Issue 074

April 2011

With rumblings that it’s financial dire straits for the owners of beloved Japanese promotion Dream and K-1 kickboxing, FO thought it only proper to photographically mark what could be the last of Nippon’s customary big-scale New Year’s Eve MMA festivities

Just like every New Year’s Eve for nearly a decade, the close of 2010 saw Japan host marquee fight cards from the country’s biggest promotions. Always the year’s most important events, they have, in the past, drawn millions of viewers on television and once even a reported 90,000 spectators. Simply put: New Year’s Eve is the Superbowl of the Japanese fighting calendar. With the glory days of Nippon mixed martial arts (being the peak of Pride FC during the early to mid 2000s) in retreat, and the holding company of Dream and K-1 apparently deep into the red, a 2011 return of this traditional New Year’s Eve celebration of fighting might not happen.

“The crowd was smaller than previous years,” states Esther Lin, the photographer whose remarkable work you see across this article. “Significantly smaller – and you could tell. It was a little bit quieter, but there were still a lot of very hardcore fans there.” This New Year’s Eve, the Los Angeles-based Lin, also the staff photographer for Strikeforce, documented the MMA double header of Sengoku (called Soul of Fight) and Dream (Dynamite!!) over December 30th and 31st respectively. “I love the New Year’s shows because they’re a big festival,” says Esther. “Unlike shows here in the States, it’s like an all-day event. Sengoku started at 11 in the morning and it didn’t end until around 10.30 at night.”

Passion for the sport is evidently unfaltering despite the fall in attendance. Indeed, making an outing of the shows is tradition, and a significant part of the experience is socializing around food and merchandise stalls before the bouts. Typically of the devoted and spiritual Japanese, attendees can even pay their respects at a fight shrine. “The age diversity is a lot greater at a Japanese event. You’ll find children and the elderly there,” says Esther, also noting that the graphic-heavy T-shirts from the likes of TapouT and Affliction, so popular among fans of the sport’s western arm, are entirely absent. The events don’t just showcase fighting, however. Esther says: “Mid-way through Dynamite!! Antonio Inoki [Japanese godfather of MMA] came out with a bunch of Brazilian dancers and they did a little show where ‘TK’ Kohsaka [legendary Japanese fighter] pretends to blow himself up. It’s funny, you would never see that kind of joking around in an American show where someone would pretend to be a suicide bomber. But, it was funny to them.”

The 2010 events, while celebrated, were certainly of a smaller scale to previous editions. Dynamite!! routinely scored 50,000-person attendances in the past, though in 2010 it was just over 26,000 fans. But Esther, who has been traveling to Japan for around three years covering certain fight cards for Western media and her own site allelbows.com, points out that the country’s economy is in poor condition. She says: “I talked to a lot of people and there was definitely a sense that the funds were drying up. People were talking about a lot of the fighters not getting paid. 

But, at the same time what I thought is that even if FEG [Dream’s parent company] disappears it was evident on the night that somebody would take their place.”

Esther still manages to have a few favorite images from her trip, even amongst so many talked about fights such as Overeem-Duffee, Aoki-Nagashima and Chonan-Okuno. Her multi-photo composite (check it out on allelbows.com) of Kazuyuki Miyata suplexing Caol Uno, which took her a full day to complete, is one. “I shot Miyata’s last fight as well, against Lion Takeshi, and he also did many, many suplexes. I have lots and lots of sequences of that as well. But, I’ve never actually taken the time to composite them together. All I ever did was put them into a sequence right after each other so you could look at it like a flip book, but I’d never actually taken the time to put them on top of each other. That turned out really nice.” 

The Japanese MMA scene is notoriously unpredictable, but if 2010 is to be the last of the monstrous December 31st MMA celebrations for a time, it was certainly some send off.