I’m sure I’m not the only one who devoted a large slice of New Year’s Eve to watching the big cross-promotional MMA event in Japan. I’m sure I’m not the only one to have found much to love about said event. I’m sure I’m not the only one who can’t help but think how far Japanese MMA has fallen.

Don’t get me wrong, the card was fun, and, the first half of it at least, was competitive. Japanese legends Hayato ‘Mach’ Sakurai and Akihiro Gono had an entertaining, fast paced fight that ended via vicious Gono armbar. Korean upstart Jung Man Kim had a fight of the night contender with Hideo Tokoro and Melvin Manhoef TKO’d ‘The Grabaka Hitman’ Kazuo Misaki (yes, it was an early stoppage, but that’s for another rant). Even the obligatory Judo-player face off between Hidehiko Yoshida and Satoshi Ishii was a surprisingly fun slugfest. But so much of the card was a freak show. Shinya Aoki snapped Mizuto Who-rota’s arm with a nasty reverse hammerlock. Alistair Overeem and Gegard Mousasi dismantled career journeymen Kazuyuki Fujita and Gary Goodridge inside the first round. It wasn’t funny, and it wasn’t safe. Nevertheless, overall the card had been a success.

But neither Sengoku or DREAM have yet to officially book their first event of 2010, and here lies the problem. Japanese MMA is not deep enough to survive a comparison with the near-monthly high quality offerings promoted by Strikeforce and ZUFFA in the States. How has Japanese MMA fallen so hard?

 
Four years ago PRIDE was undeniably the top MMA promotion in the world.

Obviously the beginning of the end of the golden era of Japanese MMA came with its demise back in 2007 –and the death of PRIDE can be traced to several problems. The first was the fighter’s purses: PRIDE overpaid them ridiculously. While UFC main eventers at the time like Tito Ortiz and Chuck Liddell struggled to make over $150,000, the likes of Bob Sapp, Hidehiko Yoshida and Fedor Emelianenko were rolling in money, sometimes earning almost ten times the UFC fighter’s purses. Being fighter-friendly is great, but every fighter-friendly promotion in the history of MMA has hit a cash flow crisis. EliteXC and the IFL have both fallen this way, and you can be sure that this was a component in the death of PRIDE.

Another failing of PRIDE was it’s expulsion from network television, which brings us to the heart of PRIDE’s fall: the Yakuza. The Yakuza are involved in most big Japanese franchises in one way or another, but it’s usually kept confidential, and, as the old saying (sort of) goes, what the public doesn’t know doesn’t lead to nationwide media scandal. Unfortunately for PRIDE, the Yakuza went public. This actually began back in 2003 on New Years Eve, when then-PRIDE Heavyweight champion Fedor Emelianenko fought wrestler Yuji Nagata at the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye festival. Yakuza with holdings in PRIDE threatened promoter Seia Kawamata to not allow the fight to go ahead, which he did. Kawamata, fearing for his life following the event, went into hiding, to resurface in 2006 and tell his story to the national press, implicating PRIDE president Nobu Sakakibara in the scheme. Fuji Television was forced to remove PRIDE from network TV. Sakakibara struggled in vain for about a year to get PRIDE back onto TV, going as far as hosting events in the USA to try and create a new fanbase, but it was all in vain. He was forced to sell the promotion to Zuffa, Inc.

Zuffa tried their best not to close down PRIDE, originally intending to run it as a separate promotion to the UFC, with big, yearly, Superbowl-esque cross promotional cards. But they needed PRIDE on Japanese TV for that plan to work, and even when the Yakuza were clearly out of the picture, still the networks sat tight and refused to allow PRIDE back onto TV. Left with no other choice, PRIDE was closed down, and all it’s great fighters moved to America to compete with the UFC. Antonio “Minotauro” Nogueira, “Shogun” Rua, Dan Henderson… some of the biggest stars in the UFC today all came from PRIDE. Of course, there were a couple that got away: Lightweight champ Takanori Gomi and Heavyweight kingpin Fedor Emelianenko. But it still left Japanese MMA in a lot of trouble. It had no flagship promotion and so few flagship fighters that you could count them on the fingers of one hand.

