Kai Asakura can be UFC's golden goose...

...if the promotion plays their cards right at UFC 310 in Las Vegas.

The ticket sales might not be thunderous for UFC 310 at T-Mobile Arena but the UFC has a lot riding on the line with the signing of recent RIZIN champion Kai Asakura.

There’s a reason Mr. Asakura is in the main event slot of a major fight card: UFC is currently lacking in star power. He may not have star power right now but a great showing at UFC 310 could change everyone’s fortunes.

And that means some big opportunities for UFC in the Japanese market in 2025.

Who is this guy?

Most UFC fight fans have no clue who Kai Asakura is. Let me introduce you to a very exciting and violent fighter.

Small in stature but a powerful puncher. If this was the WEC days 15 years ago, fight fans would be buzzing with legitimate anticipation.

The reaction so far in America has been rather muted but it’s a much different story in Japan. The digital numbers for UFC’s promotion of their upcoming 310 event at T-Mobile are very good.

That doesn’t mean that there will be a flood of Japanese tourists heading to T-Mobile Arena but it does portend a very good outlook for digital broadcaster U-NEXT, which has the rights to UFC and features event commentary from a very famous UFC Japanese veteran — Tsuyoshi Kohsaka. Uncle TK is one of the few fighters who can translate the modern day scene and marry the sport’s history into a narrative weave.

For all intents and purposes, Kai Asakura is as big — if not bigger — than Kyoji Horiguchi. Horiguchi has a big hardcore following in Japan. However, Kai — and his more popular brother Mikuru — have a large following with the Japanese casual fan.

Check out this recent video from Demetrious “Mighty Mouse” Johnson reviewing fight footage of a bout between Kai Asakura and, you guessed it, Kyoji Horiguchi:

As Mighty Mouse properly diagnosed, Kai Asakura has a lot of punching power for a smaller fighter. As the erstwhile Caposa pointed out on Twitter, look at the damage Mr. Asakura inflicted upon the jaw of RIZIN fighter Ulka Sasaki:

Mr. Asakura sent Ulka Sasaki out of RIZIN with a broken jaw and into the world of NOAH, where Mr. Sasaki will be competing against WWE US champion Shinsuke Nakamura on January 1st at Nippon Budokan in Tokyo. It’s a small world in the land of TKO.

If Kai Asakura becomes the UFC Flyweight champion, it will create a big wave of momentum of publicity for both UFC & RIZIN in Japan. Not Sumo-level publicity, but a much-needed shot in the arm for Japanese Mixed Martial Arts.

As there usually is with Japanese fight stars, of course there is a circus story — and a pack of controversial characters — chasing, following, and surrounding the heat magnet.

Meet the family of Outlaw MMA

Kai and Mikuru Asakura are young brothers who came-of-age during a post-PRIDE scene. Akira Maeda, the legendary Japanese wrestler and MMA promoter under the RINGS banner, made a foray into the world of outlaw MMA with a promotion called The Outsider.

The Outsider featured a mixture of every day salarymen and normal people who just happened to be very good athletes. They got mixed into a matchmaking blender against real or semi-real yakuza guys, past and present. This combustible Hodge-podge of excitement was deftly navigated by Mr. Maeda’s right-hand man, MMA legend Enson Inoue.

Yes, that Enson Inoue. We never forget his contributions to the fight game and erase his history unlike some opportunists recently have in Japan.

Mr. Inoue did his best to keep the peace at Outsider events but that didn’t mean that there weren’t party crashers waiting to create chaos. It was an outlaw shop, after all.

I personally got to know some of the fighters in The Outsider. Some of the guys, who are now in their 40s, are in remarkable physical shape.

This was the world in which the Asakura Brothers began their journey into full-fledged MMA. They connected with a fellow Outsider fighter who turned out to be a real estate lawyer named Teppei Hori.

The brothers backed Mr. Hori’s venture in launching Japan Top Team. The concept of JTT was to create a series of gyms featuring an actual full-sized cage to train and fight in. Most fighting gyms in Japan do not have a cage due to size constraints or because of cost. It’s why a lot of Japanese fighters, who wanted to fight in America, traveled to training facilities like American Top Team in Florida. Kyoji Horiguchi is one of those fighters.

JTT was the next step in a natural progression of trying to build a wave of future Japanese fighters to compete in the global combat sports landscape.

The problem is that, domestically speaking, the pathway for becoming famous in Japan was still largely promoter-based.

