Classic Match: Aja Kong vs. Manami Toyota, AJW V-TOP Woman Tournament ’94

RondaRousey.com’s Classic Match series takes a closer look at significant and super cool matches from wrestling history.

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Every revolution has its roots, and in the case of the rise of women’s professional wrestling, those roots are spread out around the world throughout the history of wrestling. Yet, for a period stretching from the ’80s and ’90s and well into the ’00s, Japan played a large role in the development of the medium, placing influential building blocks that remain to this day. At a time when Japanese male performers were stoic heroes imbued with the fighting spirit of their ancestors, female performers had a clean slate to work with. They blew up like pop stars, became larger-than-life heroes or villains, and were able to forge their own paths to sold-out crowds at some of the largest, most historic venues in Japan.

In 1994, that was where All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling—also known as Zenjo—was. AJW was the hot ticket in Tokyo that fall, packing the Tokyo Dome with 42,500 screaming fans. It was there on November 20th that they held the V-TOP Woman Tournament, a one-night tournament featuring their top talent. every match from that 8-woman tournament is worth viewing multiple times just to catch everything. And yet, this match between one of the best wrestlers of all-time, Manami Toyota, and one of the largest-looming powerhouse wrestlers imaginable in Aja Kong, is still one of the most talked-about matches from this stacked card.

Why this match is so incredible becomes clear as soon as the action starts. Manami is perhaps the perfect vision of a top name for any wrestling promotion: incredibly athletic, charismatic and likable, while Aja Kong serves as the perfect foil: large, looming, in control and brutal every step of the way. Both would go on to become prototypes of female stars that we still see today, with former WWE star Kharma (and current star of the Netflix series GLOW) even going by the name Amazing Kong in AJW after her debut, the promotion modeling her after her namesake. Everything that Aja Kong does hurts and Toyota’s pained screams filled up the Tokyo Dome all throughout the match. Everything from Kong’s stiff strikes to something as simple as a Boston Crab made Toyota all-the-more sympathetic, as the crowd screamed along with her.

And what a crowd it was. They fed off of Toyota’s pain, watching the woman many believed was fated to win this tournament being tested beyond her physical limits in just the first round.

What helped make Toyota so great and have such a strong connection with the fans was her willingness to communicate every step of the way. She screamed in agony while being stretched, she would levy war cries when she would fling her body at her much larger opponent and she’d screech when summoning the strength to kick out of pinfall attempts. Wrestling is already a visceral enough medium, but the way that Toyota communicated her pain, suffering and triumphs helped to push that connection with the audience over-the-top. Watching the match it’s difficult not to feel for her as she struggles to defeat the beast that is Aja Kong, with her going to great lengths, launching a missile dropkick to the floor and splashing to the outside through a table. This was much more than a tournament, this was life-or-death and Toyota was doing what she had to to do survive.

What ultimately was Toyota’s undoing was Kong’s ability to answer everything Toyota could throw at her. In wrestling, conquering heroes overcoming their foes is the norm, There are times when the hero falls down and can’t get back up again, but they’ll get up later. Because they always do, but this wasn’t that time. Toyota and Kong would meet multiple times throughout their storied careers, but the reality was that whatever Toyota could throw at Kong, Kong had the answer.

When Toyota reversed a backdrop suplex and landed on her feet, Kong was right there with her dreaded spinning , which signaled the beginning of the end for Toyota in the V-TOP Woman Tournament.