Posts tagged ShinyaAoki at FanHouse

Welcome, fellow MMA fans and insomniacs, to the FanHouse live blog of the Japanese mixed martial arts show Dream.5.

Although Dream.5 hasn't received nearly as much attention (at least among American media and fans) as Saturday night's Affliction and UFC shows, it promises to be a great event, headlined by the semifinals and finals of the Lightweight Grand Prix.

Shinya Aoki will take on Caol Uno in one Lightweight Grand Prix semifinal, Tatsuya Kawajiri will fight Eddie Alvarez in the other, and then the two winners will get just a short time to rest before they fight each other in the finale.

We're live blogging all of it, and the undercard, starting at 2 a.m. Eastern Monday, 11 p.m. Pacific Sunday.

Mixed martial arts has been a global sport for as long as it has existed. The first UFC event featured a Brazilian defeating a Dutchman in the final. The current UFC champions are two Americans, two Brazilians and a French Canadian, and the sport's top fighters outside the UFC include one from Russia and several from Japan.

But while the sport has always been global in the sense that the athletes come from all over the world and fight all over the world, its fans are still segmented by language barriers. The internet gives fans access to MMA news, but there's not a lot of English-language coverage of MMA events in Japan.

A blogger named Suki Kubo is changing that. A 31-year-old woman who was born in Kyoto, Japan and has lived in the United States for six years, Suki figured that being an MMA fan fluent in English and Japanese put her in a unique position to help American fans learn more about what's going on with the sport in Japan.

So she launched her blog, Suki MMA, which translates Japanese MMA articles into English. In the interview below, Suki answers my questions about how she got the idea to start the site, and what the differences are between the way MMA is covered in Japan and in the United States.

The Japanese mixed martial arts organization Dream doesn't get any mainstream media attention in the United States, but hard-core American fans have followed the Dream lightweight tournament that has been going on for the last few months.

Shinya Aoki, especially, has drawn attention from American fans, and there are indications that he may soon fight on American soil. The blog Suki MMA, which translates Japanese MMA articles into English, has a blog post Aoki wrote, and this paragraph is particularly interesting:

The top fighters I consider are all in the U.S. now. I want to defeat them and I believe I can do it. I have confidence becoming a No.1 fighter. I will be a top fighter with my techniques and in my way.

Aoki refers to "the top fighters," plural, but there's one particular fight a whole lot of fans would love to see, Aoki vs. UFC lightweight champ B.J. Penn. It sure sounds like Aoki is interested. Let's hope Penn and Dana White are, too.

Shinya Aoki defeated Katsuhiko Nagata by first-round submission today at the Dream.4 event in Japan, and watching the way Aoki finished Nagata has me thinking Aoki might be the best submission artist in MMA right now.

Aoki's submission took advantage of his extreme flexibility to go from a full mount position to get his shin up toward Nagata's neck. It was so unique that no one is quite sure what to call it -- Jim Murphy at the Savage Science calls it an omoplata shoulderlock from the top mount, while Sherdog lists Aoki as having won with a gogoplata. Bas Rutten, calling the fight for HDNet, said he had never seen Aoki's submission before. When you've got a submission move that Rutten has never seen, you're doing something special.

I think Aoki is the favorite to win the Dream Lightweight Grand Prix, and after that I'd love to see him come to America. B.J. Penn might be the best lightweight in the world, but we won't know for sure until we see Aoki in UFC.

We're starting to see more mainstream media coverage of the sport of mixed martial arts, which is good. But a lot of that coverage comes from people who don't know much about the sport, which is bad. So I'd like to offer a few suggestions:

Don't call it "ultimate fighting." The name of the sport is mixed martial arts, or MMA. The most popular organization within MMA is Ultimate Fighting Championship, or UFC. The phrase "ultimate fighting," with those two words lower case, should never appear in your articles. Ultimate Fighting, a phrase that is a registered trademark of the UFC, can appear in your articles, but it should be followed by Championship -- and in general, you can just say UFC.