Japan

Japan is the other country where mixed martial arts was invented rather than imported. While the sport was being assembled in Brazil out of jiu-jitsu and vale tudo, a parallel version was being assembled in Japan out of professional wrestling, judo and karate — and for a long stretch the Japanese version was the more organised of the two.

Shoot wrestling, and the rules that came from it

The Japanese line runs through shoot wrestling: professional wrestlers who wanted to compete for real, and who built rulesets to let them. Those early promotions did something the rest of the sport took years to copy — they used weight classes, rounds and judging when open-weight tournaments were still the norm elsewhere. Several conventions that now look universal were tested in Japan first.

The feeder disciplines left their own marks. Judo supplies the throws and the grip fighting; karate supplies a distinctive range game, with a bladed stance and long entries that look nothing like boxing footwork and that opponents frequently misread. Catch wrestling, absorbed through the shoot lineage, shows up in leg locks and in a willingness to attack submissions from positions grapplers from other traditions treat as neutral.

Where Japanese fighters train now

The domestic scene remains substantial, but the pages below show something else clearly: a large share of the Japanese fighters in this catalogue train at teams outside Japan. Fighters move for training partners at their own weight — the lighter divisions in particular are deep in Japan and thin almost everywhere else, which cuts both ways.

Reading the gym column below therefore separates two very different careers: one built inside the Japanese system, one built abroad by a fighter who left it. Their records look different, and so do their styles.

The pages below list every Japanese fighter in the catalogue, with their weight class, their gym and how each of their last five fights ended.