Akari FUJINAMI, Olympic and world champion, has an unbeaten record of 153-0 in wrestling since 2017. But who handed Fujinami her last loss nine years ago?
TOKYO (September 19) -- The one who lost still recalls the match quite well, having used the agony of that defeat as a springboard toward one of the most remarkable winning streaks in wrestling history.
The winner of the encounter -- which became historic in the context of what followed -- is fuzzy on the details and has long chosen to put her victory in the past. In fact, her interview for this story is the first time she has ever spoken about it to the media.
Well before she would become an Olympic and two-time world champion, Akari FUJINAMI was dealt a 7-2 defeat in the girls' 44kg final at the National Junior High School Championships, held in June 2017 in Mito, 120 kilometers northeast of Tokyo.
Her conqueror that day was Umi ITO, whose victory was not unexpected. It was a repeat of the final from the National Junior High School Invitational in November the previous year, when Ito, who was one grade older, pounded out a 10-0 victory over Fujinami.
But the match in Mito became significant for one specific reason -- since that loss, Fujinami has never tasted defeat. Over the next nine-plus years, Fujinami has taken the mat in 153 official matches, and left it with her hand raised in victory in all 153.
Fujinami cites that loss to Ito for providing the motivation she needed to spur her on to the incredible streak that includes the finals at the 2021 and 2023 World Championships and 2024 Paris Olympics. Only twice has she legitimately come close to defeat in that span.
"Up to then, I had been doing wrestling for fun," Fujinami said in a recent interview to United World Wrestling on the campus of her alma mater, Nippon Sports Science University. "But I wanted to beat Ito-san so badly, I became serious about it. More than getting better myself, I thought about what I could do every day to get stronger so I could beat Ito-san.
"But I still remember vividly that last loss at the junior high school championships. And I can still picture after the match going to the toilet and crying by myself."
The 23-year-old Fujinami will put her streak on the line when she aims for her second straight title at the upcoming Asian Games, which will be held September 19 to October 4 in Nagoya, a short distance from her hometown of Yokkaichi, Mie Prefecture.
The tournament, in which the wrestling will be set for September 30 to October 3, will be the latest in Fujinami's transition to 57kg following the Paris Olympics, where she won the last of her lengthy list of major titles at 53kg.
Ito, meanwhile, never earned the notoriety of Fujinami after their clash, but the 24-year-old does have world U17, U20 and U23 titles to her credit.
Her path to senior level glory at 50kg has long been blocked by Tokyo Olympic and four-time world champion Yui SUSAKI and 2021 world champion Remina YOSHIMOTO, a barrier she hopes to overcome in a bid to make the 2028 Los Angeles Olympics.
In speaking to both wrestlers about that fateful match nine years ago, one gains insight into the intense rivalry and mutual respect that developed between them, dating well back into their elementary school days. A surprising link between the two was also revealed.
How did Ito come to dominate Fujinami in those days, and what happened that propelled them on such divergent paths after it? Both wrestlers provided an inside look into what occurred before, during and after their consequential match.
Background: Crossing paths at an early age
Ito and Fujinami grew up about 120 kilometers away from each other, and both started wrestling at age 4.
Ito, who is 18 months older, began her wrestling journey at the powerful Suita Wrestling Club in Osaka, while Fujinami got her start at the Inabe Club in Yokkaichi coached by her father Toshikazu. He has remained her coach at every step of her career -- even accompanying her to Tokyo when she attended Nippon Sports Science University.
Not unusually, both followed an older brother into the sport, but in a bizarre twist, Yuhi FUJINAMI (a 2017 world bronze medalist at freestyle 70kg) and Shun ITO developed a rivalry themselves that predated their sisters' clashes and went well into their university years.
Ito did not particularly like wrestling in the beginning, although it grew on her once she tasted the thrill of victory.
"I was forced to go," she said during an interview with UWW before a training session at her alma mater, Waseda University, in Tokyo. "I was only 4 and I couldn't be left alone at home. At first, I was forced to go along. It was more like exercising on the mat, it felt like gymnastics, and I would cry while doing wrestling.