For a few months MMA in Japan really did vanish. Hardcore fans still went to events put on by the veteran promoters like PANCRASE and SHOOTO, and a few newer, small time shows like DEEP, but the fans who had watched PRIDE on their TV sets did not have this sort of devotion, and MMA began to dip out of the national spotlight. Japan needed a new ‘name’ promotion, and unfortunately the three mentioned above weren’t going to do it: DEEP simply didn’t have the resources, and PANCRASE and SHOOTO had been trying to break into the mainstream for years with little success. It was clear that it would be a new name that would save MMA in Japan.

Most people believe that it was DREAM, named for PRIDE’s parent company Dream Stage Entertainment, that answered the bell — but it was in fact World Victory Road’s Sengoku Raiden Championships. The company was created on 15th October 2007, just eight days after the closure of PRIDE, and unlike PANCRASE and the rest, it would go on to score a major TV deal with Fuji TV. It also became home to a collection of Japanese stars, like Takanori Gomi and Akihiro Gono, the latter after an ill-fated spell with the UFC.

Despite their obvious pros, World Victory Road lacked the money to bring in the superstars, and so out of the ashes of PRIDE rose DREAM. The company, a subsidiary of Fighting Entertainment Group (the owners of K-1) had both huge financial muscle and name value, propelling it instantly to number one in the Japanese MMA stakes. DREAM managed to lure back a few of the Japanese superstars who had headed aboard, like Alistair Overeem, and, with the help of veterans of the Japanese MMA scene like Kazushi Sakuraba, began to create a new generation of stars.

The problem for MMA in Japan is the fact that this new generation of stars is not as interesting, nor as devoted to the sport in Japan, as the group that came before. Shinya Aoki, undoubtedly the biggest name ‘found’ by DREAM has made his intentions to fight for Strikeforce in the states clear. Marius Zaromskis, the entertaining head kick merchant, has already ventured to these shores to compete in American MMA’s #2 promotion. Alistair Overeem, considered by many among the top five heavyweights worldwide, recently admitted he would sign for the UFC ‘right away’ should they offer him the right deal. Sengoku are also struggling. Their attempt to build Satoshi Ishii as a new figurehead for the company since Gomi’s defection, first to SHOOTO and then the UFC, failed at the first hurdle after he was defeated by career journeyman Hidehiko Yoshida at Dynamite!!. Dan Hornbuckle, a top Welterweight prospect turned down the chance to remain in Japan over returning to America and fighting for Bellator in their upcoming Welterweight tournament. The sad fact of the matter is that neither Sengoku nor DREAM has enough exclusive talent to put on the monthly schedule expected by MMA fans of all ‘major’ companies.

This brings us to 2010. There has been just one ‘major’ event held in Japan over January, SHOOTO offering a solid card made up almost entirely of Japanese fighters that fans who are not kings of hardcore will never have heard of. The two ‘big name’ promotions are not holding cards until March, three months after Dynamite!!, and the headlining bouts for both DREAM 13 and SRC 12 include at least one fighter coming off a loss. Considering the three-month break, you would expect the cards to make up for their lack of quantity with quality.

Japanese MMA probably isn’t dying, but it’s definitely a bit sick. The fact that it took two MMA promotions and a Kickboxing group to put on a show that drew 40,000 people puts into stark contrast how far the sport has fallen: PRIDE once drew 90,000 fans all by itself, and averaged way above 50,000. Sengoku and DREAM both struggle to draw more than 10,000 fans. The days of Japanese dominance in MMA are over, and unless they can create stars who capture the imagination of the public in the same way that Bob Sapp, Fedor, “Minotauro” and “Shogun” did, Japanese MMA will never return to the PRIDE glory days.