Japanese MMA powerhouse RIZIN Fighting Federation will head to the Ariake Arena in Tokyo on April 29, 2024 for RIZIN 46, and the card is beginning to take shape.
On Wednesday, promotion officials announced a number of bookings via press release, with several RIZIN regulars featured.
Among the newly announced match-ups, former featherweight champ Juntaro Ushiku will face Shinobu Ota in a bantamweight bout, with Ushiku making the drop to 135lbs for the first time. Ushiku (23-10-1) won the RIZIN featherweight crown in 2021 when he defeated then-champ Yutaka Saito in the challenger’s promotional debut. He would defend the belt in a rematch, before being submitted by Kleber Koike in October of 2022.
While not the most experienced of opponents, Ota (5-3) was a silver medal winner in Greco-Roman wrestling in the 2016 Olympic Games.
Pancrase champ Taichi Nakajima (17-12-1), meanwhile, faces off with South Korea’s Soo Chul Kim in another key fight for the bantamweight division.
Coming off a loss to Kyoji Horiguchi, Makoto Shinryu (16-2-1, 1NC) will look to get back in the win column opposite another South Korean talent, Jung Hyun Lee (4-1). Shinryu faced Horiguchi in back-to-back fights, with their first meeting, part of the Bellator X RIZIN 2 crossover show, ending in a No Contest due to an accidental eye poke.
Rounding out the RIZIN 46 fight announcements, Kazuma Kuramoto meets Ji Yong Yang at bantamweight, while Yoshiki Nakahara gets Viktor Kolesnik of Russia in a featherweight pairing. In another featherweight pairing, Sora Yamamoto faces Ilkhom Nozimov, and rounding out the match-ups, also at featherweight, Ryo Takagi fights Taisei Nishitani.
The RIZIN 46 fight card as announced on Wednesday (more bouts are expected to be added in the near future):
- Juntaro Ushiku vs. Shinobu Ota
- Taichi Nakajima vs. Soo Chul Kim
- Makoto Shinryu vs. Jung Hyun Lee
- Kazuma Kuramoto vs. Ji Yong Yang
- Yoshiki Nakahara vs. Viktor Kolesnik
- Sora Yamamoto vs. Ilkholm Nozimov
- Ryo Takagi vs. Taisei Nishitani
