Tomoka Nakagawa announces retirement

Tomoka Nakagawa announces her retirement

After losing a Wizard of Oz Championship match to AKINO on Wednesday's Oz Academy show, Tomoka Nakagawa announced her retirement. Her retirement match will be Dec. 4 at Korakuen Hall. Because she is one half of the Shimmer Tag Team Champions, she will also have a Shimmer retirement match in the spring. On her blog, Tomoka didn't give a specific reason for retiring but she had been thinking about it for a while. She talked about getting older and injuries and making room for younger talent. Shimmer fans are upset because they liked her heel shtick. But she never did any of that in Japan. Her biggest problem in Japan is she lacks personality. So it was a smart move for Shimmer to pair her up with someone like Kellie Skater who has enough personality for both of them. So she was doing great in Shimmer but not so great in Japan. Because she is managed by S-Ovation who don't own a wrestling company, she is essentially a freelancer working for several companies. She works where S-Ovation books her. And it's tough to get any kind of consistent booking when each company has its own agenda. The joshi business has been like this for several years and I don't see it changing because the company owners are selfish and don't care about the business as a whole. I think these companies perceived her as a mid-card wrestler. Working for all these different companies for very little money on mostly prelim matches can get very tiring. For the most part, Tomoka only held tag team titles during her career except when she won the Smash Divas Championship from Kana a couple of years ago. That match raised a lot of eyebrows at the time. And as we discovered later, there was a behind the scenes dispute going on between Smash owner Masakazu Sakai and Smash manager Tajiri that led to Smash closing a few months later. So I don't count that title as a legit win. Tomoka was a wrestling fan growing up. So she became a wrestler and got to live her dream for ten years. But she worked as a nurse before she became a wrestler so I expect her to go back to that. In another big announcement at the Oz Academy show, Sakura Hirota announced she will have shoulder surgery and will be out indefinitely.