Hikaru, Maemura to retire

Hikaru and Saki Maemura announced their retirements at today's ZERO-ONE MAX show at Shinjuku FACE. They were in the kind of mixed tag match that they have been working for the last year. Afterwards, Hikaru took the mic and announced that the two will retire on a final Chick Fights SUN show in April. The company has been dormant for the last year. I think they had one show in March. It should have closed a long time ago. Both wrestlers trained at AJW around 2002 and worked there until AJW closed in 2005. They were part of Nanae Takahashi's Flash 7 office for a while and joined SUN with Takahashi. They stayed with ZERO-ONE after Takahashi  & Natsuki*Taiyo left and they've had mostly pointless matches against each other on Z1 shows. Fans have asked me why they stayed and you might also ask why they would retire because they could be in demand as freelancers. The answer is the same to both questions. They don't want to freelance. They want a steady paycheque. Today the joshi business is much different to what it was in the heyday of AJW. It's difficult for some wrestlers to adjust to that. I'm not a huge fan of either wrestler. Hikaru's wrestling style is somewhat of an acquired taste and I didn't care for it. But she had a growing fanbase of young girls from her AJW days. She could be a very effective underdog babyface. But I don't think she ever got the kind of sustained push that she deserved and she's certainly not going to get that in today's joshi. Maemura is simply a midcard jobber who normally wins matches with rollup pins. She was never going to be a credible main event wrestler. So with their contracts running out in April, it's probably a good time to get out while they still have their health. And Chick Fights SUN comes to the disgraceful end that it deserves. I don't know if the company expected this as they just put new merch on sale.