FanHouse AkihiroGono

Don't call him the "Grabaka Hitman."

2006 PRIDE GP champion Kazuo Misaki announced Monday that he has left his camp of nine years, the Grabaka Gym based out of Nakano, Tokyo.

World Victory Road has named 10 participants for its New Year's Eve Sengoku Raiden Championships 12 event at the Ariake Coliseum in Tokyo.

World Victory Road held a news conference Tuesday to announce three additional bouts for its Sengoku 10 card on Sept. 23 in Tokyo, Japan.

Dan Hornbuckle (18-2), who at the last Sengoku spoiled Akihiro Gono's return to Japan by way of a devastating head kick knockout, will take on Nick "The Goat" Thompson (38-11-1) in a welterweight bout. Thompson is returning to Sengoku off a loss as a middleweight to Tim Kennedy at Strikeforce Challenger Series in June.

Japanese MMA fighter Akihiro Gono is expected to make a complete recovery after suffering head and neck injuries when he was knocked out by a brutal head kick from Dan Hornbuckle Sunday.

After a turbulent 24 hours, Jon Fitch is back in the UFC.

Fitch confirmed to MMARated.com that he talked to UFC co-owner Lorenzo Fertitta today and agreed to sign the company's video game licensing agreement. That means his previously scheduled fight with Akihiro Gono at UFC 94 will go on as planned.

"We're going to move ahead and I'll be back in the UFC," Fitch told MMA Rated. "We're going to sign off on the video game and I'm back. It was never even about the agreement or the contract. It was the approach that we felt (UFC President Dana White) was being a little bit hot-headed and was threatening us right off the bat. It didn't seem like a professional way of doing things."

Fitch was dropped by the UFC yesterday for refusing to sign over the rights to his name and likeness for use in the UFC's upcoming video game. That he capitulated a day later will teach the rest of the MMA world a valuable lesson: Fighters who cross the UFC quickly come to regret it.

Mixed martial arts has been a global sport for as long as it has existed. The first UFC event featured a Brazilian defeating a Dutchman in the final. The current UFC champions are two Americans, two Brazilians and a French Canadian, and the sport's top fighters outside the UFC include one from Russia and several from Japan.

But while the sport has always been global in the sense that the athletes come from all over the world and fight all over the world, its fans are still segmented by language barriers. The internet gives fans access to MMA news, but there's not a lot of English-language coverage of MMA events in Japan.

A blogger named Suki Kubo is changing that. A 31-year-old woman who was born in Kyoto, Japan and has lived in the United States for six years, Suki figured that being an MMA fan fluent in English and Japanese put her in a unique position to help American fans learn more about what's going on with the sport in Japan.

So she launched her blog, Suki MMA, which translates Japanese MMA articles into English. In the interview below, Suki answers my questions about how she got the idea to start the site, and what the differences are between the way MMA is covered in Japan and in the United States.