How Tiger Mask Created Japanese MMA

Satoru Sayama walked away from New Japan Pro-Wrestling in 1985 at the height of Tiger Mask mania to pursue something nobody had seen before — a martial art that blended pro wrestling's catch-style submissions with real striking borrowed from his kickboxing past. That departure, triggered by backstage politics and loyalty conflicts during an attempted coup, set in motion the birth of Japanese MMA.

According to a retrospective by The MMA Draw, Sayama had spent years quietly developing his combat theories even as he played the high-flying Tiger Mask character for NJPW. The promotion sent him to Mexico to learn lucha libre and later to the UK, where he wrestled as Sammy Lee, but his mind kept circling back to the style-versus-style kickboxing match he fought against American karateka Marc Costello before his Tiger Mask run. NJPW boss Antonio Inoki had briefly promised Sayama a lead role in a planned martial arts league after that moral-victory loss, but the opportunity never materialised.

From UWF Shoot Wrestling To Shooto

The same year he left NJPW, Sayama joined former stablemates in the Universal Wrestling Federation, a shoot-style experiment that stripped away spectacle in favor of austere grappling and realistic technique. He also founded Tiger Gym to refine what he called Shooting, a system he marketed in training videos as New Martial Arts. The UWF became the cradle for Japan's MMA pioneers — Akira Maeda, Masakatsu Funaki, Minoru Suzuki, Nobuhiko Takada — who would later launch RINGS, Pancrase, and eventually PRIDE.

Sayama's UWF matches showcased a style distinct from the rest of the roster. While most wrestlers focused on endless submission chains in a game of mat chess, Sayama incorporated kicks and strikes as primary weapons, not just setup tools for clinches. The MMA Draw notes that audiences sat in near silence, studying the matches and trying to decode this new U-style wrestling that approximated real fighting without closed fists or ground strikes. Pancrase inherited those rules directly when it launched years later.

Internal politics and financial strain eventually fractured the UWF, scattering its roster into the promotions that defined Japanese MMA through the 1990s. Sayama's Shooto would go on to host the Vale Tudo Japan tournaments starting in 1994, where repeated losses to the Gracie family forced Japanese fighters to reconsider their philosophies. That reckoning shaped the next generation of MMA in Asia.

Source: themmadraw.com