2021 in Review

With Rizin 33 wrapping up the year with a couple of upsets, it is now time to take a look back on 2021 and analyze the women’s MMA scene in Japan. We will be looking at Rizin, Pancrase, Shooto, Deep and Deep Jewels.

With 47 fights this year, Deep Jewels had by far the most women’s fights. Deep came in second with 19, Shooto in third with 10, Rizin in fourth with 7 and Pancrase came in last with 4. If you want to break it down percentage wise, 100% of Deep Jewels’ fights involved women, 12.5% in Deep, 7.45% in Rizin, 6.5% in Shooto, and 3.92% in Pancrase. It is important to remember the impact of the pandemic, as Rizin and Pancrase in particular have historically relied on foreign talent in their women’s divisions, when looking at these numbers.

Deep & Deep Jewels

• Average age: Unknown
• Average number of appearances in 2021 per fighter: 1.24
• Most appearances: Moeri Suda (4), PochanZ (4), Eru Takebayashi (4), Te-a (4), Asumi Komatsuzaki (4)

Deep and Deep Jewels had an outstanding year in 2021. Despite the pandemic, they were able to put on their Atomweight tournament, saw two new champions crowned in Saori Oshima and Seika Izawa, and saw five women from their roster fight for Rizin, with four of them winning. Saori Oshima and Seika Izawa were clearly the breakout stars for the promotion, with both champions picking up massive wins in Rizin. Saori is now set to return to Deep Jewels this March. Seika, on the other hand, will likely fight in Rizin again for the title.

Outside of Izawa and Oshima, a new generation of fighters emerged. Fighters like Aya Murakami, who went 3-0 and submitted all her opponents in the first round, Moeri Suda, who went 4-0 with two submissions, and the striker Eru Takebayashi are all promising prospects. New flyweights like the popular Kate Lotus and Nirvana also emerged and we should expect to see more of them soon as a tournament is planned for 2022.

Rizin

• Average age: 30.8
• Average number of appearances in 2021 per fighter: 1.4
• Most appearances: Ayaka Hamasaki (3)

Historically, Rizin likes to have Japanese fighters fight non-Japanese fighters in their Super Atomweight division. However, this isn’t really possible during the pandemic. This may help explain why the promotion only put on 7 women’s fights this year. Despite the low number of fights, the fights were exciting and surprisingly close, in fact three of the fights ended in split-decisions. The biggest news stories are obviously the upsets and that Rena is not going to be retiring so soon after all. This is good news for Rizin as she is one of the more popular women in the sport.

With Miyuu being 47 and Ayaka being 39, the infusion of young talent has opened up the division and now there are some interesting matches that can be made. It is also worth noting that all of the Atomweight fights at Deep Jewels 36 are being contested at 49kg instead of 48kg, meaning we should expect more fighters to move back and forth between the two promotions. Clearly, Seika is next in line to fight for the title.

Shooto

• Average age: 31
• Average number of appearances in 2021 per fighter: 1.4
• Most appearances: Miku Nakamura (4)

Shooto has historically produced some of the top talent in Japan. Examples include fighters like Ayaka Hamasaki and Saori Oshima, who both made their debuts under their banenr. In 2021, the wrestler Chihiro Sawada made her debut. With her brother in One, the 24 year old is an interesting fighter from AACC. With Shooto having their Infinity League in 2022, it will be interesting to see how she develops alongside veterans like Hisae Watanabe.

Also in 2021, Satomi Takano proved that the third time’s the charm when she defeated Mina Kurobe to win the championship. With 28 fights under her belt and at 31 years old, the veteran seems to be coming into her own, so it will be interesting to see how what she does in 2022. When we spoke to her, she mentioned that she wanted to win the belt then go fight abroad, so it remains to be seen if she goes back to One or somewhere else.

Pancrase

• Average age: 32
• Average number of appearances in 2021 per fighter: 1.33
• Most Appearances: Karen and Nori (2)

Every women’s fight under the Pancrase banner in 2021 involved a member of Team Pravajra. Both performed well enough to earn title shots, with Nori falling short to the veteran Takayo Hashi and Karen scheduled to face Emi Fujino this March. As we mentioned above, before the pandemic Pancrase used to bring in a lot of women to fight, but that hasn’t been possible. However, Karen and Nori are both incredibly charismatic and can act as good faces for their divisions, if they can continue to find success. However, one does have to wonder about the quality of the training.

