JMMA Snot Dead!

It has always been a weird thorn in my side, a pain in my neck, sand in the ointment for me.  None of those sayings quite do the trick but it was around 1995, when Green Day went from playing shows for 10 at a dingy club off of I-10 in Pensacola to playing live on an MTV awards show, "Punk’s not dead!"  Gushed Kurt Loder, the supposed guardian of rock and roll history, exposing himself as another ignorant dilettante journalist.

 As if Fugazi and OPIV hadn’t happened between The Clash's last album and Greenday on the MTV movie awards.  As if thousands, tens of thousands of shows hadn’t taken place in just as many garages and community centers and all ages venues across the world.  But for Kurt Loder they hadn’t.  The music world consisted of what popped up on MTV and he was the myopic prince, dictating what was alive and what wasn’t.

I think you probably already see where I am going with this.  Almost every report I read lately is on the imminent death of mixed martial arts in Japan; how it’s all over, over there (here.)  However, on a personal scale, the last death gasps of JMMA look pretty much like the peak of its vitality.  Every week I am in a Shooto gym where pro- fighters are training the new crop of amateurs and getting ready for their next fights.  Men in their thirties rush from work to the gym to get in what will hopefully be enough practice to take them through their next grappling competition.  Teachers(me)  take aside the bad boys on Friday nights down at the school and teach them kickboxing on the freezing hardwood gym floors; after basketball is finished of course.  The first year junior high school students are well into the judo section of P.E. class and run through the halls in their off-white gis. The 7-dan at kendo who has the desk next to me asks if Overeem is the best heavyweight going and tries to remember Zambidis’s name.  I still get beat up routinely and snap a photo of the new black eye or bloody nose so that my mom can disapprove from a few thousand miles away.  So now there is a wife to disapprove at home; not much changes.

This isn’t a denial that it is harder to find JMMA on TV.  I wouldn’t try to tell you that somehow there are huge events happening here that just aren’t shown in America. There aren’t.  But it isn’t in a vacuum.  A lot of good things disappeared in the wake of the Japanese economy tanking:  My cushy job at a medical college.  The huge DJ events we used to throw four times a year.  The great English bookstore downtown.  Fulltime teachers in Osaka.  The M-1 Grand Prix.  Lots of good stuff, big and small has gone away.  The large interests that were supporting JMMA were riding out the last waves of the bubble that burst in 1991, bottomed out in 2003 and sank even more in 2008.  (Thank you global banksters by the way.  We hope you sleep well in your giant piles of money.)  Bemoaning the downfall of Japanese MMA while not acknowledging the downfall of Japanese most everything else is  nearsighted.  Again, I am not a subscriber to single cause fallacies. It isn’t just the economy.  It is the yakuza scandal.  It is the wandering attention of the public eye. It is the rise of the UFC and the collapse of Pride.  It is the lack of a transcendent Japanese star. 

Last weekend I was at a grappling tournament in Osaka.  While I was busy losing embarrassingly on mat B, elementary and junior high kids were competing on Mat C.  Their teammates yelled at them to pass the guard, to hold onto mount, to go for the armbar.  I thought back to shows with 3 or 4 bands playing in a friend’s garage while Kurt Loder sat in his New York apartment confident that punk was resting soundly in its tomb. 

Beginning next April, the new education law goes into effect in Japan.  It will require all junior high schools to teach judo or kendo as part of the physical education curriculum (This is based on my reading and understanding of the law as a public school teacher.  If I am incorrect, please inform me.)  That is millions of new kids being introduced to combat sports.  Most kids will go through the motions and not be that interested, but we are dealing in huge numbers.  Some will have an interest. A few will have real talent that would have gone into something else.  Some will go on to compete.  More will go on to be viewers of combat sports.  I don’t think this signals the return of the Pride days, with JMMA riding back into Saitama atop a fiery chariot slinging lightning bolts, but I also don’t think it can be seen as a rain sodden funeral with a dull gray casket draped in the Hi-no-maru.

Maybe what I am telling you is no consolation.  The fact that I have been to more amateur Shooto fights in parking lots than I have been to New Year’s Eve extravaganza’s in a dome doesn’t help the average MMA fan who lives outside of Japan and doesn't have that kind of access.  It is certainly a luxury.  That anyone off the street can walk into a Shooto gym and start training, and thereby have a foot in the door to being a pro, doesn’t mean we will get epic fights on broadcast television. 

I have a bias.  I enjoy reading MMR more than I do Rolling Stone.  I looked forward to the $5 Fugazi benefit for DC sex workers I went to in 96 far more than I am anticipating the $80 Jack Johnson concert my wife is dragging me to next month.  Struggling around the barriers of acceptance to little public adulation or pay isn’t everyone’s idea of glory.  It is certainly soul crushing and weighted down with frustration.  But it is something very different than death. However, we can’t base our metaphorical EKG around whether or not Sakakibara has a grip on someone’s coattails or whether Dana White has the bankroll to please some old guys in an office in Tokyo.  Mixed martial arts is alive in Japan for the same reasons it was before the boom; because people are doing it.  Whether rich people in boardrooms agree to play along or not, the sport is happening every day.   That’s the score.  So don’t tip your forty yet for JMMA.  It snot dead!

IMG_8644 (via wwc photos)

IMG_8627 (via wwc photos)

(does anyone know if there is any way, short of deleting my account and starting over, to change my user name so that I don't have to write under a dated, if still funny, nom de plume?)