"I debuted in a small tournament for kindergarteners. I won and after feeling the thrill of having my hand raised, I started wrestling in earnest. I was still the type of kid who cried a lot in practice, but I trained seriously."
While they both won their share of national elementary school age-group titles, Fujinami said she recalls losing to Ito, perhaps in third grade, although there is no official record of the match.
Their paths crossed again in the semifinals at the 2014 Junior Queens Cup, in the 33kg division of the 5th-6th grade category, and Fujinami said Ito won that match decisively before going on to win the title.
"Ito-san was strong going back to my fifth year in elementary school, and she was an opponent that I could not never beat," Fujinami recalled. "I had first faced her quite a while before, about when we were in third grade. At the time, there was absolutely nothing I could do and it made me aware there was such a strong opponent out there."
The two were brought together outside of tournaments. As their clubs were among the strongest in central Japan, Fujinami's father and his Suita counterpart occasionally arranged for joint training sessions between the two clubs.
"We weren't very close, but a relationship developed between us," Ito recalled. Said Fujinami: "I remember that. These days, we have a good relationship and talk to each other. But at the time, she was a wrestler who I wanted to beat and I had no desire to become close with her. We didn't talk. I only wanted to win and I regarded her as the enemy."
Between the Junior Queens Cup match and their national junior high school encounters, the two also had to contend with a pair of wrestlers who would later join Fujinami as gold medalists at the 2024 Paris Olympics -- Sakura MOTOKI and Tsugumi SAKURAI.
Ito faced and defeated Motoki a number times at major tournaments, but never beat Sakurai.
"I faced her a lot," Ito said of Motoki, the 62kg champ in Paris. "It's like we eventually met in every tournament, regardless of how the draw sheet came out. It was too much. More than being aware of each other's weaknesses, it was like each time we knew what the other would do. That it made it difficult against her."
Fujinami, on the other hand, constantly came up short in her encounters with her future Olympic teammates. For her, 2016 became a year of trials and tribulations. As a first-year junior high school student, she was facing opponents one or two years older, and she took her lumps.
In succession, she lost 10-0 to Sakurai -- the 57kg champion in Paris -- in the semifinals of the JOC Cup (cadet division); lost 8-0 to Sakurai in the semifinals of the National Junior High School Championships; lost to Motoki (score unavailable) in the semifinals at the Japan Women's Open (junior high school division); and then was dealt that 10-0 loss by Ito in the final of the National Junior High School Invitational.
"That was my first year of junior high," Fujinami said. "I felt the barrier going from elementary to junior high, and the difference in physical strength. I look back and it was easy to talk about having a goal of the Olympics, but that didn't seem possible, looking at it realistically at the time.
"I felt that I couldn't win by just enjoying it. As such, I started working harder. If I had easily beaten everyone in my first year of junior high, I wouldn't have gotten to where I am now. It's because I encountered such obstacles and was determined to overcome them.
The Match: Still a bridge too far for Fujinami
In all the time since handing Fujinami her last loss, Ito had refused to talk about the match with the press. She preferred to focus on the present, instead of responding to the media's desire to make her a footnote in history.
"I don't remember how I scored the points," Ito said. "What did I think about it? It was too long ago to remember. I can't remember the details. It was my final national tournament in junior high school and going out as the champion was my strongest feeling. I only thought about winning the title."
Both she and Fujinami had breezed into the final with three straight technical falls. All were 10-0 except Ito's semifinal win by 12-2.
In the final, Ito strikes first, getting in deep on a single leg, fighting off a whizzer and getting behind for a takedown 45 seconds into the four-minute match. Fujinami comes right back with a single leg of her own to tie it at 2-2.
From that point, Ito uses her superior strength to her advantage, securing an underhook and forcing Fujinami out for a 3-2 lead that she takes into the second period after fighting off a Fujinami single-leg attempt.
Ito adds another stepout early in the second period, then spins behind after countering a tackle attempt to go up 6-2. Ito fights off a single-leg attempt at the edge, and in the last 10 seconds, uses the counter underhook again to score a stepout to make the final score 7-2.
"She was very strong physically," Fujinami said. "On the contrary, I was weak from a physical aspect. When I thought I was close to getting something, it turned out I couldn't finish it off.
