By Joe Koizumi
Photos by Naoki Fukuda
The Japanese boxing fraternity might be regenerated with name front-runners having recently hung up gloves for good–such as former WBA 130-pound kingpin Takashi Uchiyama, ex-OPBF feather ruler Hisashi Amagasa, ex-WBC bantam titleholder Shinsuke Yamanaka, former WBC 130-pound titlist Takashi Miura, ex-WBC flyweight champ Toshiyuki Igarashi, former Japanese 130-pound boss Daiki Kaneko, ex-Japanese bantam ruler Kentaro Masuda, etc.
It might be apparently a season of the generation change. Uchiyama (24-2-1, 20 KOs), who was called “Knockout Dynamite”, appeared in a ceremony in commemoration of his retirement on Tuesday at the Korakuen Hall in Tokyo, Japan.
The hard-punching Takashi registered eleven defenses including nine within the distance prior to his unexpected forfeiture of his WBA super belt to Jezreel Corrales, and failed to regain it from his grudge rival Corrales in December 2016. Uchiyama had been expected to return to ring warfare last year, but he finally said he had burnt out mentally so that he wouldn’t try to make a comeback. Takashi, 38, said, “I wish to establish my gym in the very near future to cultivate youngsters following my footstep.”
A 5’10” lanky featherweight hard-puncher, Hisashi Amagasa (33-7-2, 21 KOs), 32, also climbed up to the ring of the Hall prior to Uchiyama’s ceremony on Tuesday. Hisashi couldn’t wrest the WBA 126-pound belt from a very elusive Cuban named Guillermo Rigondeaux via eleventh round stoppage, although he amazingly dropped the Untouchable twice in round seven in 2014. Amagasa, in 2016, flew to Leeds, UK, to face unbeaten British prospect Josh Warrington, losing a unanimous nod to be unable to win the WBC international feather belt.
Japan having become a rich country with our people’s hard-working ethics and efforts, we lately see declining birth rate and population, which might have partly caused the decrease of our licensed professional boxers, who, in the previous year, became less than 2,000 for the first time in recent years. In five or ten years from now, the structure of our boxing fraternity might inevitably change with our necessary long-future perspective to respect the quality more than the quantity.
