Rena Takase never got the easy road, which was fitting, because she didn’t want it. She didn’t want to be the poster girl. She didn’t need a promotion built around her. She didn’t flash camera smiles or pose for sponsors. She just laced the boots, strapped on the mask, and hit the ropes like they owed her money. You can keep your idols and your gimmick queens. Leon was for the wrestling romantics — the ones who still believe in dropkicks and heart.
She started in Arsion back in 2000, trained in the dojo system that chewed up hopefuls and left only the defiant. She debuted under her real name and lost. Then lost again. Sixty times in a row. Imagine that — sixty beatings and still showing up. Most people would’ve faked an injury by match twenty. But not Rena Takase. She wasn’t there for easy.
Eventually, she won. A little match against Linda Starr. It was a spark. She’d win the AJW Junior Title in 2002 — the last person to ever hold it before AJW folded like a broken tent. When Arsion was taken over and rebranded AtoZ, she became Leo-na, changed her look, and changed her name. But it was just camouflage. The real fire was still in her fists.
In 2005, she split off from the promotion and became a masked freelancer. A new name: Toujyuki Leon. A new identity: masked lioness. The kind of wrestler who doesn’t need a home, just a ring. She tore through JDStar, Oz Academy, and M’s Style. Titles came — JWP Tag, NSG Championship, and more. You couldn’t predict where she’d show up, but when she did, someone was taking a Captured Buster and waking up to see her already walking up the ramp.
But her real home would become JWP. In 2007, she stopped freelancing and went full-time lion. She went to war with Bolshoi, Kaori Yoneyama, Kana, Nakajima, and everyone in between. She won the Technique Award. The Fighting Spirit Award. And if you saw her fly off the top rope with that spinning splash, you’d believe in gravity just long enough to doubt it.
Leon wasn’t just a wrestler. She was a movement in slow motion — a lifetime lived between turnbuckles. She formed the “Shishi no Ana” stable, later renamed Labradorite, a gem-hard collection of lion-hearted warriors who never begged for the spotlight — they earned it. Her matches with Ray as Mascara Voladoras weren’t just tag bouts. They were art. Masked flyers spinning through the air like gravity was a suggestion.
She’d win the High Speed Title, the JWP Openweight Title, and wrestle in matches that read like kamikaze poetry. That 2011 run — defending one title while chasing another — was the kind of thing that would break lesser women. For Leon, it was just Tuesday.
She wasn’t afraid to lose. She wasn’t afraid to fight you again. She knew the value of chasing, because she knew one thing most wrestlers never learn: the hunt makes the lion.
Leon made appearances in Stardom, Sendai Girls, Reina, CMLL, Shimmer — hell, the woman brought lucha libre into Pure-J’s bloodstream. She went to Mexico, lost her title in her first defense, then came back and took it back from La Amapola like she was collecting an overdue debt. She was billed as “León” there — lion in name, lion in spirit.
Her tag team work with Ray was the stuff of folklore. They won titles in Reina, Pure-J, JWP — they were the death-defying ballerinas of the joshi world. When Ray passed away in 2018, Leon didn’t just mourn. She carried the name forward. Their team was renamed “P-Ray-L,” a hybrid of their names, a whispered prayer inside a roar.
And even when JWP folded in 2017, Leon didn’t fade. She walked right into Pure-J, brought the belts with her, and started cracking skulls like it was still 2007. She beat Mariko Yoshida at Pure-J’s debut show like she was planting a flag in new territory. This wasn’t nostalgia. This was legacy work.
She wasn’t the most marketable. She didn’t date wrestlers or headline tabloid scandals. What she did was show up, mask on, fire in her gut, and take your breath away with speed and fury and grace.
Rena Takase — Leon — is proof that you don’t need to be famous to be great. You don’t need a Tokyo Dome main event to matter. You just need to be real. She’s been doing that for 25 years now — a lioness in a world of pandas, pythons, and peacocks.
The jungle of joshi wrestling is a crowded place. But Leon didn’t survive it.
She owned it.
