The Ghastly Match: Yoshiko’s Real Shoot on Act Yasukawa

Act Yasukawa was one of Stardom’s most passionate and hard-nosed wrestlers. In 2015, a title match against Yoshiko went badly off-script in the ring at Korakuen Hall. This is the story of The Ghastly Match Incident, a Stardom bout that turned into a real fight.

Act Yasukawa, Yoshiko, and The Ghastly Match Incident

Before exploring the match that became known as The Ghastly Match Incident, it helps to understand the history of women’s professional wrestling in Japan.

Japanese women’s professional wrestling is called Joshi Puroresu, or Joshi for short, and it has a long and storied history.

Famed trailblazing wrestler Mildred Burke sparked interest in women’s wrestling in Japan after she and her students toured the country in 1954 as part of her World Women’s Wrestling Association.

Several promotions followed before All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling (AJW) emerged as the dominant company, running continuously for 37 years, with 1992 to 1997 widely regarded as a boom period for Joshi Puroresu.

Other notable promotions of the era included JWP Joshi Puroresu, Ladies Legend Pro-Wrestling (LLPW), and GAEA Japan, all of which showcased excellent talent and are worth seeking out.

All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling

AJW, commonly nicknamed “Zenjo,” staged legendary bouts featuring some of the era’s most talented wrestlers. “Victory Through Guts” wasn’t just a slogan, it reflected how the promotion trained and presented its athletes.

Standout stars of that period included ace grappler and mat-work mentor Jaguar Yokota, who trained many of the wrestlers who followed her.

The roster also featured the Crush Gals (Chigusa Nagayo and Lioness Asuka), Devil Masami, Mima Shimoda, and Etsuko Mita, part of the trio known as Las Cachorras Orientales (LCO), which formed one of the most respected tag teams in the promotion.

Meiko Satomura, Ayako Hamada (who has roots in Mexican Lucha Libre), Aja Kong, and Bull Nakano also gained wide recognition during this stretch.

AJW’s Closure and the Fractured Joshi Scene

Joshi Puroresu was always a niche corner of Japanese wrestling. AJW lost its television deal in 2002, and after a lengthy decline in revenue, closed its doors for good in April 2005 with a farewell show at Korakuen Hall.

In the years that followed, the audience splintered across numerous smaller promotions. Attendance and business varied significantly by company: some cards drew modest crowds in small venues, while others, such as OZ Academy, continued drawing respectable houses well into the late 2000s.

Gone were the days of the Big Egg Wrestling Universe at the Tokyo Dome in 1994, a ten-hour, twenty-three-match card that drew a reported 32,500 fans, with the Wrestling Observer Newsletter putting the figure at 42,000.

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Stardom Rises

World Wonder Ring Stardom was founded in 2011 by Rossy Ogawa, who had handled publicity for AJW dating back to the late 1980s. Reporting on the incident that would come to define the promotion’s early years, Dave Meltzer’s Wrestling Observer Newsletter noted that by early 2015, Stardom had become “the most popular of the women’s groups right now” and “the most professional and most well-run of the ten full-time women’s promotions” operating in Japan.

Most wrestling promotions seek mainstream publicity. But the kind of attention Stardom drew on February 22, 2015, at Korakuen Hall was the kind that threatened the company’s future, and per Meltzer’s account, drew “a lot of attention, including some mainstream news coverage” well beyond the wrestling press.

Act Yasukawa

May 2015 saw the release of a documentary chronicling Act Yasukawa’s life and wrestling career. Below is the trailer for GAMUSHARA, which was released roughly three months after The Ghastly Match Incident.

Her real name is Yuka Yasukawa, born November 13, 1986, in Misawa, Aomori Prefecture, on the northern tip of Japan’s main island. She has said she considered herself a “tomboy” growing up.

She dreamed of becoming a samurai after seeing them portrayed on television, and her parents encouraged her to practice Kendo from first through sixth grade toward that goal.

In middle school, classmates told her there had been no real samurai in Japan for roughly 150 years, a revelation she has described as deeply disillusioning.

