Monday, March 14, 2011

Hitomi Akano wins at the PANCRASE Osaka show

Hitomi Akano
So on Friday after the earthquake, PANCRASE announced that their Mar. 13 show at Taisho Azeria in Osaka had been cancelled. I assume there was concern about getting the fighters into Osaka. Later in the day, they decided to go ahead with the show after all. You probably think that everything over the weekend was cancelled. There was nothing in Tokyo but New Japan Pro Wrestling ran a show in Shizuoka, Pro Wrestling NOAH ran a show in Akashi and Dragon Gate ran a show in Morodomi. These were all in areas that were not affected much by the earthquake and that was true of Osaka as well. Shooto had planned to run Sunday's Korakuen Hall show but cancelled when there were reports of structural damage to the building. There are now plans to reopen Korakuen Hall on Saturday and the kickboxing company KRUSH plans to run their Mar. 19 Korakuen Hall show as scheduled. There were two women's matches on the Pancrase show. Hitomi Akano won over Chisa Yonezawa with a cross arm breaker at 40 seconds of round one. That's a little quicker than I would have thought but not a surprising result. Both women are Osaka natives. Hitomi said she was very proud to fight in her home town for the first time but the earthquake and tsunami victims were very much on her mind. She encouraged people to recover from this. The second women's match had Happy Fukuko win over Mamiko Mizoguchi at 4:45 of round two via TKO stoppage due to punches. I don't expect any detailed match reports which is normal for out of town shows.

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