13 Wrestlers Who Died In The Ring 5

5. Plum Mariko

As we have previously established, Japanese womens’ wrestling is hard. Very hard. The wrestling style is very physical, with lots of hard hitting moves executed in every match. The ring is also very hard, as you can see in the above video. There is nowhere near as much give in their rings as in a western wrestling ring.
Plum Mariko was an original member of JWP, the Japanese Womens’ Pro-Wrestling promotion and made her debut aged 18 at Tokyo’s Korakuen Hall. Mariko herself was a renowned submission based wrestler who competed in a ‘shoot style’ (similar to Gary Albright’s style in UWFI), who invented the very painful looking ‘Stretch Plum’ submission manoeuvre. The weekend of August 15th-17th 1997 was earmarked as a sad occasion already, due to the retirement that weekend of Candy Okutsu, who was retiring before her time due to a persistent bad problem.
                                                               

In the weeks leading up to this weekend, people around Mariko had noticed that things were not quite right with her, She’d been forgetting finishes to matches, forgetting to save her partner in tag matches (a prime part of the storyline of Japanese tag team matches, more so than western style), and not being able to remember longer sequences. She had suffered multiple concussions in the past and these memory problems were blamed on them. Going into the weekend, she complained of having terrible headaches, but refused to miss a match.
On August 15th 1997, she teamed with Command Bolshoi to face Mayumi Ozaki and Rieko Amano in a tag match im Hiroshima. Ozaki used one of her favourite manoeuvres, the Liger Bomb (which you can see on the video above – don’t worry, the video is NOT of this final match) to pin Mariko. Mariko did not get up after the move, but this was not unusual. It was quite common for a beaten wrestler to act knocked out to sell the impact of the move. However, Mariko alarmingly started snoring, which is never a good sign and is often indicative of a gravely serious situation. She fell into a coma, never regaining consciousness, and died in hospital in the early hours of the next day, aged just 29. She became the first Japanese wrestler to ever die from injuries suffered in a wrestliing match.
It transpired that multiple concussions and cumulative injuries had resulted in Mariko sustaining an abscess on her brain, which resulted in fatal brain damage. The show the next day went ahead as planned. However, what was originally intended to be a show celebrating Plum Mariko’s 11th anniversary as a professional wrestler became a tribute to her, as JWP President Masatoshi Yamamoto had the awful task of announcing her death to the audience at the start of the night.