By Joe Koizumi
The newly crowned WBO bantamweight champion Yoshiki Takei (9-0, 8 KOs) established some remarkable records upon his coronation this Monday in Japan, as follows:
- Takei is the 100th world champion ever produced from boxing clubs here in Japan (only those authorized by the Japan Boxing Commission) since Yoshio Shirai acquired the world flyweight belt by dethroning Dado Marino at Korakuen Baseball Stadium, Tokyo, on May 19, 1952.
- Japan has completely dominated all the four world championships in the bantamweight category—WBC Junto Nakatani, WBA Takuma Inoue, IBF Ryosuke Nishida and WBO Yoshiki Takei.
- Now Japan holds no less than ten world champions in the smaller divisions:122 Naoya Inoue (Undisputed)
118 Nakatani, Takuma Inoue, Nishida and Takei
115 Kazuto Ioka (WBA)
115 Kosei Tanaka (WBO)
112 Seigo Yuri Akui (WBA)
108 Kenshiro Teraji (WBC, WBA)
105 Ginjiro Shigeoka (IBF)
We hope to watch world bantam tournaments by our champs.
They’ve just been on a great run lately. There were two pairs of Japanese brothers as reigning world champions until one of the Shigeokas lost, but then they IMMEDIATELY get two more with Ishida & Takei. They also have four womens champions and one of those is unified.
Without a doubt this is the golden age of Japanese boxing. I’ve been following boxing since the late 80’s I can’t recall of a time when they had such a dominant champion (I can recall Miura, Yamanaka, Uchiyama, Nishioka, Hasegawa in the 2000’s) However they faced decent opposition all in their back yards most of the time. Now you have fighters like Inoue and Nakatani going overseas and dominating. Besides these two the rest would be interesting to see them against top level opposition outside of their homeland. The first is very possible the second much less so, being in the lower weight classes historically makes them a hard sell overseas. However with fighters like
Congrats Japan in your boxing success.
May you continue to have more champions.