Kanna continues reign as the queen of social media

For the second year in a row, Kanna Asakura has the largest social media presence among female mixed martial artists and kickboxers. However, Panchan Rina has closed the gap and now has the biggest Youtube channel, a spot once held by Kanna. Throughout 2021, Panchan’s channel generated over 5.5 million views, with an average view count of 135,578 per video, while Kanna generated over 3.2 million views, averaging 71,425 per video. However, despite Panchan having a larger personal channel, video’s featuring Kanna, notably her fights, generated more views, including her match with Oshima, which in two months has become the most watched women’s match on Rizin’s Youtube channel. Also, while Panchan may have a larger Youtube channel, Kanna still has larger Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok accounts.

Panchan Rina has used Youtube to launch her brand on a national scale in a remarkably short period of time. She’s done this by smartly associating herself with popular fighters and using their channels to market herself, most notably Mikuru and Kai Asakura. Most Rizin fans were actually introduced to her through Kai’s channel, which led to their appearance on the cover of Gong magazine, where they were dressed in some of their Youtube costumes. However, it is her association with Mikuru that has really paid dividends, considering that the videos she appeared in on his channel in 2021 generated well over 3 million views.

It is worth noting that Rena only has a Twitter and Instagram account. If you only count those two platforms, she would have had the largest social media base by a large margin. Her instagram account alone is twice as big as Kanna’s, who is in second place. Interestingly, Itsuki had the largest Twitter account, narrowly topping Rena by just 1,000 followers.

Who and how popular are the top stars?

While Mikuru Asakura was clearly the most popular male MMA fighter in 2021, it is a much closer race between the women. In order to help compare their relative popularity, we used Google Trends to compare how many web & Youtube searches they generated. Interestingly, it looks like Rena was generally the most popular web search (on Google) while Kanna was the most popular Youtube search. Interestingly, Rena also generated a fair amount of Youtube searches, despite not having a channel. While not as consistently searches as the other two, Miyuu had some large surges throughout the year, a testament to her drawing power.

In Japan, women’s judo and wrestling produce big stars who appear in commercials and appear on variety shows. A number of them are household names and as the Tokyo Olympics happened in 2021, we thought it might be interesting to compare Rizin’s three biggest female starts, Rena, Kanna, and Miyuu with Uta Abe and Risako Kawai. Abe, along with her brother, won a gold medal in Judo and has become one of the more popular athletes to emerge from the Olympics, where Risako, like her sister, won a gold medal in wrestling. Risako and her sister actually made an announcement in the ring during Rizin 33 about the Paralympics.

Based off of the web searches on Google and Youtube searches, Abe absolutely dominated the others. The race is a little closer when you compare Youtube searches. However, the Rizin fighters generated similar web search results to Risako and actually generated more searches than her on Youtube.

Going outside the realm of WMMA for a moment, let us see how Abe compares to Rizin’s biggest stars, Mikuru Asakura and Tenshin Nasukawa. Here the results are kind of surprising as outside of a giant surge during the Olympics, Mikuru and Tenshin, were almost even with Abe going into and after the Olympics. In September, Mikuru surged well above her and stayed above her for the rest of the year. The Youtube results are even more surprising as both Mikuru and Tenshin consistently generated significantly more searches than Abe throughout the entire year, with Abe only briefly surging above Tenshin during the Olympics. However, even during the Olympics she didn’t go above Mikuru.

Now lets compare Mikuru with the most popular athletes in Japan, mainly Shohei Ohtani, Naomi Osaka, and to a lesser extent Yu Darvish. Unsurprisingly, Shohei absolutely crushed the other three for a majority of the year, but Mikuru did come on strong near the end of the year. What is more surprising is that Mikuru seems to have generated similar numbers to Darvish and Osaka, who lit the Olympic Torch, for most of the year. Starting in September, Mikuru related searches started increasing and he climbed above Osaka and Darvish, getting closer to Shohei. When it comes to Youtube, Mikuru actually smashed Osaka and Darvish and spent large portions of the year above Shohei. All of this goes to show that Mikuru is well on his way to becoming a household name, if he already isn’t.

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