There is perhaps no more iconic a symbol of
Shooto than
Mamoru Yamaguchi and his afro, every bit as puffy as Shooto’s gloves.
Only recently departing the comfy confines of a Korakuen Hall to try his hand at stateside competition, the former two-time Shooto champion and current
King of the Cage 125-pound titlist is making his journey stateside at an interesting time -- one in which flyweight has become the next division for hardcore fans to entreaty the
UFC to patronize.
Despite being arguably MMA’s greatest flyweight of all-time, Yamaguchi accedes that he will still have to earn his way into the Octagon and thus looks forward to putting on performances that will afford him some brain space with Western MMA fans. Originally scheduled to meet
John Dodson, Yamaguchi will face
Kevin Dunsmoor on Friday at
Tachi Palace Fights 9 (free Sherdog stream: 8:15 ET/5:15 PT) in Lemoore, Calif.
Luck and fate allowing, he will put on a performance worthy of getting himself on the UFC’s radar.
The last time
I spoke at length with Yamaguchi was just before his rematch with
Shinichi Kojima for the Shooto 123-pound world title. He had become Shooto’s first owner of the 123-pound strap after losing the 132-pound title to
Masahiro Oishi in 2001, during his days without the afro. After making the cut, he reigned as 123-pound champ for almost three years until losing to “BJ” by way of rear-naked choke in 2006.
In the rubber match, Yamaguchi battered Kojima from pillar to post until the last two minutes of the final round when, somewhat carelessly, the Shooto star stuck himself into a guillotine. It was by all appearances one from which he could have escaped if only his afro was not so big. Still, high-profile losses being as revelatory as they are life-altering, the shackles of chasing Shooto gold were suddenly lifted from the former two-time, two-division champion.
“The chance to fight [Kojima] as the challenger came, and, again, I lost. These losses changed my way of thinking,” Yamaguchi reflects matter-of-factly. “I wanted to try fighting somewhere else. Since I’d already fought so many of the fighters in my division [in Shooto], the only way I figured I could improve was to challenge myself under different rules.”
Yamaguchi’s long struggle to retain and recapture the title put him in Shooto’s trifecta of top 123-pound contenders between 2003 and 2008. It is a party amongst which the title has been exclusively traded for almost the past decade. Between defeating and dropping fights to grappling wunderkind Kojima and slick counter-striker and current champion
Yasuhiro Urushitani, Yamaguchi has been in a redundant top-ranked holding pattern within Shooto.
“[Kojima] vacated the title, and Urushitani eventually took it. We three have fought each other quite a few times, and I was thinking, ‘Yeah, it’s about enough by now, isn’t it?’” he asks with a smirk.
Spending five years on top may not sound like a problem -- contrarily, it sounds like a blessing for any MMA fighter in a sport where such competitive longevity is a rarity. However, long-term dominance of this kind is anathema to the Shooto ideal, which is to raise fighters from the amateur ranks to the professional level. In a sense, fighters can be too effective, becoming potential prospect killers should they continue to stick around. This was reflected in Yamaguchi’s blowouts of up-and-coming Shootors such as
Yuki Shojo and
Masaaki Sugawara.
Simply put, it was time to move on for the afro’d Shooto ace.
“I actually wanted to fight [in the States] for a long time, so going through Shoot Boxing, where they had elbows, helped a lot in teaching me how to use them and how to defend against them. King of the Cage was also good exercise, this time in American rules and in fighting in a cage. I always thought my future would be in a cage under American rules, so it was good to be there,” he says.
Yamaguchi is an explosive striker.
Visually, Yamaguchi’s style is muay Thai-based. However, save for a last-minute replacement at a Rajadamnern Stadium bout for an injured fighter on the Samurai TV program “Kick no Hoshi” in the early 2000s, his Shoot Boxing endeavors were the first times he exercised his elbows -- a rare and severely underused weapon even in the few Japanese promotions that use them. As such, he was initially unsure of how effective they were.
