AACC Celebrates 20 Years

On Sunday, December 19th, Remina Yoshimoto won the All Japan Wrestling Championship. This is the second time she’s won. Roughly two weeks later on New Year’s Eve, both Rena and Ayaka Hamasaki will step into the ring to fight live on Fuji TV. What do these women have in common? They all trained at AACC. Just the day before Remina’s win, at an Italian restaurant in Tokyo, former and current members of the team gathered to celebrate its 20th anniversary. Among those in attendance were fighters from Deep, Deep Jewels, One, Shooto, and Rizin as well as Hiroyuki Abe, Megumi Fujii, and Tatsuya Iwasaki.

Known internationally for the women that train there, AACC is an interesting team that has left its mark on both the Japanese and the international MMA scene. Fighters from there have won numerous championships, competed on the biggest stages, and have helped elevate the sport. Despite its importance, not a lot is known about the team’s history and how it came to be. In this article, we go over this history and look at how they built their women’s team.

Getting the gym started

Going into 2022, MMA has never been more accessible. Whether you are looking to become a fighter or just looking for a fun workout, most gyms cater to both. This was not always the case. Twenty years ago in Japan, training was pretty much limited to professionals in old dojos on tatami mats. Even if someone was interested in training, there was a high barrier to entry. Especially for those without a martial arts background. It was in this environment that Hiroyuki Abe decided to open a gym that would not only make MMA more accessible to the public, it would also offer training in various disciplines like karate, Brazilian jiu-jitsu, aikido, and capoeira.

Coming from a collegiate wrestling background, Abe joined Wajyutsu Keishukai, a group of MMA gyms with locations throughout Japan. He made his pro-debut in 1998 and eventually started teaching at their RJW location, with the likes of Caol Uno and Akira Shoji. During his time at RJW, he met two people that would play a big role in helping him open a gym. These were Tatsuya Iwasaki and Megumi Fujii. Iwasaka was a friend of Abe’s who had become a kyokushin karate champion. He had come to RJW in order to prepare for his transition to MMA, where he would eventually face Wanderlei Silva at Dynamite in 2002. Megumi was competing in sambo at the time and was at RJW training.

Outside of RJW, Abe was teaching group lessons at fitness clubs, where it was easier to teach non-professionals. He was also traveling to the U.S. to train. It was during one of these trips that he came across the “Fight Club” in Manhattan. From what he remembers, it was a building that housed a bunch of different dojos and gyms. Once could learn sambo, bjj, boxing, and even savate there. This set-up made an impression on him and he decided to create a similar building in Japan. This idea would eventually became Chambers Tokyo.

With a name inspired by the popular kung-fu movie, The 36th Chamber of Shaolin, Chambers Tokyo housed the Abe Ani Combat Club (“AACC”/MMA), Kazumi Dojo (Karate), Girl Fight (AACC’s women’s team), and Yoshikan Aikido (Aikido). People could also take kickboxing lessons. In addition, the facility also had a full cage, which would have been extremely rare in Japan in 2001. Abe and Fujii worked together to come up with various ideas and put them into motion, with Abe teaching MMA, wrestling, and bjj, while Megumi worked on the women’s team and with the kids. Abe’s old friend, Iwasaki, who had experience running his own karate dojo, ran Chambers Tokyo.

Moving to Gold’s Gym

Founded in 2001 by Abe and Fujii, AACC quickly benefited from the explosion in popularity that martial arts was undergoing as a result of Pride and K-1 in the early 2000’s. Their members quickly increased and after a year, Chambers Toko was no longer big enough. It was around this time that an opportunity presented itself when an old acquaintance of Abe’s contacted him. He was building a new Gold’s Gym in Omori and wanted to add a space for martial arts. The rest as they say is history and now AACC has branches in four Gold’s Gyms throughout the Tokyo area. It is also worth noting that despite leaving Chambers, Abe’s original concept of a space where people can learn different martial arts still exists. At the Omori Gold’s Gym location for example, one can learn wrestling, bjj, kickboxing, and MMA from various different schools. Even within AACC, one can learn different martial arts. Iwasaki teaches karate as part of AACC through his own dojo, Goukikai Karate and AACC has developed an impressive wrestling program over the years. Current fighters and siblings Ryuta Sawada and Chihiro Sawada are both products of their wrestling program.

