Fujiwara Toshio
If you feel like drinking for eight hours every day
Kickboxer | 3 March 1948 –
From the late 1960s to the early 70s, the Japanese Islands were captivated by a kickboxing boom.
Sawamura Tadashi, the central figure of this craze, was known as “The Demon of Kickboxing.” He was the equivalent to baseball’s Oh Sadaharu and Nagashima Shigeo, or sumo wrestling’s Taiho—a role model for children all over the country.
Sawamura even debuted as a recording artist, gracing the covers of boys’ magazines. It seems somewhat unsettling now, looking back, to imagine some guy with a beard and a crew cut smiling on magazine covers, but so great was Sawamura’s popularity that no one gave it a second thought. Even in the 1980s when I was a grade schooler, the “Vacuum Jump Knee Kick”—Sawamura’s classic move—had still not become an obsolete word, and kids were always imitating him in the hallways. (Although it may have been a strange phenomenon, endemic only to the Nerima Ward in the outskirts of Tokyo.)
It was due to kickboxing boasting such popularity that then led to the constant mergings and dissolvings of its various organizations, ultimately causing the sport to disappear from the social stage. Right around the final phase of this boom, however, there was another character who made his entrance: Fujiwara Toshio.
