For those of you who’ve had their concept of women’s professional wrestling shaped by the WWE ‘Divas’ here’s some clips of Akira Hokuto aka ‘The Dangerous Queen’. Hokuto was a mainstay in All Japan Women’s Pro Wrestling. And lest you think AJPW was a Japanese equivalent of “GLOW” guess again–at the time they were considered by many to be the most consistently excellent wrestling promotion in the world.

How metal was Hokuto? In 1987 she was in 2 out of 3 falls tag team match with her partner Yumiko Hotta against ‘The Red Typhoons’ (Kazue Nagahori and Yumi Ogura). In the finish of the second fall, Hokuto landed wrong on a tombstone pile driver off the top rope and broke her neck. Just coming back from that injury to wrestle again was pretty bad ass in itself, but it gets better–Hokuto ***wrestled the entire third fall with a broken neck holding her head in place with her hands***. Kids, don’t try this at home…

Fortunately, there’s a ton of AJPW footage on YouTube. Her 1993 match with Shinobu Kandori received a five star rating from The Wrestling Observer and is on a short list of the best wrestling matches you’ll ever see. The first part of that match is immediately below and that will get you to YouTube for the remaining three parts–yep, they wrestled for nearly 40 minutes which only a handful of the men in the WWE or TNA locker rooms are capable of let alone the ‘divas’ or ‘knockouts’ or whatever they’re called. The rest of the videos are highlight clips: