Yuzuki Aikawa is officially the new Fuuka

Nanae Takahashi, Yuzuki Aikawa

Bikini model Yuzuki Aikawa made her joshi puroresu debut on Sunday in a show created for her. I don't know if there will be any more of these shows as STARDOM will start running shows every other Sunday on Jan. 23, 2011. They say they filled Shin-kiba 1st Ring for this show. The main goal is to convert Fuuka fans into Aikawa fans. Who knows if that will work? So the show format was very similar to the Fuuka Matsuri format. Aikawa faced Nanae Takahashi in the main event. They had a couple of other matches, an exhibition with STARDOM trainees Eri Susa and Yoko Bito. And of course a dance routine and some sort of live band performance. That's one of the big differences here. Fuuka would particiapte in the singing and dancing. Aikawa did not. Maybe she doesn't do that stuff. I guess she's only good at posing in a bikini and Hiroshi Ogawa thinks that's enough to turn her into the new Fuuka. The big difference is Aikawa is being thrown into a main event immediately. Fortunately she is working with Nanae Takahashi and Takahashi is training her and will make her look as good as possible. Obviously I haven't seen the match video yet. But I did look at a pic gallery at Sportsnavi so I got an idea about how the match went. The first thing I noticed was that Aikawa was in a white outfit very similar to what Fukka would wear. And most of her offence will be kicks, also similar to Fuuka. The first thing Takahashi has to teach Aikawa is to take bumps. So credit Aikawa for getting through the match without killing herself. And lot of credit to Takahashi for making sure that Aikawa got through the match. She was the perfect opponent for Aikawa's debut. Not surprisingly, Takahasi was on offence for most of the match. Aikawa's offence was mostly high kicks but she did do a fisherman suplex and got a couple of near falls. After she lost, Aikawa said the match was more physical than she expected and her goal is to one day beat Takahashi. The show got a lot of media coverage and was even on the front page of Yahoo Japan for a while on Sunday. I'm sure Ogawa was happy with the show but I'm not sure how this will work when they are running regularly. After a while, fans tend to get tired of this kind of wrestling product. EDIT: Hailey Hatred faced Basara in the opening match of this show. The match was stopped when Basara suffered a knee injury. She posted on her blog yesterday that she will have surgery on a torn ligament and will be out for six months. Since showing potential to be the Sendai Girls ace as Tyrannasaurus Okuda, she has had reconstructive shoulder surgery, a concussion and now knee surgery. She says she will return but she just can't seem to stay healthy.