All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling
Japanese professional wrestling promotion
All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling (全日本女子プロレス, Zennihon Joshi Puroresu), nicknamed Zenjo (全女: 全 meaning "All", 女 meaning "Woman") was a joshi puroresu (women's professional wrestling) promotion established in 1968 by Takashi Matsunaga and his brothers. The group held their first card on June 4 of that year. For close to 33 years it had a TV program on Fuji TV called Women's Professional Wrestling.
History
The All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling Corporation, established in 1968, was the successor to the All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling Association, which had been formed in August 1955, to oversee the plethora of women's wrestling promotions that had sprung up in Japan following a tour in November, 1954, by Mildred Burke and her World Women's Wrestling Association (WWWA). These promotions included the All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling Federation, and the All Japan Women's Wrestling Club, started in 1948, which was the first women's wrestling promotion in Japan. For a time the Club pushed female wrestling as a legitimate sport, booking sporting arenas.
By the mid-1960s, the association had fallen apart, due to infighting between the member promotions, and female wrestling was relegated back to being a sideshow act in strip-tease theaters. In 1967, another attempt to organize the sport of women's professional wrestling was made with a new All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling Association. This time the Fabulous Moolah, the NWA Women's Champion, came across from the United States and traded her title with Yukiko Tomoe, to lend legitimacy to the promotion. The new Association broke up later that year.
The public source identifies “All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling” as japanese professional wrestling promotion. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Japan, Women's and Pro-Wrestling.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2583287. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1968, 1955, 1954 and 1948.
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This entry incorporates text from “All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.