11 Most Influential Japanese Wrestlers Of All Time

6. Manami Toyota

During her Hall of Fame speech, Lita referenced Toyota in passing, saying that €˜I€™ve never met her, but she€™s awesome€™. For those who don€™t know who she was talking about, Manami Toyota is the greatest women€™s wrestler of all time. Japan has traditionally been ahead of WWE in terms of how female wrestlers are portrayed in television, as they€™ve been treated in virtually the same ways as the male wrestlers. As a result, some joshi practitioners were able to have lengthy, technical matches. Though many names come to mind in terms of great Japanese women, none has been more influential than Manami Toyota. Over the course of her career, Toyota has wrestled in the same kinds of matches that her male counterparts did. Some of her greatest matches were over 30 minutes in length, and featured the kind of drama, physicality and technique most commonly seen with the greatest male wrestlers. She was so good at what she did that she won Wrestling Observer Newsletter€™s €˜Most Outstanding Wrestler€™ award in 1995, the only women to ever do so. She has also had 14 5-Star matches between 1992 and 1995, and she has also created several impressive (and dangerous) wrestling maneuvers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AjIYdFdW_ks So while women like Sable were lighting the world on fire as Divas, emphasizing their looks over everything else, Manami Toyota was proving that women can wrestle just as well as men, if not better than them at times.