Everything changed with reality show Breaking Down. The show airs on CyberAgent-backed digital platform ABEMA.

Breaking Down is an absolutely terrible unofficial copycat lovechild spinoff of The Ultimate Fighter. Think of TUF married to a bunch of wannabe yakuza stooges who get into all sorts of fights and pranks. The idea is that some of these contestants, who have street fighting or social media influencer backgrounds, can somehow be reformed and find redemption by fighting one-minute rounds inside of a cage.

The audition shows for Breaking Down draw millions of views on Youtube for each video uploaded:

Besides the street-flavored element to Breaking Down, the shows draw huge numbers because the concept goes against so much of how Japanese media companies view copyright enforcement. Breaking Down is meant to go viral. It goes against the complete concept corporate Japan has about DMCA strikes. TV-Asahi is super aggressive on Twitter with copyright strikes for clips featuring pro-wrestling — on fan accounts, no less.

The flashy, obnoxious, in-your-face, nouveau riche COO for Breaking Down is a man named Yuji Mizoguchi. The story on Mr. Mizoguchi, for Americans, reads like someone who wanted to become a Japanese health-and-wellness version of Eric Bischoff. A gym rat who hung around famous people like Livedoor founder Takafumi Horie, got into IT, raised a lot of money, and then struck gold with the Asakura Brothers by pushing an outrageously very-not-Japanese-style reality TV show.

To no one’s surprise, Mr. Mizoguchi has inserted himself as a recurring character on Breaking Down as a fighter in the cage.

Mr. Mizoguchi believes in the old adage that “bad publicity is good publicity” and that it’s better than having no publicity at all. Unfortunately for him, he has a growingly-famous social media investigator and muckraker named Entertainer Orihara who has been hounding his business practices.

Recently, several individuals who had previously appeared or were associated with Breaking Down were arrested for criminal activity — but not related to activities on the show, however. Nevertheless, some powerful people are watching Breaking Down and the cast of characters who hang around that scene.

The combination of RIZIN + Breaking Down is how Mikuru Asakura and his brother Kai became famous. Mikuru is the more famous of the two. There is a lazy tendency to try to compare them to Jake & Logan Paul but that’s not really accurate.

Kai Asakura is the real deal. There’s a reason his native fight promoter, Nobuyuki Sakakibara of RIZIN, pushed the UFC front office to sign Mr. Asakura. Should Mr. Asakura win his championship fight at UFC 310 against Alexandre Pantoja, a lot of fortunes could very well change back home in Japan.

For Mr. Sakakibara, it would be a big boost in credibility and would likely solidify his image as the number two MMA promoter in the space. Notwithstanding everything happening with Oktagon and PFL.

For Mr. Hori, a win by Kai Asakura would be a big boost for Japan Top Team and the gyms they manage. It would be a proof-of-concept of what could be, which is always a marketing principle that sells in fight sports.

For Mr. Mizoguchi, a win by Mr. Asakura would validate his trashy Breaking Down series as somehow being a legitimate fighting operation. He would love to compare his project to what Mams Taylor is doing with Misfits on DAZN or what Jake Paul & Nakisa Bidarian are doing on Netflix. It would be big for bragging rights.

Mr. Maeda and Mr. Inoue, both veterans who have been recently beleaguered by controversies, would suddenly find themselves as part of modern day MMA history. The Outsider, the outlaw MMA promotion that polite society wanted nothing to do with, suddenly would have a UFC champion as part of the family lineage.

For the UFC? Having Mr. Asakura as champion would given Endeavor a big opportunity to run in Japan in 2025. Mark Shapiro would have to understand that bigfooting their way into Japan, as they previously attempted to do under old ownership, doesn’t work.

The UFC would need a strong Japanese business and marketing partner. They already burned one major advertising agency in Dentsu. If the sharps in Endeavorland — provided they understand and respect Japanese culture and protocols — get their hands on Kai Asakura, UFC Flyweight champion, they could print a lot of money.

No pressure, kid. If you lose, well, everyone expected it.

If you win? Everyone will want to take a picture with you inside the UFC cage in Las Vegas. That kind of photo can be worth millions of dollars in Japan, especially in recruitment value and street credibility.

Some very powerful people back in Japan will be watching carefully.

Zach Arnold is a lead opinion writer for The MMA Draw on Substack. His archives can be read at FightOpinion.com.