From Butterbean to fighting grandmas to Cup Noodle man, anything is possible on New Year's Eve in Japan

If you ever get the chance, go to Japan to see some fights on New Year’s Eve. It doesn’t matter who’s fighting.

Maybe it’ll be someone in full cosplay gear. Maybe a nearly 50-year-old woman will bounce herself off the ropes just to confuse her much bigger, better, younger, and all around scarier opponent. Maybe a former NFL player will fight a sumo wrestler in a kickboxing match, and maybe more than 50 million people will tune in to watch it.

Even for a fight scene that tends to operate by its own rules, New Year’s Eve is special in Japan. It’s not just that it’s a wild spectacle where everything is permitted — including fights with such drastic disparities in weight, age and skill that they’d be unsanctionable and unthinkable anywhere else. It’s also a matter of scale. Everything about it feels big and loud and immense. Even if some of the fights are also there to be quite intentionally ridiculous.

I finally got to see it for myself in 2009. I was too late to catch one of the New Year’s Eve spectaculars that PRIDE FC regularly put on. That crown jewel of the Japanese MMA scene had already been purchased and put to bed by the UFC’s parent company by then, but the tradition of a massive end-of-year show was kept alive by Dynamite!!, which featured a co-promotion of sorts between DREAM, Sengoku and K-1.

What I didn’t realize when I showed up in Tokyo was just how extensive the whole production was. This was a fighting event that started before noon on New Year’s Eve and went past midnight. Among the attractions included were:

– A high school kickboxing tournament, complete with crowd shots of the losing fighter’s crying grandmother.

– The finals of a “Super Hulk” tournament, which pitted fighters of varying shapes and sizes and general weirdness against one another in the battle for a belt with a critical misspelling on it.

– A series of DREAM vs. Sengoku bouts, culminating with DREAM champ Shinya Aoki snapping the arm of Sengoku champ Mizuto Hirota in the wee hours of the new year, then celebrating with a middle-finger salute.

– A lengthy drumming exhibition.

– An MMA battle between judo gold medalists Hidehiko Yoshida and Satoshi Ishii, who weren’t terribly well-known in the North American MMA scene but who were famous enough in Japan that a giant ad featuring their faces covered the side of Shinjuku Station in the lead-up to the event.

– A kickboxing retirement fight for Masato, who was treated all week like the Japanese Brad Pitt, with throngs of screaming teenage girls following him to every public appearance.

Mostly what I remember was the sheer size of the Saitama Super Arena. You could have sailed a cruise ship through there without touching the ceiling. Entering it felt like journeying into a hollowed out mountain. Vendors outside made a killing selling binoculars for those in the cheap seats.

Fighters entered on an immense glass staircase that lit up and thumped along to the music. The walkouts were shows unto themselves. Akihiro Gono made especially good use of this time, entering with a choreographed dance routine and stopping every few feet to remove his animal-print shorts, only to reveal another slightly smaller pair of animal-print shorts.

In other words, there was something for just about everyone, which was kind of the idea. These New Year’s Eve events developed as an alternative to Japan's incredibly popular Red and White Song Battle, a decades-old tradition that aired to massive audiences at the end of every year. (Think of it as the precursor to any of the American shows featuring famous musical artists in one singing competition or another, except this one typically draws a TV audience on par with the Super Bowl.)

With so much of the country at home in front of the TV on New Year’s Eve (arguably a superior tradition to the American practice of packing into overpriced and overcrowded bars in sequined outfits), it was only a matter of time before fight promoters figured out how to capitalize with a very different offering.

Viewed through that lens, some of the less conventional fight bookings make a little more sense. The hardcores might get excited for bouts between grizzled bantamweights who’ve fought their way up the rankings, but to draw a more casual nationwide audience you need some big, dumb spectacle fights too.

This is a big part of how Japanese MMA got a reputation for “freakshow fights.” New Year’s Eve was when all the bizarre yet somehow compelling fights got made. It’s when Wanderlei Silva gave up about 70 pounds in weight to take on Mark Hunt. It’s when Fedor Emelianenko hit pause on an epic run of serious heavyweight dominance to fight talentless big men like Zuluzinho and Hong-Man Choi, just for the hell of it. It’s when the American boxer Eric “Butterbean” Esch made his MMA debut (and lost via heel hook to the delightfully eccentric Genki Sudo).

Certainly, there were plenty of serious and legitimately important fights too. But this last show to bid farewell to the year became a time when anything is possible. Even the Cup Noodle man.

RIZIN keeps the tradition alive today, and competently so. The overall power of the Japanese MMA scene has dimmed considerably from those highs in the mid-2000s, but this year’s RIZIN New Year's Eve show still had plenty of highlights, including wins for Kyoji Horiguchi as well as Taisei Sakuraba, son of the legendary Japanese fighter Kazushi Sakuraba. (Keeping with the spirit of the holiday, a poor referee also got smashed in the face twice with punches in a boxing bout gone hilariously wrong.)

But while MMA in Japan might see some ups and downs, we can at least hope that the New Year’s Eve tradition remains intact. The UFC has opted to avoid the holiday altogether, even once staging a year-end pay-per-view (featuring Alistair Overeem vs. Brock Lesnar, no less) for a Friday night just to avoid New Year’s Eve that Saturday.

Somewhere, someone should be out there ringing in the New Year with wild fights and occasional madness. And if it gives us another chance to hear Lenne Hardt belt out the name “Sakuraaaaaaba,” so much the better.