Five lessons learned two years after PRIDE’s death
Published by Zach Arnold on April 7th, 2009 in History

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Two years ago, Dream Stage Entertainment held the final PRIDE event ever on April 8th, 2007 at Saitama Super Arena. The sad ending to the festivities involved Jeff Monson choking out Kazuyuki Fujita. Even sadder was the fact that disgraced executive Nobuyuki Sakakibara used the show to basically put himself over and how great he was.

When UFC management held a press conference alongside DSE executives in Roppongi Hills, Tokyo in March of 2007, they promised Japanese fight fans that “the Super Bowl of MMA” would happen. Many in the Japanese media quickly took the tone of mocking UFC management and deriding them as evil foreigners killing off the life of a Japanese company. It was race-baiting at both it’s best and it’s worst.

Unfortunately, the fear-mongerers were on target. UFC never managed to run an event under the PRIDE banner in Japan due to chaos with ex-PRIDE employees. There was, of course, a lawsuit filed by UFC against Sakakibara a year later in a Las Vegas courtroom.

There have been many lessons learned in the two years since the death of PRIDE and the end of the MMA boom in Japan. Let’s take a look at five lessons we have learned so far and what each lesson means for the business in Japan.

1. The majority of MMA’s star power in Japan is reliant on pro-wrestling. Until pro-wrestling has a UWF-type revival, MMA will not have a PRIDE-level revival. (MMA needs wrestling to gain strength so that when they ‘beat’ wrestling again, it will mean something.)

If you argue with PRIDE fans that their company was based on pro-wrestling power, expect to keep arguing with them until you are blue in the face. The pro-wrestling connection is never fully, truly acknowledged. However, pro-wrestling’s star power and presence in the fight industry made MMA possible. If it wasn’t for figures like Nobuhiko Takada and Antonio Inoki, MMA would have never reached the level that it did in the country. Whether you like or hate either of those men, they played key roles in how the business was shaped.

Takada lost a lot of money in a failed political campaign and UWF International, the group he was the ace of, quickly hit financial trouble afterwards. New Japan booked three major Tokyo Dome events in 1995 & 1996 to crush UWF-Inter in an interpromotional series of match. Pro-wrestling had officially beaten ‘dojo wrestling.’ Ironically, it was New Japan’s killing of UWF-Inter that led to the birth of PRIDE thanks to Takada and Hiromichi Momose, the late yakuza boss who was a big supporter of the fight game. Once PRIDE started taking off in the late 90s, Antonio Inoki decided to program Shin’ya Hashimoto and Naoya Ogawa in a series of semi-shoots at the Tokyo Dome. Hashimoto ended up losing a retirement match and Ogawa would soon go on to become of the big Japanese aces for PRIDE.

The problem for PRIDE was that the company was so reliant on Japanese pro-wrestling star power and the wrestling business’s ability to create stars that once the bubble burst, there was nothing left to recover. In order for a second MMA golden age to happen in Japan, it will require a strengthening of the pro-wrestling business once to create stars. If pro-wrestling cannot rebuild itself to strong levels, MMA will remain a stagnant proposition in the country.

2. The more money MMA makes in Japan, the more the yakuza wants to get involved. Without major television money, the yakuza isn’t that interested in the business. (A double-edged sword.)

Simply put, if a business makes money in Japan then the yakuza wants a piece of the action. If a Japanese business makes money, the yakuza wants to soak and regulate it. If it doesn’t make money and they think it can, then they will subsidize it (money laundering or not).

Once Fuji TV cut ties with PRIDE, the organization became a sinking ship and the money vanished. When the money vanishes, the rats jump off the ship and it’s game over. The Japanese fight business continues to eat itself because when there’s money involved, the mafia wants in. When there’s no money involved, it means business isn’t good and the shady figures with power don’t want to waste their time in the business.

The Shukan Gendai negative media campaign against PRIDE, linking them to organized crime, killed the company’s credibility in Japan. Unlike America, shame is still a big part of the Japanese culture.

Which leads to…

3. Most Japanese entertainment entities are very good at running business on their home turf due to their nationalistic ways, but are just as lousy about exporting their product on a global scale because their knowledge of doing business is based solely on what the Japanese want.

PRIDE, as an MMA product, should have made significant money on a global stage. In the end, it didn’t. But PRIDE is not the only example of a Japanese entertainment product that has not translated from its home country onto the global stage. It’s a fact of life that when it comes to promoting a product with a Japanese flavor and sense of culture that the yakuza gets the job done in Japan. However, when it comes to translating that product and doing business by foreign rules and regulations, suddenly interest is quickly lost.

4. As WWE proved, UFC will not be able to run big in Japan unless they run a pure Japanese-style product and Zuffa is unwilling to do this. (They use the WWE philosophy of ‘we’ll run our own type of show, accept it.” (The Japanese fans want promoters to understand the concept of “we have strong aces, and the best fighters in the world come to us.” In other words, create an image that the world is coming to us to perform in Japan.)

5. Once the MMA boom died in Japan, the business reset to pre-PRIDE levels. (K-1 is K-1, and New Japan is the dominant wrestling power. K-1 understands principle #4.)

Watch a K-1 event and you’ll see how Kazuyoshi Ishii understands what his audience wants. They want the best gaijin talent (image-wise and skill-wise) in the world, and they want an occasional Japanese ‘ace’ who they can buy into. Recently, Master Ishii lucked out with Keijiro Maeda became the K-1 Heavyweight champion at Yokohama Arena. In the past, Ishii used fighters like Nobu Hayashi & Musashi in the Japanese ‘ace’ role to perfection. Ishii has been able to maintain K-1′s strength while leaving DREAM hang to dry for the most part. His interest in the fight business is to be the singular gateway to get onto TV. K-1 has TV deals with Tokyo Broadcasting System and Fuji TV. If Ishii can continue to build momentum for his core product, then he can expand his sphere of influence and keep others out of the fight game.

While New Japan is struggling to sell out buildings like Ryogoku Kokugikan (they drew 8,000 on April 5th for a show headlined by Hiroshi Tanahashi vs. TNA ‘ace’ Kurt Angle), the promotion at least has a sense of direction and still has a television deal — something no one else in the country has at the moment. While the glory days of New Japan vs. All Japan in the 90s are dead, at least there is a sense that the business has hit its bottom and now is slowly regaining a little bit of momentum.