Yuka struggled socially and, according to a 2014 interview with Pro Wrestling is Art, dealt with an undiagnosed vision impairment in her right eye that contributed to her being bullied. She has also discussed living with attention difficulties and mental health struggles during that period.

She has said she considered ending her life during this time but did not act on it. She found an outlet in her school’s Drama Club and later attended the Japan Institute of the Moving Image before falling ill.

She was subsequently diagnosed with Graves’ disease, an autoimmune condition caused by an overactive thyroid, which explained her vision problems, rapid weight loss, tremors, and inability to stand for extended periods.

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“My weakness gives me strength. If I were healthy and everything was all right, I wouldn’t have tried so hard; I would have given up.”

– Act Yasukawa, in an interview with Pro Wrestling is Art

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Act Yasukawa Finds Her Place in Professional Wrestling

In 2011, Yuka Yasukawa appeared in the stage production Wrestler Girls alongside model-turned-wrestler Yuzuki Aikawa, who was one of Stardom’s featured performers at the time.

Yasukawa began training with Stardom shortly after and made her in-ring debut on February 5, 2012.

Still recovering from complications related to her thyroid condition, Yasukawa, then in her mid-twenties, decided this might be her best opportunity to become a wrestler and pursued it.

She had experience as a Kendo competitor, but the physical demands of wrestling training proved far more taxing than she expected.

A doctor suggested medication that could significantly improve her condition but carried a risk of infertility. Yasukawa proceeded with the treatment regardless.

“My doctor told me not to wrestle or even do anything too active, but I refused. I couldn’t live with giving up,” she said.

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“I Wasn’t a Pirate!”

– Act Yasukawa

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Graves’ disease affected the vision in Act Yasukawa’s right eye, and she incorporated the impairment into her ring character by wearing an eye patch. She also drank rum and spat it toward fans as part of her gimmick, though she has pushed back on the assumption that pirates were her inspiration.

“People think pirates inspire me because I wear an eye patch and drink rum,” she said in her 2014 interview with Pro Wrestling is Art. “There’s a samurai named Date Masamune from northern Japan. He had an eye patch.”

“As for the rum, it’s just because I like alcohol! I chose rum specifically because it has color and a smell, so fans know I’m drinking the real thing when I walk to the ring,” she continued.

Her gimmick caught on with fans, who embraced her even as a heel. She went on to win the Wonder of Stardom Championship, one level below the World of Stardom Championship, and by early 2015 had recaptured that title for a second time following a bout with Graves’ disease that had hospitalized her the previous summer.

Tension Leading Up To The Ghastly Match Incident

Yoshiko Hirano, born July 26, 1993, in Katsushika, Tokyo, and wrestling under the name Yoshiko, was nearly seven years younger than Act and debuted with Stardom in January 2011, roughly a year before her debut. By early 2015, at just 21 years old, she had emerged as one of the promotion’s top prospects and was the reigning World of Stardom Champion, having successfully defended the title twice.

The precise personal source of the tension between Act and Yoshiko heading into their February 2015 match has never been fully or independently confirmed in available reporting. Even Dave Meltzer, whose Wrestling Observer Newsletter provided the most detailed contemporaneous account of the incident, wrote only that there was “legitimate heat between the two of them leading to the match,” without further elaboration on its origin.

What is documented is that both were on a collision course for the promotion’s top title, with Act challenging as the reigning Wonder of Stardom Champion, and that Meltzer specifically flagged Act as “the fastest rising star in the group” heading into the bout.

Things Go South: The Ghastly Match Incident

Act Yasukawa challenged Yoshiko for the World of Stardom Championship on February 22, 2015, in front of roughly 700 fans at Korakuen Hall in Tokyo.

Referee Kyohei Wada, described by Meltzer as “the most experienced ref in the country,” was in charge as the bell rang. Early in the bout, Yoshiko began punching Yasukawa with a closed fist, seemingly all out, opening cuts across her face, including her nose, mouth, and both eyes, with severe swelling near her right eye, the same eye affected by her Graves’ disease.