Over its 20 years, AACC has seen a lot of change. Founded during the Japanese martial arts boom, it survived the demise of Pride and is not enjoying a period of renewed interest brought on by Rizin. When they first moved to Gold’s Gym, there were around 50 people at each session, including fighters like Josh Barnett, Mirko Cro Cop, Noguiera and Joachim Hansen. Nowadays the numbers are on the rise again. Abe stated that girls and students of all ages are coming and telling him that they want to be MMA fighters and that the overall environment at the gym is really good these days.

The premier women’s team in Japan

When Abe and Megumi started AACC in 2001, women’s MMA was still in its infancy. Smackgirl, the premier promotion for women in Japan at the time, had just started the year before and women were a still a rare sight at the gyms. In fact, Megumi wasn’t even a mixed martial artist yet. When she met Abe at RJW, she was a former judoka who was competing in sambo, while also training in Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Even though she wasn’t a mixed martial artist, helping Abe with AACC was appealing to her several reasons. Not only did it sound fun, she thought that if she helped, she could get more women involved in martial arts, which would also allow her to to develop more training partners.

In fact, one of her training partners at the time was the future MMA champion Satoko Shinashi. Both were training and competing in sambo at the time, but when it became too difficult to find matches outside of Russia, Satoko decided to transition to MMA near the end of 2001. Ahead of this fight, she was training at Chambers Tokyo and in 2002, she became the first woman to fight under the AACC banner, which was called “Girl Fight AACC.” However, Satoko’s time with the team was short-lived and in mid-2003 she became an independent fighter.

When Satoko left, AACC lost their only female professional fighter. This didn’t stop Abe and Megumi, who continued to work on developing the team, which did face some challenges. First, they needed to battle public opinion, which according to Megumi, was that “MMA was a sweaty and scary sport for men.” Second, during his time wrestling in college, Abe had come to the conclusion that women generally get better when they can train with other women. This meant that the team needed enough women so that they could train with each other. Third, Megumi was teaching a lot of the women from the ground-up, which was challenging considering that she was also an active competitor.

In order to attract women to the gym, Megumi and Abe needed to make MMA less scary. They did this by creating a fun and happy environment. This doesn’t mean that the training sessions weren’t intense, just that they tried to keep things playful. Over time, more and more women came to train, which can be seen in a women’s only grappling tournament that took place in 2002, where eight of the participants came from AACC.

However, getting women to train was just the first step. Developing strong fighters was going to take time and this meant that AACC wasn’t able to field another woman till mid-2004, when Megumi made her own debut. Several months later, her high school friend, Hitomi Akano debuted and in mid-2005, Yasuko Tamada made hers. Interestingly, when all three got started at AACC, they weren’t looking to turn professional. Akano joined to diet, Fujii got involved to train and help others, and Tamada got involved to workout. These three women would form the core of the team during the early years and they would all find success in and outside of Japan, helping to build AACC’s brand as the premier MMA gym for women in the process.

In 2008, Rina Tomita joined the team and made her pro-debut a year later. While you may be unfamiliar with her name, you probably know her friend Ayaka Hamasaki, who she introduced to AACC the same year she joined. A former judoka, Hamasaki looked like a younger version of Megumi and quickly became the face of the team’s next generation. Like those on the early team, Hamasaki achieved success in and outside of Japan. As her career has progressed, it can be argued that she’s eclipsed many of their accomplishments. She became the first Japanese fighter to win a title in North America, won the Rizin championship, and has repeatedly fought on live TV in Japan, something that none of her predecessors got the chance to do. Through her success, AACC’s brand continued to grow and it attracted a new generation of fighters. Fighters like Miki Motono, Otoha, Saori Oshima, Te-a and Mikko Nirvana. In fact, Abe mentioned that their women’s team currently has about 20 members, meaning the future of the team looks promising.

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