Shinjuku FACE, Shin-Kiba 1st RING, and Korakuen Hall in 2025, but no attendance data was available on Cagematch. Whether that’s because attendance was so embarrassingly low that it’s better not to report it is up to you.

As Kelly Harass had put it in Mei Suruga’s profile in Voices of Wrestling’s 2025 30 Under 30 Honorable Mentions, “Mei has been putting in very strong work as the face of ChocoPro.” I personally had high hopes that someone might put the word in Tony Khan’s ear to seriously consider adding Suruga to AEW’s roster when Suruga was in the United States in November and December 2021 to serve as Sakura’s valet. Suruga did wrestle seven matches for AEW, relegated to a dark match on Dynamite and various AEW Dark and Dark: Elevation matches. I know hiring a Japanese wrestler to work at an American company is not as easy as snapping your fingers, but Suruga seemed to be worth as much effort, if not more so, than Maki Itoh, for example, who wrestled on two episodes of Dynamite in 2022. 

Though AEW didn’t sign Suruga, the 26-years-old had managed to find an American home base in DEADLOCK Pro Wrestling, where she wrestled twice in 2022, 2023, and 2025. She also had tours in CMLL in 2022 and 2023, wrestling in the International Women’s Grand Prix 2022 Torneo Cibernetico and the Grand Prix de Amazonas 2023. Like ChocoPro, the diminutive Suruga seems easy to dismiss (I mean, come on, her nickname is “Apple Girl”), but we might be doing so at our own peril.

On the other side, the 36-years-old Rina Yamashita, who started her career with Osaka Joshi-Pro and Pro Wrestling WAVE in 2013, seems to be reaching her peak this year. I think of her first and foremost as a deathmatch wrestler, which makes sense since she was the GCW Ultraviolent Champion for 791 days from August 13, 2022 to October 12, 2024. Because everything is connected to everything else now, Yamashita also teamed with Michael Philippou, one half of the RackaRacka team with his brother, Danny Philippou and co-director with Danny of horror films Talk to Me and Bring Her Back, to wrestle Ciclope and Miedo Extremo in an exploding barbed wire deathmatch on September 20, 2025 for the Philippous’ deathmatch wrestling documentary for A24. (Is Michael Philippou the only legitimate director who also has a profile on Cagematch? Imagine Clint Eastwood working a match against Lou Thesz in NWA San Francisco in the 1950s.) Finally, Yamashita joined World Wonder Ring Stardom’s roster this year to back her fellow deathmatch wrestler Suzu Suzuki in Suzuki’s Mi Vida Loca faction. 

This match against Yamashita was scheduled to be Suruga’s 10th defense of her Super Asia title, which had been previously held by Riho, Minoru Fujita, and Emi Sakura. Suruga had won the title from Sakura and defended it against Miyuki Takase, Sayaka, Chie Koishikawa, and Mei Seira, Suzuki’s former partner turned rival after Suzuki crossed her. (With all of these crossovers, joshi can sometimes feel like a very small scene.) This is Suruga’s highest rated match on Cagematch of 2025 and Yamashita’s for her career thus far, so I have high expectations for the match. Billed at 5’5” and 154 lbs., Yamashita has a significant height and weight advantage over Suruga, who is billed at 4’4” and 108 lbs. So, I’d expect Yamashita to overpower Suruga, and Suruga would only survive based on her quickness, agility, and skill. 

Suruga paid those expectations off from the start as she navigated her larger opponent with technique and speed. Despite her best efforts, Yamashita’s power advantage is hard to overcome. I really liked the violent quickness of Yamashita’s headlock takeover. 

So, you would almost have to admire Suruga for rushing into collar and elbow lock-ups with Yamashita again and again despite the major height and weight differences. It’s simply what valiant babyfaces do: they seem a challenge and focus to conquer it even if they should try a different tactic.

One must then ask: can you still be a babyface if you grab your opponent by her hair and try to throw her, as Suruga did to Yamashita after Yamashita threw the first strike out of a break? Was Suruga, who would do her best noblewoman’s laugh throughout the match, even really the babyface here? 

Just as we dismiss ChocoPro and Suruga at our possible peril, we should also reconsider our assumption that Suruga played the underdog babyface based solely on her small stature compared to Yamashita. The only time I can remember a smaller wrestler playing the villain in a match against a larger wrestler is Bryan Danielson, who would bully larger wrestlers like Takeshi Morishima, Mark Henry, and The Big Show by picking them apart using his superior technique or by outsmarting them.

In any case, Suruga escaped a Yamashita hair toss with a cartwheel, which was neat.

