And Yushin Okami will be surely eager to show the fans his strength following his title shot defeat in Brazil.

Looking forward to all the fights on this card.

Main card:
Lightweight Championship Bout: Frankie Edgar vs. Ben Henderson
Quinton Jackson vs. Ryan Bader
Mark Hunt vs. Cheick Kongo
Yoshihiro Akiyama vs. Jake Shields
Anthony Pettis vs. Joe Lauzon

Preliminary card:
Yushin Okami vs. Tim Boetsch
Takanori Gomi vs. Eiji Mitsuoka(?)
Hatsu Hioki vs. Bart Palaszewski
Norifumi Yamamoto vs. Vaughan Lee
Riki Fukuda vs. Steve Cantwell
Takeya Mizugaki vs. Chris Cariaso
Tiequan Zhang vs. Leonard Garcia

NYE 2011

Some great fights here.

Check out the rumble between Rumina Sato verus Nico Veressen, second video down.

February 26, 2012, at the mighty Saitama Super Arena. Be there.

The Takaya vs Miyata fight will be a war. They are both in incredibly good shape right now. Takaya has strong determination and it’s clear that Miyata has evolved as an MMA fighter.

Keeping tradition with the Judo-ka turned MMA fighters (excluding Ishii), Izumi has been given a very tough opponent who on paper is not likely to beat.

The English subtitles don’t show it but at 1:35 Aoki uses the word “gaijin” for foreigners. This literally translates as ‘outsiders’ and in Japanese this is the rudest choice of vocabulary, showing no respect. At 3:11 Kikuno uses the word “gaikokujin” in reference to non-Japanese which literally translates as ‘foreign country people’ which is more polite and shows respect. Although it doesn’t come across in the English language, where the word foreigner is mostly avoided, it shows a basic difference in the mental character of these two fighters and how they use their mother tongue.

Aoki, the younger of the two, and the one with the lesser respect in terms of MMA on the international circuit, especially following his embarrassing losses to Gilbert Melendes and Yuichiro Nagashima, clearly shows his contempt and immaturity with this choice of language.

Aoki obviously doesn’t care but the world is watching. He is loved for his incredible grappling skills in Japan but some now question just how long the ‘Baka Survivor’ (baka = stupid) will last in the MMA world.

We visited Yushin Okami at RJW (Real Japan Wrestling, part of the Wajutsu Keishukai network) where he trains several days a week to interview him and watch him take the MMA class with some of the resident professional and amateur fighters.

RJW is located in a very unlikely spot. A residential area of Tokyo, on a converted floor of a condominium, rather hard to find for anyone unfamiliar with Tokyo or the Japanese language.

A foam matted area and a marked wrestling matted area with padded walls is about all there is. No heavy bags, no fancy equipment. Just the smell of old sweat barely masked by disinfectant. The cleaning of the mats is done by all those who train that day after practice, and this is the norm for all martial arts dojos of any discipline across Japan.

Okami was happy to have the opportunity to speak to the international media. His English is almost non-existent, and he is much less known in his own country than abroad, making it a rare occasion to speak publicly to the international audience.
He was very adamant about his position in terms of a title shot against Anderson Silva, confident that he will take the middleweight belt and completely uninterested in the talk of a GSP versus Silva match up. In fact, he expressed his disdain at anyone switching weight class should get an automatic title shot.

For the full interview click HERE.

This was my first article for CagePotato.com

The match which went to a judge decision in the favour of his opponent, Nick Ring (Canada), was widely accepted as Fukuda’s win and it has been reported that Dana White has offered to compensate Fukuda with the same purse as the winner.

MMA-in-Japan will interview Fukuda shortly and get his thoughts on the fight and his first experience in the UFC.

Riki Fukuda (Grabaka) when he took the DEEP Middleweight belt.

As a side note, MMA-in-Japan.com would like all Japanese fighters (and fans alike!) currently involved in the UFC, or wishing to fight in the UFC, to ignore the current misinterpretation of Dana White’s name. For some reason, in katakana (the Japanese writing system used for expressing non-Japanese words/names) Dana’s name is written and pronounced “da-na” instead of “day-na”. While this means little to the Japanese themselves, in an international context it is somewhat ignorant and rude. It would be on par with English speakers saying “Akai-yama” instead of  Akiyama, or “Okay-my” instead of Okami.

So, to set the record straight, in Japanese, Dana White should be written, read, and pronounced “デイナ・ホワイト” and not “ダナ・ホワイト”. Let’s make the effort folks.