“I ate one on the crown of my head in a Shoot Boxing fight and thought, ‘Man, that really hurts.’ So yeah, they’re effective. It was bone on bone and was so hard that I was afraid I’d been cut. My head was really hot, so I reached up thinking, ‘Oh no, I’ve been cut.’ But there wasn’t any blood, and so I thought, ‘Oh, thank goodness’,” he recalls with laugh.
Adding elbows to a Japanese fighter’s game has always been rare and problematic at best. However, Yamaguchi’s case is unique in that he not only picked up the weapon relatively quickly through Shoot Boxing but also saw its practical use as a way to add versatility to his clinch game.
This became evident in his King of the Cage debut in early 2010, when the show made a stop in Okinawa. In his first cage and unified rules bout, Yamaguchi first crushed
Frank Baca with short elbows before choking him out to win the promotion’s 125-pound title.
“I didn’t know how it happened, but the opportunity came and I was thrilled to think, ‘If I win, I’ll get a belt, and then I can go to the States and fight as a defending champion,’” recalls Yamaguchi. “I feel very lucky that I got to fight in Okinawa for my first fight under American rules, rather than having to fight abroad. That would’ve been far more difficult.”
Yamaguchi came stateside seven months later in Highland, Calif. In what was supposed to be his first KOTC title defense, he bashed an overweight
Greg Guzman with his new favorite weapon: elbows. Despite the win, making the transition to stateside fighting has not been the easiest change for him, though it was not the rules or the cage that proved difficult. While most fighters are loath to bring it up, travel proved to be his most difficult adversary.
“I finally came to appreciate jet lag, which is something I’d never experienced but always hear foreign fighters claiming they got when they came to Japan. It’s something that I tried not to take much notice of and just tried to relax through it for the sake of the fight, but at night, I’d wake up at odd hours. Keeping your conditioning under those circumstances was difficult,” he says, somewhat embarrassed.
“Conditioning, different food, the time difference, and, of course, the language barrier I think are the biggest differences,” he elaborates. “I felt a little nervous if there wasn’t anyone who could speak Japanese around me while I was there.”
Japanese fighters, especially those on the regional level, almost never travel to vastly different time zones. Given that Tokyo often provides all Japanese fighters need career-wise, the opportunity to travel beyond the familiarity of one’s geographical and cultural comfort zone is rare. Further, at 33 years of age it is understandable why Yamaguchi has found it difficult to adapt.
“I don’t mean for these to be excuses. When you step into the cage, you still have to be at your best and you still have to win,” he says. “In order to be victorious in America, I just need to be stronger mentally. I promised to study how the rules and judges in America execute fights. I think not being prepared for these things is one of the reasons why other Japanese fighters aren’t doing well there.”
“Of course, another reason is that the level of American fighters is higher, probably the highest in the world,” he concedes.
Yamaguchi (top) calls Shooto his “life’s work.” | Stephen Martinez/Sherdog.com
These days, the concentration of MMA’s top talent is largely in the UFC. However, as the UFC’s opening of the flyweight division remains up in the air, it is anyone’s guess when -- if ever -- someone like Yamaguchi will be signed to a Zuffa contract. Still, he is adamant that is where he wants to end up, and, perhaps, where he wants to end his career.
“If the UFC opens up the flyweight division, then most definitely, I want to be in it. The UFC is the world’s biggest promotion, and the level of its fighters is the highest. As a pro fighter, there’s no other place than the UFC that I’d want to be or end my career,” says Yamaguchi. “I’m going to be 34 soon, so fighting in the UFC is my main and final goal now. I know I just can’t get in and win just like that, so I think what I’m doing now by fighting in other promotions is preparing for the UFC. Honestly, I don’t even know if they want me there yet, but for the meantime, what I’m doing now is what I believe to be the path to the UFC.”
Besides the usual training camp, there is one prefight ritual that Yamaguchi must perform before every fight. While a Mamoru Yamaguchi without knees -- and now elbows -- would be a strange sight, a Mamoru Yamaguchi without an afro would simply be alien.
