My personal outlook on the Japanese MMA scene
By Zach Arnold | December 21, 2007 | Print This
Warning: This is a very long post.
For the last couple of months, I’ve stayed relatively quiet in terms of talking about the Japanese MMA scene and how things are lining up. For starters, I’m bored with a lot of it. Secondly, I don’t see a lot of positives right now.
Here is my breakdown of how the political landscape in Japan is shaping up and what you should be paying close attention to.
The power brokers and matchmakers
Dave Meltzer recently wrote an article on Yahoo profiling the tradition of MMA on NYE in Japan. There were a few bloggers who were shocked, stunned, surprise, or whatever adjective you want to use to learn about how Fedor ended up working for the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye 2003 event (instead of the PRIDE event that same night).
If you read through out our site archives (which contains a ton of information from start to finish about how the yakuza scandal occurred), you probably already know the story. Start reading by using these links (here, here, here, and here).
However, let me give you a more detailed account of what exactly happened (based on my personal knowledge and years of talking to people inside the Japanese MMA business).
Antonio Inoki had ran a disastrous event called “Legends” on 8/8/02 at the Tokyo Dome for Nippon TV. Akira Fukuzawa, long-time All Japan Pro-Wrestling play-by-play man, did the PBP call for the event. (This is the event where Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira destroyed Sanae Kikuta and Kikuta ended up doing a stretcher job.) It was a disastrous event because the main event was Naoya Ogawa vs. Matt Ghaffari. The show did terrible numbers at the gate and was a black mark for Inoki. Inoki’s power source, old-time Japanese entertainment business mogul Tatsuo Kawamura, was the backer of this project and every other project known to man since then for The Big Chin. Kawamura owns one of Japan’s largest entertainment companies, K-Dash, and Ogawa has always been closely tied to Kawamura.
You have to understand what the power structure of the Japanese MMA business was in 2002. You had K-1 and PRIDE working together. As we’ve learned in the last couple of years, the power structures of the two groups were as follows: K-1 had Kazuyoshi Ishii as the boss, with Ken Imai and Nobuaki Kakuda in secondary roles along with admitted yakuza-fixer Seiya Kawamata and Daisuke Teraguchi, who helped out with foreign business. PRIDE’s backers consisted of Hiromichi Momose (the guy at the early PRIDE events in black glasses and a ballcap who always marked out for fighters at ringside after the fights were over), along with underlings of Naoto Morishita and Nobuyuki Sakakibara. Nobuhiko Takada has always been a front man (a spokesperson) rather than someone with major power in the group. Momose followed Takada after the end of UWF-International and the start of PRIDE in 1997 under the KRS banner. The power base for PRIDE was in Nagoya, which is where Morishita and Sakakibara came from.
Mixed in with all of this were the major agents. Motoko Uchida, who was Akira Maeda’s secretary when he ran the RINGS promotion, ended up being a power broker for the Brazilian Top Team in Japan. The rumor (for a long time in Japan) was that Uchida was backed heavily by Tatsuo Kawamura (the same guy backing Inoki and supposedly Kawamata). Koichi “Booker K” Kawasaki was the power broker for Chute Boxe Academy in Japan. Australian-born Miro Mijatovic was the super-agent to be, as he was really the most powerful gaijin agent at the time in Japan (managing both Fedor and Mirko Cro Cop, along with fighters in Fedor’s camp). Mijatovic had made his living in Japan for many years as a contract lawyer and had deals in place with star athletes like famous swimmer Ian Thorpe for business in Japan. Mijatovic worked alongside Bas Boon, who is very close to Golden Glory. Mr. Kokubo, the man who is behind J-ROCK, is the backer of fighters like Hidehiko Yoshida, Kazuhiro Nakamura, etc. J-ROCK is now backing the new World Victory Road project.
The events that shook up the Japanese MMA scene forever
For those of you who have followed the PRIDE yakuza scandal since day one, none of this information is new. However, if you’re a newcomer, here is a synopsis of what took place.
K-1, PRIDE, and Inoki cooperated with each other on a big show (produced by K-1) called Dynamite on August 28th, 2002 at Kokuritsu (National) Stadium in Tokyo. The stadium was meant to be used for soccer, so the amount of production equipment and portable toilets needed to be installed to execute this show was monstrous. The show drew a huge crowd of over 70,000 (legitimately paid), even though 91,000 was the claimed attendance. After this event, things started to fall apart.
Since NYE of 2000, all the parties had been cooperating with each other for events (2000 was a SkyPerfecTV PPV at the Osaka Dome, 2001-2002 was at Saitama super Arena taped for Tokyo Broadcasting System). However, the factions started feuding with each other after two important incidents.
There had been rumors that K-1 was undergoing some tax problems. Kazuyoshi Ishii was paying out a lot of money to foreign fighters and had also desparately wanted to sign Mike Tyson. Ishii ended up getting busted in December of 2002 in a raid by the Tokyo tax bureau. There were allegations that a contract for Mike Tyson was forged in order to divert money, that fighters were being paid under the table, and that evidence of such acts were intentionally destroyed. Ishii ended up going to jail, along with a mysterious Bangladesh man who was arrested in another country and was sentenced for making phony contracts for Ishii. Ken Imai was rumored to be close to Ishii on business deals at the time, but he was never charged or convicted of any crimes. Imai ended up leaving the K-1 power structure.
Sadaharu Tanigawa, a former pro-wrestling and MMA writer, took over for Ishii. He created FEG as his umbrella group to run operations.
