By the time Tae Honma hits the mat, it’s like watching a cherry blossom fight a typhoon. All grace and color, twisted in a storm she didn’t sign up for—but hell, she’ll dance in it anyway.
She’s never been the headliner. Never the poster on the kid’s wall. She wasn’t the chosen one. She didn’t come draped in family legacy or a Netflix docuseries waiting in the wings. What she brought to the ring was something more fatal, more enduring—grit forged in the dusty back alleys of Japanese wrestling, where your payday is a handshake and your receipt is a bruise you don’t remember getting.
Tae Honma was born with that look—equal parts mischief and melancholy. You’d find it at the corner of a jazz bar at 3 a.m. or in the smirk of someone who just learned pain is relative. She debuted for Actwres girl’Z in 2015, not with a bang, but with a kind of humble promise: this won’t be easy, but I’ll be here when it gets worse.
And she has been.
Honma is a wrestling gypsy. A wanderer. One of those freelancers who never got a full-time contract because the industry didn’t know where to put her. Was she a junior ace? A tag specialist? A comedic relief? The truth is, she was all of them—sometimes in the same damn night. She crisscrossed promotions like a barfly hops between neon signs. Oz Academy, WAVE, PURE-J, Wrestle-1, Ice Ribbon, even a trip to the lucha-mad halls of CMLL in Mexico, where she threw down with women who looked like they came from a comic book and fought like they’d kill you if you flinched.
You can learn a lot about a wrestler by who she loses to.
Honma’s résumé is decorated with losses to names like Saori Anou, Suzu Suzuki, and Reika Saiki—women with main event cred and marketing machines behind them. Tae? She just showed up with her boots laced and her heart wide open. You’d think that would be enough. It wasn’t. But it was something.
In 2019, she wrestled under a mask for Fukumen Mania. Most folks don’t remember that. But it’s the kind of move you make when you’re testing yourself, seeing if the audience loves the character—or just the face. That’s the thing about Honma: she’s always been a wrestler first, a woman second. No makeup tutorial, no Twitter campaign, no OnlyFans side hustle. Just calloused hands and ring rope friction burns.
That same year, she popped up in Consejo Mundial de Lucha Libre, working six-woman tags in the heart of Arena México like some wandering ronin tossed into a telenovela. She teamed with legends like Marcela and brawled with monsters like Dalys la Caribeña. It wasn’t her crowd. Spanish promos flew past her ears. But the crowd understood one language—timing, toughness, and tenacity. And Tae Honma, to her credit, spoke all three fluently.
Her time in Ice Ribbon is what made people finally notice.
She wasn’t the ace—hell, she wasn’t even the queen’s knight. But she carved out a space the way stray cats carve out a kingdom: by being the last one standing after the alley’s gone silent. She went from charming tag partner to icy contender, challenging Suzu Suzuki for the ICE Cross Infinity Championship like it was some long-due reckoning. She didn’t win, of course. But she left something in that ring—an imprint. The kind you don’t wash off with the next show.
Tequila Saya’s retirement gauntlet match on New Year’s Eve 2019 was the kind of absurd, glorious chaos that defined Ice Ribbon. Forty-four participants, legends and lunatics alike. Honma was there, of course. Not as the spotlight. As the thread holding the whole scene together. You need people like that—glue wrestlers. Wrestlers who show up, shut up, and bump like their rent depends on it.
Bukowski once said, “What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.”
Tae Honma doesn’t walk through fire. She lives in it. The fans who’ve followed her across Japan’s fractured promotions know the score. They’ve seen her eat stiff lariats, fly off turnbuckles, and get buried in tag team losses that no one remembers but her. But she always got back up. Never a diva. Never a drama queen. Just a woman with busted knuckles and ring-ready instincts.
There’s a blue-collar poetry to her matches. They’re not classics, but they’re honest. You won’t see a five-star breakdown from Dave Meltzer. But if you were there—if you watched her grin after eating a dropkick from Kyuri or saw her fall to Sae with a smirk on her face—you’d understand the religion of it all.
Honma didn’t chase belts. She chased moments. And when she found them—sweet Jesus—they hit like a shot of whiskey after three days sober.
Tae Honma’s legacy isn’t in gold. It’s in gravel.
She’s a road wrestler. The kind who’s more comfortable in the locker room of a middle-school gym than a Tokyo Dome suite. The kind who drinks Pocari Sweat out of a dented thermos and tapes her own boots. The kind of wrestler that promotions don’t build around—but can’t function without.
And now? She’s still out there, freelancing, like a ghost in a kimono made of bruises. She’ll team up with a green rookie one night, then get steamrolled by a rising star the next. That’s the life she chose. Or maybe it’s the only one she was ever offered. Doesn’t matter. She made it hers.
Tae Honma never had a farewell match because her career isn’t about closure. It’s about continuation. Every suplex, every match, every small-town show is a love letter scrawled in sweat. She may never headline Korakuen, may never get the magazine cover or the action figure. But she gets something else—respect. The quiet kind. The kind you whisper about backstage.
She’s not done yet. And maybe she never will be.
Some wrestlers chase glory. Tae Honma just keeps showing up. And in a business that chews up its faithful and forgets its foot soldiers, that might just be the bravest damn thing of all.