In the kaleidoscope freakshow that is Japanese pro wrestling—a universe where neon lights flicker like broken dreams and dropkicks carry the weight of heartache—there exists a woman with enough fire in her veins to melt steel chairs and enough soul to haunt a bingo hall. Yuna Manase, born Yuna Suzuki, isn’t just a wrestler. She’s the kind of woman who walks into a room and makes the floorboards apologize for not being red carpet.
They say she was born in 1987, but that’s a lie. Yuna was born when someone whispered “No” and she said “Watch me.” A freelancer, a coach, a one-woman demolition derby in a world of spandex and sprayed-on smiles, Manase has made a career out of putting her body on the line and her students on the map.
She’s trained the likes of Tam Nakano, Saori Anou, and Natsumi Maki—names that now orbit the Stardom galaxy like meteorites. But don’t mistake her for a side character in someone else’s fairytale. Yuna is the one who sharpened the blades, handed them over, and still walked into the ring barehanded.
Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling: Love, Pain, and Princess Titles
Yuna’s true storm brewed in Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, where she entered not like a debutante but like a former bouncer who crashed a tea party and drank everyone under the table. She made her TJPW debut in 2017 by pinning Nodoka-Oneesan and never looked back. This wasn’t about smiling for the cameras—this was about survival. This was a woman who wrestled like someone owed her money and owed it in blood.
February 2018, she challenged Miyu Yamashita for the Princess of Princess Championship. She didn’t win, but she made the title sweat. And if the belt could speak, it would’ve whispered, “Don’t let her touch me again.”
She was a heavyset metaphor for heartbreak and revenge, wrapped in pink and black and built like a shotgun wedding. Her biggest triumph came in 2019, when she took the International Princess Championship from her own protégé, Natsumi Maki. Teacher vs. student. Cinderella vs. the woman who built the damn ballroom. It was a match soaked in meaning and sweat, the kind of collision that turns locker rooms into confessionals.
The Stardom Chapter: Brief and Bruised
Yuna’s first taste of the Stardom spotlight came in 2014, where she debuted against Kairi Hojo—yes, that Kairi, before the Sane name and the pirate cosplay. The crowd saw a rookie. But inside that ring was a woman trying to choke the stars out of the sky with a headlock.
She floated in and out of Stardom like a ghost who hadn’t finished her business. Battle royals, rookie chaos, and then a long, deliberate absence until a flashbulb moment in 2021—a surprise return during Stardom’s 10th Anniversary. A 24-woman all-star rumble, a nostalgia trip with jagged edges. The crowd popped. The ring creaked. Yuna, older and meaner, reminded everyone that time doesn’t rust the soul—it galvanizes it.
Then came Stardom in Showcase Vol. 2, the kind of fever dream that only Japanese wrestling can get away with: masked reapers, bodyguards, shadowy alliances. Yuna teamed with Nanae Takahashi and Yuu to paint an abstract masterpiece of violence, mystery, and kayfabe carnage. By the end, Alpha Female was beaming in on tape like a cyberpunk warlord, proposing a Neo Stardom Army. Of course Yuna fit right in—she’s the kind of woman who builds armies out of burnouts and broken promises.
The DDT Life: Rumbling With the Weirdos
Yuna’s frequent stomping ground has been DDT and its eccentric offspring Ganbare☆Pro-Wrestling, where she’s embraced chaos like a drunk poet at a karaoke bar. She’s teamed with men, women, machines—hell, probably a luchador raccoon at some point.
Peter Pan. Ultimate Party. Battle Runner. These weren’t just events—they were wrestling’s equivalent of a dive bar jam session, and Yuna Manase was always front and center, swinging a chair like a mic stand.
She’s brawled in ten-person tags with Super Sasadango Machine, shared the ring with human meme Danshoku Dino, and tangled with the Ironman Heavymetalweight Championship like it was a drunken one-night stand. Sometimes she won. Sometimes she lost. But she never disappeared. That’s the difference between a gimmick and a legend.
At one point, she even took a swing at the GWC 6-Man Tag Titles with Kuuga and Yumehito Imanari. They lost. But again—it was about the swing, not the scoreboard.
Wrestling’s Blue-Collar Prophet
Before any of this—before the ring lights, before the idol work, before the bumps and belts—Yuna Suzuki had the kind of face you’d see on a magazine cover and the kind of fire that burned right through the page. She didn’t need to wrestle. She chose to.
And she chose to bleed for it.
Bukowski once said, “Find what you love and let it kill you.” Yuna Manase did. Wrestling didn’t ask her to be a trainer. It didn’t ask her to mold Tam Nakano’s future or hand Saori Anou the blueprints to her soul. She did it anyway, because her legacy isn’t in gold—it’s in the echoes of women who carry her spirit into the ring.
When you look at her now, working the indies, coaching behind the scenes, jumping in and out of chaos like a hard-boiled detective with a steel-toed boot, you’re not watching a fading star. You’re watching a slow-burning meteor that never needed to crash—just light the sky.
Final Bell
Yuna Manase is that strange kind of beautiful: the kind that doesn’t smile unless it means it, the kind that walks past mirrors because it’s too busy becoming the thing its reflection fears. She’s never been the poster girl. She’s been the blueprint. The architect of mayhem, the accidental saint of women’s wrestling.
In an industry that chews people up and sells the bones on clearance, she’s still here. And that’s no accident.
That’s a goddamn miracle.
