Would you agree with that, Justin?

Uh, yeah.

I would definitely agree with that.

I think that one of the things that a lot of these indie promotions really, um, help with the scene is the fact that they give more people places to work in general.

So one of the biggest things with joshi wrestling, uh, is that a lot of these wrestlers are very, very, um, active every single year.

Like if you, if you would look down the list of the wrestlers that are on our list this year for the top 100, there are very few that have under 50 matches, and there are quite a few who are right around 100 or even way above it because all of these small promotions give people a chance to get in the ring, get that ring time, and that's especially important for a lot of these young wrestlers to get better because we've seen what happens with, you know, like American promotions, for instance, who don't allow people to get the type of ring time that they need early in their career.

You don't really see the growth that you would see if they were in Japan, where you c- they're constantly working.

Yeah

We should probably say what the criteria is, right? So do you want to go through the criteria first? Yeah.

So the criteria is broken into three big categories, but one of those categories also has three within it as well.

So one of them is going to be the win percentage.

So that is by itself how many matches they had, what is their win percentage, and The amount of matches is not as important, but if someone only has like say 25 matches in a year and their winning percentage is like 75%, it's really not as big of a thing at that point.

So the win percentage overall is what I'm usually looking at, especially if they have a lot of matches in the year.

The second part would be the accomplishments, which can be current titles that they hold when the period ends or anything that they had during that year.

whether it's championships won um defenses of their championships uh it could be tournaments won um any sort of awards that they may have gotten i usually put the pwi women's 250 a number on there as well just in case that could also play into it because it is a recognition of something that is not it's not their like specialty when it comes to pwi because it's japan and They pay attention, but they're not as in tune, I think, as we would be as fans of that, mostly.

Would you like to weigh in on these things that we mentioned so

That's my understanding of it is then, you know, the, the new ideas of, of other cultures and other countries and, other spiritualities that showed up for him that he was interested in.

Yeah.

Well, so there's a lot I could say about this.

And I think maybe let's start with some of the stuff from the CV and his development before like leading up to the development of Reiki.

And then I can get into more, some of the things that, um, we're still looking for some of this like smoking guns or whatever from exactly these different spiritual practices that he, that he integrated into Reiki.

But we have, I think pretty strong evidence that there are certain, um, practices that were coming out of the United States and being localized for Japan and then influenced Reiki.

But before that, this is kind of like the prehistory of that.

So was his family then wealthy? to you know we haven't really talked about his earlier years they must must have had been at a certain level of wealth for him to have the opportunities he did

i think that's the best place for us to start here i'm glad you just brought us right into it because i'd love to know how you got into joshi wrestling and then once you got into it what made you want to cover it as a writer and start publishing different articles and tier lists and everything

So I would say my first entry into understanding what Joshi Wrestling is or any of the wrestlers who came from Joshi is back in Shimmer, probably like early, like maybe 2010-ish.

I think it was around Shimmer... 21 or 22 had just like released like around that time and I had always heard that like that's like the best place to watch like women's wrestling in America at least when it comes to getting to see the most talent and so forth because obviously at that time we had you know TNA and you also had WWE but like the the there wasn't really like the give divas a chance thing happening at the time yet.

Like there was a lot of things that were still kind of the old style.

And I wanted to find like some really awesome women's wrestling.

So I went ahead and like decided to buy a few DVDs and they were all really good shows.

And from there, I just started kind of like buying like the back catalog and getting the new stuff as it came.

But before we start talking about the rankings and kind of where everybody slots, and before I start to argue with you about why Raku isn't number one, How overall does this list come together? How do you take this ginormous Joshi scene that we're talking about and simplify it down into a tiered list of 100, the top 100?