A Blood Called Shooto

Stephen Martinez/Sherdog.com

Yuki Nakai is a Shooto hero.

Wakabayashi does not need much prompting now; it’s like a chain reaction. The intangible aspects that make Shooto something larger than sport are something he’s undoubtedly paid mind to before.

“One of Shooto’s strong points is that it’s honest. Shooto means choosing the right thing, being honest, going in the right direction; it’s about propriety,” Wakabayashi says. “In Shooto, we do the things we do for the ‘right’ reasons. We don’t have fighters fighting opponents outside of their weight classes, we don’t have excessively young fighters fighting in the events, and we don’t pit experienced fighters against inexperienced fighters. We do things properly for the sake of martial arts.”

Wakabayashi takes a silent, thoughtful moment of introspection before he continues to carefully groom an analogy.

“The way I see it, Shooto is like a school,” he says. “Young people these days, especially in Japan, they like ‘virtual’ things, like video games and so forth. But in the martial arts, it’s very interactive. You need to learn all kinds of things: mannerisms, how to respect people and how to make friends. And when you fight, you can’t really lie. You can have a real life experience in Shooto.”

Wakabayashi himself is no different than the other fighters for whom Shooto touches something deeper within, embracing the same kind of spiritual slogans. He appears to be the author of some of them, as well; perhaps he’s Shooto’s answer to Publilius Syrus.

“I’ve always said this as a kind of personal catchphrase: ‘Shooto isn’t my work; Shooto is my life,’” Wakabayashi says.

Like any culture, Shooto has its own mythos. Shooto is replete with many suitable hero figures in its hall of champions, past and present, but one figure looms larger than all others.

“When I think of Shooto icons, I usually think of Sayama first. Without him, there would be no Shooto,” Wakabayashi says. “But after him, it would definitely be Yuki Nakai.”

Nakai was the third 150-pound world champion of pro Shooto. He roared out of the Super Tiger Gym in 1993, emerging as Shooto’s finest young talent. When Shooto authorities put together the second Vale Tudo Open card in 1995, Nakai was the ideal candidate through which to prove the strength of Japanese fighters and especially Shootors.

The rest of the details are crystallized in MMA lore. Vastly outsized by the rest of the tournament field, Nakai took on notoriously lawless Dutchman Gerard Gordeau in the first round of the tournament. Gordeau brutally eye-gouged Nakai repeatedly over the course of their 27-minute bout. Nakai eventually emerged victorious via submission -- and even came back out in the semi-finals, eye bandaged, to submit American wrestler Craig Pittman. Nakai was trounced in the finals by Rickson Gracie but ultimately became legendary for his resolve.

Gordeau’s gouging permanently blinded Nakai in his right eye. Although he was forced to retire at the age of 25, Nakai concealed his disability from the public for two years, fearing the backlash that may result against the sport he loved so passionately.

Nakai is an even more complex figure for Wakabayashi. Not only is he a close friend, he is actually a business partner: it was Wakabayashi who co-founded the original Paraestra gym in Tokyo with Nakai in December 1997. In fact, Wakabayashi was the man who gave the original Tokyo gym the name “Paraestra,” and he still trains in that same gym today -- one of dozens of Paraestras all over the world.

“Gordeau was someone I’d known. I’d known him for years, and he was my friend,” Wakabayashi says. “I knew he had his good points, but I also knew he had the potential to do bad things during fights.”

There’s a true otherworldly reverence audible when anyone speaks about Nakai. Wakabayashi is no different.

“When that fight was proposed, I was against it. I knew that even if Gordeau was faced with a smaller opponent, he’d still have done anything to win,” he says. “But Nakai told me then, ‘I’ll be fine. Do you really think I’d lose to him?’ By him saying that, I couldn’t really oppose him from fighting.”

Stephen Martinez/Sherdog.com

Rumina Sato is Shooto.

It makes things simple when Wakabayashi is asked what he sees as Shooto’s greatest moment.

“I think that for me, the greatest moment is when Nakai won against Gordeau. Because of the fight with Gordeau, we couldn’t give Nakai a Shooto license anymore; that was very difficult for me,” Wakabayashi laments.

It’s the ultimate cliché of literary analysis, the scourge of any well-bred English major. It’s invoked nauseatingly by a great many pseudo-intellects and try-too-hards desperately feigning deep thought. It’s the Christ narrative. Yet, for Nakai, it’s never a comparison for which one has to reach but rather the one that instantly implants itself in the mind.

Nakai’s story may be a devoutly secular one, but it isn’t particularly hard to understand why those in the world of Shooto see him as something greater than a fighter, trainer or originator. It’s monumental when titles such as “Shooto world champion,” “world-class trainer,” “the father of BJJ in Japan,” and “MMA pioneer” somehow do not seem grand enough for a particular person. However, Nakai’s selfless suffering -- his own passion -- is what both implicitly and explicitly informs the morality and mentality of Shooto.

To watch, Nakai makes the abstract ideas about “fighting spirit” more concrete. Anyone can physically watch his bouts and see him fight, unwavering, and understand sacrifice and conviction in combat; this symbolism is easy. However, no less important are the less obvious tenets of improvement and evolution that Nakai promoted by bringing Brazilian jiu-jitsu back to Japan, demanding to discover how it was that Gracie had beaten him.

The kanji characters used to write “Shooto” literally mean “learn” and “combat.” Surely then, Nakai is Shooto’s icon, its Christ.

“In previous Vale Tudo Open events, all our Japanese fighters had lost. Seeing Nakai fight, guys like Rumina Sato had decided not to leave Shooto, and a guy like [Hayato] ‘Mach’ Sakurai decided he wanted to be a part of Shooto,” Wakabayashi says.

“After watching Nakai fight, that’s when Shooto became my life.”