The process is a long one at just less than three hours and brings him to a barber shop called “Jun” in a bustling part of his hometown, Moto-sumiyoshi. The proprietor, “Jun” Ishida, has run his shop in Moto-sumiyoshi for the past 15 years, though his career as a barber stretches back 45 more, to when he was 16 years old.
“He’s got a knack for perming an afro very quickly,” says Yamaguchi, as he rolls his bicycle up Ishida’s driveway.
In an unexpected but charming gesture, Ishida and his wife are standing outside their mom-and-pop barber shop waiting to greet us. Yamaguchi seems unsurprised, which is perhaps to be expected, as he tends to visit them three to four times a year to keep up his funky fresh hairdo.
Inside, Yamaguchi gets immediately settled in and takes a basket of hard candy to occupy himself as the Ishidas get to work. Normally, he reads comics or other literature while waiting, but on this day, he opts to engage the mister and missus in conversation.
Once Ishida trims the loose curls from the previous perm, one can briefly see the Yamaguchi of old, as he was when he reigned over Shooto’s 132-pound division without the afro. The illusion does not last long, though, as Ishida quickly busies himself with rolling every centimeter of Yamaguchi’s hair in rows with miniscule hair rollers. It is meticulous and arduous work, demanding no small degree of dexterity.
“Japanese people tend to be good at very fine, detailed work like this,” says Ishida with pride, without breaking the pace of hair rolling. “And no, I never get tired or sore from doing this.”
Eight years is a long time to sport an afro, but that is about as long as Mamoru has been cultivating one with the Ishidas’ help. He has gotten to be such a regular visitor that the Ishidas do not even charge him for the work-intensive process anymore. It is, as mentioned, a tradition. Strange as it may seem, it is something that may soon come to an end, as Yamaguchi looks toward retirement. Once the fights end, the perms will likely end, as well.
“Fighting in the UFC may be the last major thing in my fighting career, but Shooto will always be close to me,” says the man who once called Shooto his “life’s work.”
“Going from Shooto to the UFC will be like going from Japanese baseball to the major leagues. I want that big challenge, but my feelings toward where I came from won’t change. After I retire, I may open my own gym, and if I do, I want my students to fight in Shooto. I want to keep teaching and guiding fellow fighters, leading them to Shooto because I love the sport of MMA and Shooto,” he says.
Passionate comments like these resonate with the message of “never forget your roots” -- the mantra of another Shooto icon,
Rumina Sato, who has made competing in that circuit more a way of life than a career. As Yamaguchi is no different, the current turmoil within the Japan Shooto Association strikes a delicate chord with him.
While he has a stake in fighting under the unified rules now, one can tell he is less than certain its introduction into Shooto would change it for the better.
“I’m not particularly in a position where I can say a lot about the matter, but I do want to say that I hope they get through their difficulties and are able to make an environment where professional and amateur fighters can safely fight without worrying about politics,” he says.
“
I just want American
fans to remember me
as that Japanese guy
with the weird, big afro
and awesome striking.
-- Mamoru Yamaguchi
“If Shooto’s rules stayed the way they’ve been until now, that would be fine with me. If they were to change, too, that would also be fine by me. I haven’t really thought too deeply about it, but if they allowed elbows in Shooto, I’d definitely use them without any hesitation. I train with the American rules in mind now, so I have no problems with them,” he says.
As the JSA continues its struggles to reform, Yamaguchi continues to make his way through stateside MMA. Though his home circuit may change substantially while he is away, he has made it his mission to bring a touch of Shooto to American cage fighting.
“I want to get to the UFC one day, and if American fans are going to remember and root for me, I’ll have to perform well against guys like Kevin [Dunsmoor] and make a big impact.”
“I just want American fans to remember me as that Japanese guy with the weird, big afro and awesome striking,” he says with a smile, not unlike Yoko Gushiken himself.
Yuko Komiyama contributed to this story. - Source 
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