Fighters Only

Issue 047

March 2009

The Japanese have a habit of playing down their achievements, but any way you cut it Yuki Nakai is a living legend, writes Matt Benyon.

President of the Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu (BJJ) Federation of Japan, founder of the Paraestra network of BJJ and Shooto dojos, and coach to one of Japan’s most talented mixed martial arts (MMA) fighters in Shinya Aoki, most nights you can still find Nakai-sensei on the mats in the basement headquarters of Paraestra Tokyo.

Perhaps it is easiest to start with his most famous showing, featured in the 1999 documentary ‘Choke’. It was 1995, and the Japanese Shooto Commission (Japan’s longest-running MMA organisation) was hosting Vale Tudo Japan ‘95, the second in a series of pioneering, large-scale MMA events. Rickson Gracie had literally wiped the floor with the opposition the previous year, submitting his way to legendary status among Japanese fans.

Yuki Nakai, then the welterweight champion of Shooto, was slotted into the tournament on the opposite side of the fearsome Brazilian, with the pride of a nation on his narrow but densely muscled shoulders. “I was really confident that I would make it to the finals and I was very confident that I could beat Rickson,” said Nakai.

He did not disappoint. If there’s anything the Japanese love more than a winner, it’s a valiant loser. Nakai submitted Gerard Gordeau and Craig Pittman on his way to the finals where he would, with a historic sense of inevitability, face Rickson. In his quarter-final fight against Gerard Gordeau (infamous for his appearance in UFC 1) Nakai spent a lot of time on his back attempting to twist off the Dutchman’s feet. Gordeau had other plans though. He stomped on Nakai’s face, and even eye-gouged him. The Japanese fighter eventually secured the submission, but serious damage to his eye had been done, as he would later discover.

Nakai entered the finals in high spirits, but sporting two black eyes that looked as though they had been inflated by an over-anxious bicycle repairman. Rickson walked into the arena looking as though he had just slid off a deck chair in Rio. The two fighters met in the centre of the ring and, probably due to good sportsmanship, went to the ground without much hassle.

Rickson passed Nakai’s guard like a hot Brazilian knife through tofu, drawing hushed ‘oohs’ and ‘aahs’ from the awestruck crowd. The over-matched Japanese fighter seemed powerless as Rickson took the mount and unleashed just the right amount of punches on those badly damaged eyes to cause him to turn over. Mount, to punches, to back mount, to rear naked choke (a classic BJJ combination) would end Yuki Nakai’s dreams of glory that night, but it was Gerard Gordeau’s busy fingers that had ended his MMA career permanently. Yuki Nakai has been blind in his right eye ever since that fight. “For the first two years I kept it a secret,” he says. “I didn’t want people to think that vale tudo was a dangerous sport.”

A combination of his loss to Rickson and a second loss to BJJ legend Jean-Jacques Machado — and his countrymen not faring too well on the international stage — caused Nakai to reconsider the core of his fighting skills. He had trained in wrestling at high school, and Kosen judo (a style heavily focused on ground grappling) at university in the snowy north of Japan. The young fighter would lead the Hokkaido University judo team to victory at a prestigious national cup, stopping the previously unbeatable Kyoto University’s ten-year winning streak.

After this, following a calling into the world of combat sports, Nakai quit university and moved to Yokohama to train under Satoru Sayama (a legendary professional wrestler named Tiger Mask) in the emerging sport he had created, namely shootfighting (the precursor to what would become Shooto).

After his losses in the Vale Tudo Japan events, Nakai decided that BJJ would fill the gaps in his skillset. “At that time a lot of Japanese fighters were not top class and they were losing a lot of fights, and then I thought ‘What’s needed to win?’ I was doing a lot of judo, but then I started to think ‘Okay, let me try jiu-jitsu’. I started with a white belt.”

Travelling around the world to train in the art, Nakai earned a reputation for himself as a tough and technical grappler, gaining victories in both the Pan-American and Mundial [World] jiu-jitsu tournaments. Eventually outgrowing the brown belt he had quickly achieved, he was awarded his black belt by the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation and went on to found Paraestra, effectively bringing the art of BJJ to its estranged homeland. As a black belt, Nakai has competed in hard-fought battles against some of the world’s best jiu-jitsu players on the professional circuit, facing off against Leo Vieira and Ricardo de la Riva among others.

“I thought Brazilian jiu-jitsu fit the Japanese,” says Nakai, and evidently he was right. Nowadays you can find one of his Paraestra dojos nestled in the basement of an apartment building, or down a narrow alley, in just about any city in Japan. When you consider the fact that Nakai-sensei coaches multiple Shooto champions (including Shinya Aoki) and that his team took first place at the 2008 Asian Cup, it is clear that, for a little guy, he packs a big punch that is still being felt around Japan. “I’m not a legend,” he modestly says. “It’s too early. I’m a jiu-jitsu practitioner.”