Yuu Funasaki : A New Japan Champion!

3rd All Japan Open Karate Tournament
Saitama Super Arena, Japan 2005 - RESULTS!!

Yuu Funasaki (right, Kyokushin-kan Nara Branch) defeats prior Champion Masaya Ichikawa (also of Nara Branch) in the final. During the fight Kancho encouraged them to fight harder and fight to win even though they were training partners from the same dojo.

Champion Yuu Funasaki defeats another prior champion, Yusuge Fujii (Kyokushin-kan Jonan Ooimachi Branch), in this semifinal match.

On the opposite side of the draw, semifinalist (best 4 fighters) Masaya Ichikawa defeats Kyokushin-kan Jonan Ooimachi Branch's Gen Mizutani to progress to the final.

Interestingly, this left Yusuge Fujii (seen here knocking down his opponent in a earlier round) to fight Gen Mizutani, one of HIS training partners also of Kyokushin-kan's Jonan Ooimachi Branch, in the fight-off for 3rd place. Thus both final matches (the fight for 1st place and the fight-off for 3rd place) featured fighters of the same dojo battling it out for the trophies.

Champion -- Yuu Funasaki (Kyokushin-kan Nara Branch)
2nd Place -- Masaya Ichikawa (Kyokushin-kan Nara Branch)
3rd Place -- Yusuge Fujii (Kyokushin-kan Jonan Ooimachi Branch)
4th Place -- Gen Mizutani (Kyokushin-kan Jonan Ooimachi Branch

Here Kancho greets the crowd during the opening ceremony.

One touching moment during the opening ceremony (below) was when Kancho (who took a controversial 2nd place in the 1st World Open Karate Tournament in 1975) welcomed the 1st place winner of that competition, Katsuaki Sato (left) and the 6th place winner, Takashi Azuma (right).

Kyokushin-kan overseas branch chiefs and representatives, from left to right (below), from Spain (Jose Millan), America (Kenji Fujiwara and Nathan Ligo), Ukraine (Nikolay Zhylin), Kazakhstan (Tajimurat Naizabekov), Korea (Shin Tae Kyun), Philippines (Sakurai Kiyotaka), Malaysia (Michael Ding Soo Ming), South Africa (Hennie Bosman) and Russia (Mikhail Slipenchuk and Alexander Nesterenko) were also introduced to the crowd during the opening ceremony.

Other exciting images from the tournament follow: