Miyuu Yamamoto has had a good long while to wrap her head around her upcoming retirement from MMA, having announced her final fight back in March.
That fight finally arrives at RIZIN 45 on New Year’s Eve, where the 49-year old Yamamoto will face unbeaten super atomweight champ Seika Izawa. Originally booked for May, with the bout being pushed back — Yamamoto suffered an ACL tear — there’s been plenty of time for it to all sink in. As Yamamoto explained to Cageside Press in a recent interview, however, she wasn’t initially going to publicly announce her decision to move on from actively fighting.
“I wasn’t going to make an announcement at all, because my brother, Kid Yamamoto, Kid never— he never said he retired. So I was going to stick with it. But when I talked to [Nobuyuki] Sakakibara-san, the promoter, he’s like my boss, he said he understands, but [he said to] think about my fans. Maybe they deserve to know this one’s going to be the last fight. Maybe some people wanted to watch live, in person, they wanted to be there.”
That appreciation for her fans, for supporting Yamamoto, and her responsibility to them, helped her with the decision. “That’s why I made the announcement.”
At 49, age is obviously a factor in Miyuu Yamamoto’s decision to walk away from fighting. While she only made the move to MMA in 2016, she’s been a competitive athlete most of her life, winning a trio of gold medals in freestyle wrestling at the World Championships in 1991, 1994, and 1995. Like her father, Ikuei, who competed at the 1972 Olympic Games, Yamamoto hoped to compete on the biggest stage, and in 2013 moved to Toronto, Canada, eventually becoming a Canadian citizen and aiming to compete in the Rio Olympics.
In other words, it’s been a long career for Miyuu Yamamoto, but it comes down to more than just years and mileage.
“The reason why I decided to retire was because at the time, I had a lot of stuff going on. I had my gym, Crazy Bee, we just had a re-opening, so kind of like a restart,” explained Yamamoto, whose brother, Norifumi “Kid” Yamamoto, was a trailblazer in the lighter weight classes for K-1 and Shooto, later competing in the UFC. He passed away after a battle with stomach cancer in 2018. “After Kid died, we kind of had to focus on our new gym— not new gym, but we have a lot of fighters, younger kids. I just wanted to make sure they’re okay, they’re training okay, preparing for fights okay.”
“I’m not like a boss, I’m the mom to them. So I felt like I had a lot of responsibility to focus on. So that’s why, I feel like maybe I should stop focusing on my fights and myself and then start focusing on my team, my family and my gym.”
And so on New Year’s Eve, part of RIZIN’s annual blockbuster, Miyuu Yamamoto calls it a career. Of course, if the former title challenger wins and becomes the first to beat champ Izawa, in a non-title fight, there will likely be calls to run it back. Could she fight again with a win over the champ?
“I never know, because I think I kind of stopped planning my life. No plan. Because every time I plan something for my life, I never follow it. I always go a different direction,” answered Yamamoto. “So I guess you never know what’s going to happen, but for now, I feel like I should focus more on team, gym, than my stuff. So that means I’m not 100%. So it’s not— I want to be 100% ready for the fight. I’m 100% ready for this fight, but I don’t know if after this fight, I can be 100% for my fights, putting everything into it. I wasn’t sure. So that’s why, if it wasn’t 100%, I shouldn’t be fighting. That’s kind of disrespectful.”
There is little question that brother Kid Yamamoto was a huge influence on Miyuu, and little question that his loss has impacted her greatly. His career also helped inspire her to make the jump to MMA, a dream that was eventually made reality when RIZIN’s Sakakibara approached her about fighting.
“I never thought I would get into MMA. Because I was always the one watching,” she stated. Yamamoto was used to being in the audience for her brother’s fights. “When I decided to start becoming an MMA fighter, the first thing I thought of was walking to the ring. [The] walkout. Every time I watched his walkout, [I thought] ‘man that must have felt really good.’ All the fans cheered for him, he’s dancing, being him. I was literally happy to go watch it. I never thought that ‘I can be that,’ but I always thought ‘that must feel really good.’ Now I’m doing the same thing, and I’m so happy. The first time I walked out, I walked into the ring, I remember ‘oh my god, this is it.'”
Yamamoto still felt the shock that she was about to fight, but ‘when I walked in there, like I walked into the ring, I was happy, that I was going to have my happy place. I turned around, I looked at Kid, my brother, and then I didn’t say anything but I was like ‘I’m here. I’m like you.'”
That first fight came with a little surprise for her brother: she opted to use his entrance music. “I didn’t tell him that I was going to use his walkout song. He was so surprised, he started dancing too. That moment, I still have the picture.”
Now, Miyuu Yamamoto’s career is set to come to a close, against an unbeaten champion considered by most to be the best atomweight fighter in the world. Yamamoto, over 20 years the elder to her opponent, sees in Izawa a “good grappler.”
Judo, and wrestling, are among Izawa’s elite skills. But Yamamoto believes that “I trained enough to beat her.” And, she added, “RIZIN gave me an undefeated champion for my last fight. I know it’s non-title of course, but that means I can be the first person to beat her. So wish me luck!”
Watch our full interview with RIZIN 45’s Miyuu Yamamoto above.
