She came in like most of them do—unassuming, humble, cheeks still full from adolescence, eyes wide with the lie of glory. Hana Iwaki walked through the doors of Marvelous in 2018 with more hope than muscle, more will than guile, and a name that would vanish like smoke in a thunderstorm. These days, they call her Kohaku—the red fox of Wave, cunning and coarse, a survivor of too many backroom beatings and backstage betrayals to still be wide-eyed.
You don’t last in the wrestling world without becoming a shapeshifter. Kohaku’s journey has been a slow burn on a cigarette already dipped in gasoline. She’s not the flashiest, not the loudest, not the Twitter darling. But every time she gets in that ring, there’s the heavy scent of unfinished business and borrowed time.
Her debut came on a sticky summer night in August 2018, thrown to the wolves against Yoshiko—a woman built like a middleweight brawler and packing the rage of ten. Kohaku got folded like a rental suit, but it wasn’t about winning. It was about showing up. A girl walks into Marvelous and eats a loss for dinner, and the industry barely blinks. But she blinked back. She kept blinking back, match after match, loss after loss, until one day people stopped asking “Who is that?” and started asking, “Why the hell is she still standing?”
Kohaku’s ring name came later, after she ditched the old skin, Mikoto Shindo. She wandered into Pro Wrestling Wave like a ghost in denim—tired of being everyone’s third match and never the poster. Her first bout under the new name came in April 2022, a losing effort to Suzu Suzuki. But if you’ve been around the business long enough, you know that’s not the part that matters. What matters is how a woman walks out after the final bell. Kohaku walked out the same way she walked in: head high, fists tight, like a barfly who just lost a bet but knows the night’s still young.
Then came the title shots—the Wave Single Championship, the Wave Tag Team Championship, even a crack at the EVE International title. She came up short each time, but never empty. Every match took something from her, and every loss filled the vacancy with scar tissue and anger management issues. It’s a beautiful thing to watch a wrestler harden like wet cement. Ugly too. But beautiful.
She flirted with Sendai Girls for four years, moonlighting under the name Mikoto Shindo, trying on identities like thrift-store jackets. She finally found gold there—Sendai Girls Junior Championship, ripped from Manami’s grip in June 2019 like a stolen kiss. That title didn’t make her. It just proved what those in the cheap seats had already figured out—this girl could go.
But Kohaku was never going to be content tucked away in a junior division. She wanted chaos. Blood on the mat. Thumbtack dreams and barbed-wire promises. She fought in Prominence’s madhouse shows, in Oz Academy’s grinder, in Seadlinnng’s shark tank. These weren’t matches, they were exorcisms. When she teamed with Kaho Kobayashi and Tsukasa Fujimoto to beat back Las Fresa de Egoistas, it wasn’t a win—it was a declaration: “I’m not here to smile and lose politely. I’m here to take your spot, your air, and maybe your goddamn soul.”
Kohaku didn’t just evolve—she molted. Each promotion, each identity change, each loss was a flayed layer of skin. By the time she appeared in Wave full-time, she wasn’t the girl who debuted in 2018. She was an animal now. A crafty one, too—name lifted from the red fox, that trickster beast of folklore and late-night alley fights.
And like any good fox, she’s been underestimated every step of the way.
The 2022 Catch the Wave Tournament should have been her coming out party. Slotted in the “Future Block,” she scratched out four points against the new blood—Suzu, Haruka Umesaki, Chie Ozora. It wasn’t enough to win, but that wasn’t the headline. The headline was that Kohaku, finally, looked like a woman who belonged in the same breath as them. She didn’t win, but she stole the narrative like a drunk swiping silverware from a wedding.
There’s something electric about Kohaku now. Watch her in a tag match and you’ll see it—that reckless abandon in her rope work, the desperate torque in her submissions, like she’s trying to choke the last ten years out of her own memory. She’s become a woman constantly wrestling ghosts—Yoshiko’s first mauling, Marvelous’ long shadow, Sendai’s revolving door, and that aching sense that no matter how good she gets, someone else will get the billboard.
She’s never been the favorite, never the anointed. She’s been the girl with scabs on her knees and something bitter in her chest. And that’s what makes her dangerous. The ones who were never handed anything—they learn how to steal. They learn patience. And they learn that when the bell rings, respect isn’t earned. It’s extracted.
Kohaku doesn’t smile for the camera. She doesn’t angle for likes or design merch with pastel anime tears. She doesn’t need to. Her career is built on bruises, broken partnerships, and the kind of resolve you only get from hearing a hundred locker rooms say “maybe next time.”
But “next time” is now. The indie scene in Japan is boiling over with hungry eyes and dusty dreams, and Kohaku is knee-deep in the muck, brawling her way into relevance one forearm at a time. The deathmatch days may be behind her, but you still see it in her eyes: that quiet promise that if someone asked her to bleed for this, she’d just ask how much.
She may never be the face of a promotion. She may never hold the big belt. But Kohaku is the kind of wrestler who outlasts trends, outworks stars, and outlives hype. She’s a Bukowski poem in knee pads—rough, stubborn, full of soul and chipped enamel.
And sometimes, that’s more than enough.