Hideaki Yamazaki

and the Karate Blitz

There are a thousand styles of karate, from those with rich history and lineage to those invented by a guy teaching at the mall who shoots adverts in a stars and stripes gi.  But for our purposes we have always divided them more broadly into two camps based on their method of competition: knockdown karate and point karate.

Knockdown karate has produced dozens of K-1 champions, and point karate tends to be the property of the McDojo. A lot of successful guys have a black belt in a point karate style but carry very little of it into the ring with them. With the advent of MMA—and the desire to fight elusively and avoid prolonged engagements—point karate has found some new vigor, but everything about the point karate style is an invitation to get beaten up in the kickboxing ring. Our subject today is the anomaly: a man who fought a point karate style at the highest levels of kickboxing, Hideaki Yamazaki.

Yamazaki’s career is remarkable because he was a Shotokan karateka who, crucially, used that in the kickboxing ring. In a relatively short kickboxing career, Yamazaki became Krush champion with multiple defences, won a K-1 grand prix, and won the K-1 super lightweight belt. He was far from flawless, but he convincingly avenged losses to Masaaki Noiri and Rukiya Anpo, and knocked out Yuta Kubo. For his era of J-kick, that is a strong set of names. Another way to look at it is that those fighters were good enough to know why an opponent shouldn’t stand and move like Yamazaki in the kickboxing ring, and they could not consistently make him pay for it.

In and Out

Karate point fighting came out of the mythmaking of the old Okinawan martial art. The idea that you could kill a man with one blow, ikken hissatsu. You get in first, you land, you score. In competition the other guy normally hits you a moment after you hit him, but you get the point and he doesn’t. Sometimes writers and pundits use the term “karate blitz” to describe getting across the floor quickly.

A long stance enables a fighter to make a good fencer-like lunge with either a jab or a right straight, but the distance used in point fighting is obviously too great to get all the way to the opponent with just that lunge. The distance a fighter can lunge is governed by the position of his back foot, so the point fighter wants to get that back foot as close to the opponent as possible, while keeping it behind his centre of gravity so that he can effectively drive off it into the lunge. This is where the idea of “sneaking up the back foot” comes from.

Take a look at this clip of Yamazaki initiating a fight by bouncing in rhythm, and then pouncing on his man.

He bounces forward, back, and forward again. On the bounce forward just before he initiates his attack, you can see his back foot comes in closer to his front foot, ready to drive him forwards.

The heart of this entry is the bounce. The simple pattern that is repeated in every point fighting contest but has the ability to make the closing of distance look like witchcraft. To distill the magic of every great point fighter down to one expression that you can carry with your forever, think: “forward, back, forward, FORWARD.”

When I first learned the bounce many moons ago, I was told that all you need is to find that rhythm for a moment. Every fight—whether it starts as a tentative feel out, or as a barnburner that finally hits a lull—eventually finds this moment. The opportunity to bounce unoffensively back and forward just out of your opponent’s reach.

By establishing the rhythm of a bounce, you fill the opponent’s vision with movement, but also condition him to ignore it. When we discussed Alexander Volkanovski’s step-up inside low kick, we mused on the idea that a technique having a telegraph is not necessarily a weakness, if you can use that telegraph to draw reactions and threaten to capitalize on them. Yes, the bounce is a lot of movement and has something of a lead time, but Yamazaki does not have to commit to the attack even on what he planned to be the last bounce before entering. Here is an excellent use of the bounce to draw out a big, messy counter attempt.

And of course, the more you can make a man show you his counters in thin air, the less inclined he is to throw them. Even more than hobbyists, professionals do not like to be made to look silly.

What makes Yamazaki remarkable is that for most elite point karate stylists in combat sports, that is their entire gimmick as a striker. Lyoto Machida, Kyoji Horiguchi, Stephen Thompson, Michael Page, they all do this, intercepting counters, and not a whole heap else. This blitzing stuff is their entire identity as a fighter.