Suruga and Yamashita have some more tress-based shenanigans that result in both women jockeying for position on the apron and Suruga locking Yamashita in a variant of the Tarantula hold. Unfortunately for Suruga, that did little to slow Yamashita down since she was able to catch a diving Suruga and ram her back into the ring post.

Suruga and Yamashita played more variations of the theme of Yamashita’s power advantage and Suruga’s agility:

• Yamashita lariated Suruga on the floor
• Suruga squirmed and bridged out of Yamashita’s pin attempt
• Suruga could not throw Yamashita with an arm drag until she got some momentum with some twirls

None of this has been exactly state of the art, but it has been solid wrestling grounded in the big vs. small narrative schema.

And to dot the i and cross the t in my earlier evocation of Bryan Danielson, Suruga captured Yamashita in the Cattle Mutilation. 

Yamashita turned the match around with a simple but effective powerslam. Yamashita’s boot to her face awoke the angry goblin in Suruga, who proceeded to pound on Yamashita. Yamashita obliged by kneeling on one knee so Suruga could reach her, and we revisited the match’s main dynamic again as Yamashita showed that she could withstand Suruga’s strikes. 

Suruga, on the other hand, could not handle one of Yamashita’s.

The match went into a higher gear after Suruga and Yamashita faked each other out with jumps. Suruga used a leg scissors trip (or the Cung Le Special, if you’re nasty) to trip Yamashita and rolled her up for a pin after bouncing off of the top rope. When Yamashita caught her and set up to powerbomb her, Suruga used the top rope for leverage to swing out of Yamashita’s grip, hit her with a running dropkick in the corner, and capped the burst with a surprising powerslam. 

Having withstood Suruga’s surge, Yamashita brought us back to the story that one strike from Yamashita is worth multiple from Suruga. Yamashita laid Suruga out with a step-up enzuigiri, and both wrestlers took a breather until they stood up at nine in the referee’s count. They exchanged elbow strikes on their knees as they again challenged each other to land a knockout blow. When they both rose to their feet, Yamashita continued to bait Suruga into exchanging elbow strikes to Suruga’s detriment.

Suruga realized that trading blows with Yamashita was a losing proposition, so she returned to leaning on her slippery agility and speed to weave around Yamashita and tie her into pinning attempts and quick strikes, like this neat rebound double stomp.

All of that was for nought though when Yamashita again hit the blow that she needed to stop Suruga’s momentum. In this case, it was a simple vertical suplex. Yamashita would again try to drop Suruga with an Air Raid Crash, but Suruga reversed Yamashita’s force against her in a way that showed off Yamashita’s own surprising agility.

From there, Yamashita’s power advantage came into play again because Suruga was unable to pull Yamashita away from the bottom rope, tiring herself out with her efforts. After some struggle, Suruga was able to position Yamashita for a double stomp from the top turnbuckle, but Yamashita’s size allowed her to absorb even the stomp’s damage so she could kick out. 

Yamashita made her case, starting with another simple but effective boot to Suruga’s face. Yamashita imprudently climbed the ropes and tried to splash onto Suruga only to meet Suruga’s raised feet with her face. Suruga tried to press the advantage with a submission hold on Yamashita, but Yamashita rolled far enough away to blast Suruga with a lariat. Even when Suruga activated her meter and fired up, Yamashita just put her down with another lariat. Finally, for all of Suruga’s rolling around, groping for a pin that could last three seconds, and frantic evasion, all Yamashita needed was one powerbomb to plant Suruga to the mat and win the Super Asia Championship.

The 150 fans in attendance at Shin-Kiba 1st RING that evening and the 21,453 views of the match aren’t wrong: this match was rad. It told a classic pro wrestling story in an energetic way. Suruga is a charismatic dynamo, and while I’m glad that she’s loyal to Sakura and ChocoPro, I hope that Suruga is able to wrestle elsewhere and test herself against some of the best wrestlers in the world. This was Suruga and Yamashita’s only singles match, and I’d love to see a rematch between the two because they had great chemistry here. I could also see Suruga meshing well with Syuri and Suzu Suzuki, who would lay some whoopings on Suruga. 

Wow. I really did dismiss ChocoPro and Mei Suruga at my own peril because they (and Yamashita) just knocked my socks off with this match. 

Go watch the match on ChocoPro’s YouTube page. The entire show, which also had a Speed of Sounds match, can also be seen on ChocoPro’s YouTube page.

Next time: Twist your tie in your best Windsor knot and drink some Hayterade as we check out an underappreciated women’s match from Pro-Wrestling EVE: Alex Windsor vs. Jamie Hayter. We can then start to answer the question: “Is Alex Windsor secretly the most important woman in women’s wrestling in 2025?”