[ryochonan1]

Part 3
Meanwhile, Kawamata was having his own troubles before and after the Inoki Bom-Ba-Ye show. According to Kawamata in Shukan Gendai magazine, he was allegedly receiving threats from DSE yakuza for booking Fedor. After the Inoki show, Kawamata was summoned to a building in Shizuoka where he was threatened for blackmail money — by his own yakuza gang members, who turned on him and supposedly were friendly now to DSE. Kawamata ended up leaving Japan and there were some angry people.

According to Shukan Gendai, Mijatovic was summoned to a hotel room meeting where a gun was allegedly pointed to his head and was warned about crossing DSE. Mijatovic’s relationship with Red Devil started to deterioriate as Sakakibara and PRIDE started to get closer to Vadim and Fedor. Eventually, Mijatovic left the MMA business and focused his business activities on Japan’s lucrative love hotel sector (raising capital to buy properties and renovate depressed areas).

Kawamata’s revenge

Seiya Kawamata launched a multi-pronged attack against DSE. He filed a police complaint in 2005 with the Kanagawa Police, claiming that alleged yakuza members connected to DSE threatened him. He helped cooperate with Kodansha, the publisher of Shukan Gendai, for a multi-month negative campaign against DSE. The magazine campaign built up so much public pressure on Fuji TV (which was having a stockholder’s meeting to address Livedoor’s attempt at a hostile takeover of their company) that the network dropped DSE programming despite the large ratings it attracted.

The Kanagawa Police investigation into Kawamata’s claims went unresolved because they couldn’t track down Mr. I (aka Mr. Ishizaka aka Kim-Dok Soo), who rumoredly fled to South Korea at the time of the investigation.

With PRIDE finished and Kazuyoshi Ishii sitting in a jail cell, the MMA scene became weakened in Japan. Almost scorched earth, in fact. There are strong rumors now that Seiya Kawamata is back in Japan and is making some big political decisions impacting the NYE scene this year for MMA. (Hence why there seems to be cooperation between the Yarennoka and K-1 MMA events.)

Personally, a story I found fascinating is a report in Japan that Kawamata supposedly has a stake or interest in FC management, the supposed company backing and representing Brandon Vera. The story got no traction whatsoever in the US MMA blogosphere, which surprises me given that Kawamata is an admitted yakuza fixer.

It should be noted that the Yarennoka event will likely do lackluster business (since it is only on SkyPerfecTV PPV and not on free-to-air TV). Good benchmarks for the show (in my estimation) would be 30,000 PPV buys and 10,000 paid tickets sold. Anything over those benchmarks is gravy. My personal opinion is to expect some papering of tickets for the DSE event in Saitama. (Same for their Hustle afternoon event).

There is not much appeal at all for the Yarennoka event in Japan. It is scarily quiet this year in terms of NYE MMA activity, certainly by a longshot when compared to previous years. I personally have zero interest in the DSE event and very little interest in the K-1 event, which is personally shocking to me (I’m actually interested in watching the UFC 79 event).

The intriguing part about the DSE event on 12/31 is that more people in America may be watching the event on HDNet than people paying to see it in Japan on SkyPerfecTV. Completely unfathomable if you’ve been a fan of the NYE MMA events in Japan since 2000.

If you’re curious as to how HDNet got the rights for the DSE event, I can only come up with one guess (it is conjecture) as to how it happened. HDNet ended up making a deal with M-1 Global for the TV rights from SkyPerfecTV. In past dealings between PRIDE and Vadim Finkelstein (of M-1), the Russians were given the TV rights to PRIDE events and they turned around to distribute the footage in other TV markets. So, it’s totally not out of the question that the same deal happened here (Vadim and M-1 got the TV rights, M-1 Global flipped them around and made a deal with HDNet).

The direction of MMA in Japan for 2008

With Seiya Kawamata supposedly back in action in Japan, expect the unexpected. He likes to make big splashes and big moves, but it’s usually always short-term business. It will probably be a more interesting year in terms of politics than it will be in terms of fight quality.

Caleb at MMA Predictions unwittingly gave away the main event for the World Victory Road 3/5 Tokyo, Yoyogi National Stadium Gym I event (which is being negotiated as Hidehiko Yoshida vs. Roger Gracie).

I expect to see a ton of mid-range shows in Japan for 2008, with a very mixed success rate (2 out of every 3 shows will probably be money losers or minor failures). I don’t expect great things at all coming out of Japan and with UFC expanding its schedule for more shows, expect to see more Japanese talent make its way to foreign soil and to make a pitch to get into WEC.
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This gives you insight to how business is done in Japan, when Yakuza are involved, exspecially if you are interested in MMA in Japan.