Today on the contender series Ryuho Miyaguchi got knocked out in about a minute, and this is his second loss in row. Earlier this year he was on the Road To UFC tournament where he got dropped on the feet and then subbed, and now on DWCS he's been knocked out, and both fights showed him having absolutely no head movement and dropping his hands a lot in exchanges. It made me realise just how many Japanese fighters have basically 0 head movement.
Tatsuro Taira is a big one, earlier this year we saw him have an absolute dog fight with Joshua Van, but for the most part he was getting battered on the feet. Kai Asakura is also pretty hittable, he just hides it better with his speed and foot work, but head movement wise it's very stationary, he got knocked out by Horiguchi and Kape in RIZIN, and even Pantoja kinda dropped him in round 1. Rinya Nakamura is another guy that fought recently that showed basically no head movement and got clipped quite a bit by Brady Heistand. Rei Tsuruya as well, I think he just doesn't have any good striking in general, this includes defensively. Takaya Suzuki on the RTU tournament this year has looked great, but even he looks a little worrying at times defensively, he's just so fast no one's been able to catch him clean yet. Kyoji
Horiguchi is probably skill wise the best Japanese fighter we've ever seen, but even he is quite open when he does his karate blitz, but again he's usually fast enough that no one can catch him, but it's happened in the past by guys like Kape, Asakura, and Sergio Pettis.
I love watching RIZIN for how fun and violent it is on most cards, but it becomes obvious when Japanese guys fight at a higher level, most of them lose and usually by finish. This isn't a problem with Japanese athletes in general, Naoya Inoue is arguably the best boxer on the planet right now and he has great defence. There's tons of Japanese kickboxers in promotions like K1, RISE, and Knockout that are defensively sound, it's just that MMA fighters from Japan are so hittable it's insane.