For Yamazaki, the blitzing was just a skill. He could fight in the pocket, he could fight in prolonged kick-for-kick battles, and he could make you forget about this small trick that made him so special. And as the nickname “Golden Fist” implied, he could bang plenty of opponents out of there in a straight firefight if he felt that way inclined.

All Yamazaki required was a break in the opponent pushing forward. If they stood and stared at him for just a second, he could establish the bouncing rhythm and sneak himself into the lunge.

Here are two extremes from the same fight. In the first example, Yamazaki bounces back and forth trying to get a read on his man, who seems to want to intercept him with the teep, before finally engaging. In the second, he picks up the bounce for just an instant before lunging into a good jab.

And this takes us to right to the end of Yamazaki’s career. Yamazaki’s finest hour was a rematch with Rukiya Anpo for the K-1 title. The first time they met, the two fought a slobber knocker that was so competitive that they found themselves heading to the cursed K-1 extension round. Seconds into that extension round, Anpo scored a headkick that put Yamazaki down for the count. When the rematch arrived, Yamazaki came to the ring with a lead leg bandaged to Sakuraba levels.

This time Yamazaki held his distance cautiously. When Anpo lashed out at the lead leg, Yamazaki bounced back. When Anpo stood still, Yamazaki went into the bounce, blitzed in, and cracked him.

And once he smelled blood, Yamazaki pounced on him, swinging the noodle armed power punches that made him so difficult in exchanges. The length of Yamazaki’s stance even when he was stood in exchanging range made his punches look long and theatrical, and led to strange right swings around the guard and a left hook that looked as though he were standing in a horse stance when it landed. It was this left hook that finished the job on Anpo.

The Trouble with Point Karate

A longer stance enhances linear movement towards and away from the opponent, but comes at a cost. The lead leg is out in no man’s land, ready to be kicked into mincemeat. Attempting to check kicks straight out of a longer stance often leads to the kick turning the checker around because his hips are not square.

To make the long stance work against low kicks, a fighter must switch priorities. He cannot block, he can only evade—by bouncing back or withdrawing his lead leg—or counter. The intercepting counter against the low kick is a medium risk, high reward strategy but Yamazaki has operated it beautifully. The trick of it is to hang the lead leg out in a way that is immediately appetizing to an experienced kickboxer, but still far enough that they will take the short initial step out of their stance before throwing their kick. That step is the trigger. Kaew Fairtex was more into kicking the body and head than legs, but Yamazaki tried to counter the step in the same way.

The surprise of Yamazaki’s career is how seldom the low kick decided his matches. One instance when it did was his fight with Kongnapa, wherein a single good kick to the inside of the lead leg knocked Yamazaki’s knee out of whack, and it all went downhill from there as even correctly checked kicks still sent him stumbling. But in the sweet spot before the end of his career, 2019 until his knockout victory over Rukiya Anpo for the K-1 title, Yamazaki suffered an ACL injury that saw him heavily taping up his lead leg and low kicks were still not a disproportionate problem in his fights.  

The other great low kicker Yamazaki faced was Masaaki Noiri. The two traded victories and eventually became friends and training partners. Noiri is the type of low kicker who wedges his way in behind a high guard, draws a strike out of you, and then kicks your lead leg while you’re recovering from the strike.

Yamazaki’s answer to being cornered was a liberal smattering of left hooks. He could use his left hook to force the opponent off balance and step out to his left before they recovered. Against Noiri—who was obviously looking to throw the right low kick as Yamazaki slid out—this still worked remarkably well.

Once Noiri connected a couple of good low kicks though, Yamazaki found success in throwing the hook and then high stepping out to the side as a sort of pre-emptive check.

I mentioned that Yamazaki’s strength was in being more than just a clever blitz. In the second Noiri fight, it was his ability to physically push Noiri back, and to trade blow for blow with a terrific banger that ultimately carried him through. But even in a bout where Noiri never stopped moving towards him, Yamazaki still found opportunities to establish rhythm with the bounce and then blitz.

