What's Shinya Aoki hoping for in ONE FC title fight? Just a little satisfaction

Here’s a mildly surprising fact: Shinya Aoki, the man who’s fought for just about every Japanese MMA promotion worthy of the name, the man who bounced from Shooto to PRIDE to DREAM all while enduring a couple careers’ worth of ups and downs, is not quite 30 years old.

His bout with Kotetsu Boku for the ONE FC lightweight title on Friday will be his 40th professional fight. And almost all of those have come on the other side of the Pacific, where he admits he would very much like to stay.

“I won’t deny it,” Aoki told MMAjunkie.com (mmajunkie.com) via email. “Fighting in Asia gives me an advantage. I don’t have to make the long flight overseas and suffer jet lag. It is also harder to monitor your diet while you are in a foreign country. The fighters I faced there have been used to the other elements that affect a fighter, while I have to go there and adapt.”

And, if we’re being honest, Aoki hasn’t adapted terribly well in his handful of attempts. In three North American fights – two in Strikeforce and one in Bellator – he’s just 1-2. Depending on how you want to look at it, that could be a commentary on the difference in quality of competition between Asian and North American MMA, a cautionary tale about the horrors of jet lag, or, as his opponent Boku put it, merely a sign that “Aoki didn’t have enough experience in the cage.”

But with MMA in Japan “unfortunately … declining,” according to Aoki, it’s only reasonable to wonder what kind of home he can carve out for himself in the Singapore-based ONE FC promotion. The options on his side of the Pacific have narrowed considerably in the past five years, so what would it mean for one Japan’s best-known fighters to hold the ONE FC title now? What exactly can he accomplish there, and will it be enough to keep him satisfied into his next decade?

If you ask Aoki, he’ll tell you that “the level of fighters in ONE FC ranks among the best in the world.” If you ask Boku, that rhetoric is reeled in just a bit (“It’s getting more and more,” he said of ONE FC’s lightweight prospects).

Still, you look around at the lightweight rankings and you don’t see a ton of ONE FC fighters on the list. It makes you wonder whether a fighter of Aoki’s caliber will find enough to do to keep him satisfied. Then again, maybe it also makes you consider the possibility that our goals may not be his goals.

Take his forays into North America, for example. It’s easy to look at those and assume that it was Aoki’s attempt to take on better, more consistent competition. He has a different explanation.

“In the past, there was no alternative but to seek fights in the United States,” Aoki said. “But now that there is ONE FC, the largest mixed martial arts promotion in Asia, I no longer need to search for fights elsewhere.”

Of course, “need” is a tricky word for fighters. There’s need in the financial sense, then there’s need in the competitive, what-will-they-say-about-me-when-I’m-gone? sense.

If you believe Aoki, however, the former is only a slightly more pressing issue than the latter.

“I do not need to earn a lot of money,” he said. “As long as I can provide my wife and son a comfortable life, then I am satisfied.”

That, at least for the moment, seems to be something that ONE FC can provide him. If he becomes the organization’s lightweight champ with a win over Boku, we may soon get to find out whether that really is all he requires.

For more on ONE FC 8, stay tuned to the MMA Rumors section of the site.