Your Japanese word of the week is...

"tatakai" which is a fight, tatakau being the verb "to fight". Of course, this being Japanese, there are lots of ways to pronounce the same kanji and in the case of "Sengoku", sen means fight and goku means extreme. Or, as it turns out, you could consider it to be an "ultimate fight"........ get it??

In case you haven't followed along, Sengoku is a mixed martial arts event and I attended an event this past Sunday, having been given a free ticket......... but more on that in a second......

The day before these big fights was more battles, except in the form of a school sports festival. When I think of "sports days", I recall lots of fun memories of doing three-legged races or balancing eggs on spoons in elementary school. Well imagine similar events, but with 17 year olds and competition not only between homeroom classes, but divisions and clubs.

In Japan, high schools are a huge part of the students' life, especially the club they enter in. High school level sports are a very important aspect both in terms of school image and the future careers of many pro-sports minded students. In the case of my school, they have full-time sports coaches as well as a dedicated "ball sports" training ground that includes a dormitory (lots of students from other parts of the country come to the school to play on the team), two soccer fields (one grass, one dirt), a baseball field, and tennis courts. In fact, high school clubs often take precedence over everything else and it's not uncommon for teams to train 4 or 5 days a week with games on the weekend. But for the chance to be scouted and these kids' future pro-careers on the line, it's worth it.

That aside, the sports festival was really fun. There were events like tug-of-war, obstacle courses, jumping rope, and an 11-legged race (guess how many people that is heh...). The coolest event of the morning was this piggy-back battle royale where kids with hats, hoisted up in the air by three others, had to try to steal each other's headwear. The afternoon was all relay races with some exciting races (like a girl from the cheerleading squad out-sprinting a girl from the soccer team). And it was just a fun time to hang out with the students. Although I did get a bit sunburnt.............. oh well heh.....

Anyways, back to the Sengoku event........

It was held at the Saitama Super Arena and I went simply because I was given tickets. Mixed Martial Arts, if you don't know, has become hugely popular in the past few years, not in the least because of the commercial break-out of the UFC series in America.

Interestingly, MMA has since evolved essentially into it's own martial art, so the original meaning of "mixed" is a bit lost. I remember watching old school UFC events (before they created reality TV shows about it) when fighters really did come from different martial arts and didn't all study how to fight the same way. With the commercialism came MMA-specific coaches and with the coaching came a more universally agreed-on "MMA" fighting style. And with that came the homogenisation, so now everyone looks kind of the same.

Despite that, it wasn't a bad event overall. Some of the fights weren't very interesting but the final 3 fight cards were rather good, the main event being Kickboxing and UFC Champion Maurice Smith vs Olympic Judo gold medalist Hidehiko Yoshida (who won). What did kind of ruin it was rather poor reffing.

That and the insane cost of attending an event like this. I was lucky having been given a ticket by my friend but our floor seats would've costed nearly $300!! In all honesty, the event wasn't worth $300. I don't even think it was worth the $100 they charged for the seats in the nosebleed section but hey, who am I to say how much something is worth.........

Despite that, and the fact that I don't think I could get into watching MMA as much as I used to, it was a good night out.