Kaew Fairtex did not have success with low kicks against Yamazaki as you might expect, but his usual southpaw left middle and high kick proved problematic. Yamazaki’s wide, leaning left hook was a constant feature of his bouts as he used it to pull opponents into clinches or push them as he circled off. Kaew saw this in their first fight and in both fights got to work trying to high kick as Yamazaki threw his left hook. Because Yamazaki punched so long, and Kaew was a good deal shorter than him, the two blows worked out near the same length.

The Most Beautiful Hook Kick in the World

With a square stance, the switch kick is king. Because the hips are square to begin with, the feet can be switched without any rotation of the body and set to kick. From a longer stance, one hip is always more advanced than the other, even if you try to keep your upper body square. For this reason, step-up kicks work better from a long stance.  A staple of Yamazaki’s game was the step up triangle kick with the ball of the foot to the midsection which could be mixed in off the bounce and his jab.

This combined perfectly with perhaps the most beautiful hook kick I have seen in combat sports. The hook kick is probably not impossible from a squared stance or a switch step, but it would be largely pointless. A step up from a more bladed stance allows the knee to travel across the centreline of the opponent and for the kick to come up on the “wrong” side of them, quick and sneaky.

Yamazaki threw this kick at everyone he fought, but in his fight with Yuta Kubo it saved his bacon. Kubo was a southpaw who was annoyingly hard to hit. Yamazaki struggled to land on him for two and a half rounds before noticing that Kubo was leaning away from his left hook. Against a fellow orthodox opponent, the hook kick has to sneak in over the shoulder, but against a southpaw it comes in on the open side with only the glove to obstruct it. Yamazaki stepped up into a hook kick and knocked Kubo down. A moment later he did the same thing again and Kubo leaned right into it once more, scoring the TKO.

As you can see, this kick requires Yamazaki’s left knee to get all the way across Kubo’s centreline, and this is only really practical when stepping in from a longer stance. It also makes the hook kick peculiar because it can hook over behind the opponent’s guard if they stand square, or hit them flush in the face if they are in an open stance and bladed, but often connecting the kick sends the kicker into a spin in the opposite direction to recover his leg. Some fighters have used the hook kick to rebound off the opponent into a spinning backfist in the other direction—Cung Le being the most obvious example.

The hook kick is seen as something of a flashy technician’s kick but this means that it has occasionally found a special place as a bridge to enter into punching exchanges. Stephen ‘Wonderboy’ Thompson occasionally uses the hook kick to try to strip the opponent’s lead hand down and come in punching behind it, and he calls this sort of downward hook kick a “hatchet kick,” but Yamazaki did some good work using a missed flicky kick to immediately jump in and start swinging bombs with his hands.

Hideaki Yamazaki’s story ended somewhat abruptly. After running up six wins on the trot, and collecting the K-1 belt, he was sparked in under a minute by fellow old-man, Tetsuya Yamato. That one was just a case of Yamazaki’s wide punching form and willingness to mix it up, meeting a gorgeous, tight counter left hook from a great puncher.

Yamazaki’s final appearance came at The Match in 2022. This star studded card was headlined by Takeru versus Tenshin and the promoters went all out to have every name from both K-1 and RISE on the card and in a good fight. Yamazaki took on the rising Kento Haraguchi, eleven years his junior. The read on that fight was that Yamazaki was still willing to bang, but he just could not take the shots anymore.

Yamazaki has not returned to the ring since. He has not made a public retirement, but it seems as though between leg injuries and knockouts he has decided that he is not the force he used to be. This unsettling knockout while sparring a cruiserweight in 2020 probably did not help.

But retirements in combat sports are to be celebrated—particularly those that stick. Yamazaki was a fan favourite among the Japanese kickboxing set not because of his wins but because of how he chose to fight, and that he stubbornly had success when the textbook said he should not. It is from fighters like Yamazaki, who broke the rules of thumb and got away with it more often than not, that the next generation can learn and grow.