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Matsumoto Kaoru, better known by her ring name born November 11, 1960, is a Japanese people professional wrestler. She came to prominence as one of the leading female wrestlers in All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling (AJW) during the 1980s. The longtime leader of the Atrocious Alliance stable, which included Crane Yu, Condor Saito and Bull Nakano, she was one of the main rivals of the popular tag team the Crush Gals. Their long-running feud would become extremely popular in Japan during the 1980s, with their televised matches resulting in some of the highest rated in Japanese television as well as the promotion regularly selling out arenas.
Matsumoto has stated her desire to become a professional wrestler was born out of her desire to become strong enough to kill her father. Some of Matsumoto's first memories of professional wrestling are of a crying Mach Fumiake singing to the audience following an important defeat in All Japan Women's Pro-Wrestling. Inspired by Fumiake, who won the WWWA World Single Championship in 1975 at the age of 16, Matsumoto applied to become a trainee at AJW during an audition in April 1976, but was rejected. Afterwards a determined Matsumoto attended High School and took up Archery as a sport in addition to the Basketball and swimming she was already participating in. Her trainer in Archery was Hiroshi Yamamoto, who had won bronze at the 1984 Summer Olympics and would go on to win a silver at the 2004 Summer Olympics.
Matsumoto failed a second audition for AJW in 1978 but in 1979 on her third attempt, she succeeded.
It was in January 1984 that she took the name Dump Matsumoto, supposedly because she was stocky but powerful like a Dump Truck. On the same day, she adopted the name Dump, Matsumoto dyed her hair blonde (In the context of Japan at the time, this was a major break from social norms) and donned face paint and a black leather jacket inspired by the rock band KISS. Matsumoto has claimed that, upon adopting the Dump persona, she wrote the equivalent of a suicide note to her mother explaining that Kaoru was now "dead".
During her feud with the Crush Gals, she would often team with Bull Nakano and Crane Yu, known collectively as the "Atrocious Alliance". On February 25, 1985, Matsumoto teamed with Crane Yu to defeat the Crush Gals for the WWWA World Tag Team Championship, (2025). 9781553663058, Winding Stair Press. ISBN 9781553663058 although the two were forced to vacate the title two months later following Yu's retirement. The Crush Gals vs Atrocious Alliance feud was ultra-successful for AJW and saw all involved throw in stardom. Matches between the Crush Gals and the Atrocious Alliance would regularly attract a 12.0 rating on Fuji TV, the station AJW broadcast on in Japan. This meant that 12% of the entire viewing audience in Japan that night were viewing the match. Wrestling historians have placed the Crush Gals' popularity at this point on par with Hulk Hogan in the United States.
Throughout 1985 and 1986, Matsumoto and Chigusa Nagayo had a feud with each other that included two highly acclaimed hair vs. hair matches. Following the first hair vs hair match, in which Matsumoto defeated Nagayo and forced her to shave her head bald, approximately 500 wrestling fans surrounded Matsumoto's transport outside of the arena and assaulted her. In the same time period, a drunk fan shoved a broken glass bottle into her chest at a bar in "revenge" for Nagayo. As the feud with the Crush Gals intensified, a stalker began following Matsumoto during the summer of 1985 until he was arrested.
She later made an unsuccessful bid for the vacant WWWA World Single Championship losing to Devil Masami on December 12, 1985. She later lost to rival Chigusa Nagayo for the All Pacific Championship in Tokyo, Japan on April 5, 1986.
Writing in 1988, professional wrestling Journalist and historian Dave Meltzer stated
Since her retirement from professional wrestling, she has appeared in a number of Japanese films during the late 1980s and early 1990s most notably portraying the character Bái Yá-Shàn in Ryoichi Ikegami and Kazuo Koike's Crying Freeman series which includes Crying Freeman 2: Shades of Death, Part 1 (1989), Crying Freeman 3: Shades of Death, Part 2 (1990) and Crying Freeman 5: Abduction in Chinatown (1992). She has also starred in Scorpion Woman Prisoner: Death Threat (1991) and Okoge (1992).
In 2024, a semi-biographical dramatized series about Matsumoto titled ""
/ref> was released on Netflix. The five-part series, which began streaming on September 19, 2024, features renowned Japanese comedian portraying the character of Dump Matsumoto.
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