“During the match, Yoshiko started punching Yasukawa seemingly all out with a closed fist, leaving her with cuts all over her face,” Meltzer wrote in the March 9, 2015 Wrestling Observer Newsletter, adding that Yasukawa came out of it “with a broken nose, a fractured cheekbone, a concussion, and an orbital bone fracture of the eye socket.”

At ringside, Kyoko Kimura and the rest of Yasukawa’s corner “freaked out because of the legit punches,” and one of the women threw a towel into the ring to stop the match, according to Meltzer’s account. Wada initially ignored the towel for a few seconds, since it wasn’t the finish he had been told to expect, believing it wasn’t the planned ending, before deciding to stop the bout. Meltzer noted that “the belief is Wada wasn’t in on whatever it was and confused as to what to do.” The match lasted less than eight minutes.

Yasukawa was rushed to a Tokyo hospital with a badly swollen, bloody face. She was diagnosed with a broken nose, a fractured cheekbone, a fractured orbital bone, and a concussion, and required surgery.

Because of the violence and the mainstream attention it drew in Japan, the match became known as Seisan Matchi, translated in English reporting as “The Ghastly Match.”

Stardom’s Response and the Fallout for Act and Yoshiko

Stardom owner Rossy Ogawa held a press conference three days later, on February 25, and announced that Yoshiko had been suspended indefinitely and stripped of the World of Stardom Championship. The match’s outcome was changed from a TKO win for Yoshiko to a no contest. Yoshiko apologized publicly at the press conference and said she would accept her punishment.

Ogawa announced that going forward, Stardom would have a doctor at all events with the power to stop matches, that all closed-fist punches would be banned, and that any closed-fist strike would result in an immediate disqualification.

Act vacated her Wonder of Stardom Championship as a result of her injuries.

The incident also strained the relationship between Stardom’s management and star wrestler Nanae Takahashi, one of the promotion’s holdovers from the AJW era. By mid-2015, the Wrestling Observer Newsletter was reporting Takahashi as a free agent, having quit Stardom, and she went on to found her own promotion, SEAdLINNNG, which held its debut show on August 26, 2015, at Korakuen Hall before 855 fans. That first card leaned heavily on stars from the final years of AJW, including Manami Toyota, Kyoko Inoue, and Yumiko Hotta, alongside Meiko Satomura, Ayako Hamada, Hiroyo Matsumoto, and TNA’s Awesome Kong, working as Amazing Kong.

Yoshiko formally announced her retirement from Stardom on May 31, 2015, though she later resurfaced with SEAdLINNNG and eventually returned to in-ring competition.

Act returned to the ring on September 23, 2015, roughly seven months after her injuries. She announced her retirement at a press conference on December 1, 2015, wrestling her final match on December 23 at Korakuen Hall in a six-woman tag bout teaming with Kairi Hojo and Haruka Kato against Kyoko Kimura, Holidead, and Kris Wolf.

Weeks before her comeback match, Yasukawa’s doctor told her she should not continue wrestling, warning that the damage from the attack, compounding her preexisting eye condition, meant her eyesight would never fully recover and continuing risked losing her vision entirely. She wrestled her entire final stretch, from her September comeback through her December retirement match, already aware of that risk.

“Well, at first, I was sad,” Yasukawa said at her retirement press conference, according to the Wrestling Observer Newsletter. “But there’s really no helping that I lost my eyesight. I intend to move forward with my life, rather than grieve over my past. I want to have a fun future.”

Although Yasukawa’s 2015 retirement was framed as permanent at the time, she returned to the ring in 2020 through Actwres girl’Z (AWG), initially intending only to coach before resuming an active wrestling career. She has remained a fixture of the promotion since, winning the AWG Singles Championship at Korakuen Hall in August 2024 and later forming the Tag Team Amaterasu with Mari, with whom she won the AWG Tag Team Championship in 2025.

In a 2024 interview, Yasukawa offered her own perspective on the events of February 2015, stating that the confrontation “was something that was pre-organized” and that “it wasn’t only Yoshiko that thought of it.”

Beyond her account, no independent reporting has corroborated that characterization, and the precise motivation behind Yoshiko’s actions in the ring that night has never been publicly established.

Watch The Ghastly Match Incident between Act Yasukawa and Yoshiko in its entirety:

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