Makoto never walked into the ring so much as she drifted into it—like smoke trailing out of a cracked Tokyo bar door at 3am. She was never the ace, the prodigy, or the poster child. Hell, for the better part of her early career, she was the doormat people wiped their boots on before stepping into the spotlight. But dammit, she stayed. She evolved. She adapted like a cigarette burn on vinyl—permanent, ugly, oddly mesmerizing.
Born September 26, 1989, she was handed a debut that would make a punchline jealous: a one-minute loss to nine-year-old Riho in 2006. That’s not a joke. That’s the foundation of her story. Most would’ve called it a day and gone back to drawing manga in a coffee shop, but Makoto wasn’t built for clean exits or proper timing. She was built for hard roads, busted knuckles, and the kind of wrestling career that doesn’t win awards—but it damn sure earns respect.
Trained by Emi Sakura, the mad hatter of the joshi asylum, Makoto was her socially anxious apprentice, a hikikomori in kickpads, afraid of her own entrance music. She didn’t emerge from a dojo so much as she was carved out of awkward silences and the empty seats of early Ice Ribbon shows. You could see the fear in her eyes in those first few matches—then one day it turned to grit, and grit turned to glass, and glass turned into a smile with blood on its teeth.
She spent five years in Ice Ribbon paying dues like they were taxes owed to the devil. Won the ICE×60 belt once, the tag titles twice, and still got treated like the girl holding someone else’s purse at the dance. But it was her feud with Etsuko Mita that hardened her into something else. Mita was her hero, then her enemy, then her executioner. By the time Mita retired after pinning her, Makoto had lost more than a match—she’d lost the right to be afraid.
And so she left.
Jumped to SMASH in 2011, a promotion that lived fast and died faster. She thought it might be her ticket to WWE—ironic, given that SMASH folded quicker than a motel Bible. But she was reborn there, wrestled Serena, fought Kana and the Shirai sisters, and teamed with Tajiri in ladder matches that looked like acid trips with suplexes. She learned the Spear from Funaki, who learned it from Edge, which is like getting dating advice from Bukowski by way of Casanova. Ugly but effective.
Then came Wrestling New Classic, which was neither. It was the spiritual afterbirth of SMASH, and Makoto stuck around like a barfly hoping the next drink would be on the house. She got mauled by Nozaki, betrayed by partners, and wrapped in so many gimmicks she probably forgot what her original ring gear even looked like. At one point she wrestled as “Lady Face,” a Leatherface tribute with clown makeup and the quiet desperation of a woman who knew the spotlight would never be hers, but wanted to scare the hell out of it anyway.
The business changed around her. Stardom bloomed like a flower fertilized by Twitter likes and photo shoots. Makoto wasn’t part of that machine. She didn’t have the shine, the merch, the model’s jawline. She had scars and stories and enough heartbreak to open a pawn shop in hell.
She floated into Reina Joshi Puroresu, Gatoh Move, Kaientai Dojo, and any place with ropes and poor lighting. Wherever she landed, she made you look. Not because she was flashy. But because she stayed. Like the smell of smoke in your grandma’s curtains.
She had her runs. She won the Reina World Women’s Championship. Carried the IWA Triple Crown. Held tag belts like war trophies with Bambi, Kaho Kobayashi, and whoever else was brave enough to go to battle with her. And when CMLL came calling, she took her act to Mexico, pinned La Amapola in a torneo cibernetico, and came within a hair of walking out with another title. She was fluent in pain, regardless of the language.
Makoto’s greatest skill was survival. She made you forget she was once the girl who lost to a child. She became the backbone of shows where the money was light but the ambition was heavy. She wasn’t just part of the undercard; she wasthe undercard—the queen of 10-minute matches that meant more than main events.
She had one final trick up her sleeve. In 2015, she reinvented herself again—this time as a painted-up sadist in clown makeup, part of Kana’s Piero-gun stable. She looked like a nightmare that smoked menthols and talked back. Her feud with Command Bolshoi was half lucha libre, half theater, and all glorious weirdness.
And then, just like that, she vanished.
Neck injury. No tearful retirement. No farewell tour. She dropped her titles and disappeared like a wrestler who knew the applause was never for her anyway. When she resurfaced in 2017 for one night only, it was to help launch a rookie’s career. That’s Makoto in a nutshell: never the star of the show, always the one helping build the damn stage.
She may never make the Hall of Fame. But if there’s a wing for the ones who bled for this business when no one asked them to, Makoto’s name is carved on the doorframe.
She was never the ace. But she was the one who stuck around long enough to make the aces sweat.
And if there’s justice in wrestling—if somewhere, beneath the ring, there’s a ledger being kept—then Makoto’s name is underlined in red, smudged with sweat, and circled in cigarette ash.
She didn’t conquer the mountain. She haunted it.