"The difference in strength became clear, and I realized that to beat Ito-san, the most important thing was to build up strength. Of course, wrestling practices were tough enough as it was, but I added strength training and running to the regimen."
Fujinami's father said that match was the straw that broke the camel's back for his daughter, making her realize that success would depend on intensifying her dedication. And he was ready to guide her all the way.
"After it was over, she cried," Toshikazu said. "It all started from there. She said to me, make me stronger. That's when the two of us started working together in earnest."
Later during our interview, Ito received an unexpected and solid reminder of just how dominant she was at the time.
Kenichi KUMAMOTO, senior manager of the marketing department at Fordays, the supplements and cosmetics company that Ito joined out of Waseda and which sponsors a number of athletes, was sitting in on the interview and had found a video of the match on YouTube.
It was the first time Ito had ever seen it.
"It was bringing back memories as I watched it, but to say what I feel about it is difficult," Ito said. "But it is a nostalgic feeling. I feel like, once upon a time, things were like that."
Turning Point: Revenge at last, and the start of the streak
Officially, Fujinami's streak started three months after her loss to Ito, in the junior high division of the Japan Women's Open. But she actually picked up a win prior to that in an obscure tournament that, while not counting in the streak, had a deep impact on her life.
In August 2017, Fujinami finally, finally defeated Ito. It came at a small local tournament in the Kansai region. Boys and girls were lumped together, but not surprisingly, Ito and Fujinami won through to the final.
Fujinami does not recall the score, only that it was "an incredible match, just a one-point difference with lots of challenges."
She compared her elation to that which she felt in winning the Paris gold. She also capped it off with the same, rare post-match celebration she had in Paris.
"The moment I won, I recall that I was as happy as I was when I won the Olympics," Fujinami said. "That was also the first time I ran over and hugged my father. At that moment, I felt like something had changed within me.
"Before then, I wasn't able to do moves that I could do in practice and my nervousness really worked against me," Fujinami said. "But [that win] gave me great confidence, and it started a wave that I have ridden up to now to string together victories."
After that, Fujinami and Ito went their separate ways, weight class-wise. The two even became teammates for the only time at the 2018 Asian Cadet (U17) Championships in Tashkent, where Ito won the 46kg title and Fujinami took the gold at 49kg.
It would be in her first year at Inabe Gakuen High School that Fujinami settled another score and confirmed her arrival as a force to be reckoned with. At the 2019 Inter High School Championships, she finally got the best of Sakurai, scoring a 7-4 victory in the final.
In the ensuing years, the wins and gold medals piled up, with only a spate of untimely injuries keeping her from adding to her collection of major titles.
Fujinami would win her first senior national title in 2020, three months after her 17th birthday, which started with a first-round victory by fall over world champion Haruna OKUNO (now MURAYAMA). The first of her two world titles would come the next year in Oslo, where she posted four straight technical falls without giving up a point.
In the nine years of her streak, Fujinami has come close to losing just twice in the 153 matches.
The first came in the quarterfinals of the 2023 World Championships in Belgrade, where Lucia YEPEZ GUZMAN (ECU) -- an opponent she had destroyed several times before -- stunned her by jumping out to an improbable 7-0 lead. But Fujinami shook off the poor start, got down to business and went on to win by fall after building a 16-7 lead.
The second time came in her third tournament at 57kg after winning the 53kg gold at the Paris Olympics, but first on the senior level. She faced an opponent who showed that the transition might not go as smooth as she had hoped.
In the final at the Emperor's Cup All-Japan Championships in December last year, Fujinami shot in for a single against Himeka TOKUHARA, lost her balance and was muscled onto her back, where she stayed for over a minute but survived until the first period ran out. Again, she rebounded and managed to eke out a 4-2 win.
In both instances, Fujinami cited her own insecurity regarding the circumstances surrounding the match that caused a self-inflicted mental wound that nearly cost her the match.
In the case of Yepez Guzman, that World Championships was serving as a qualifier for the Paris Olympics, and Fujinami was afraid of losing and having to start the process over again.
"I was thinking too much," she said. "If I lose, I have to go back to Japan and start again at the beginning. The opponent was strong, but it was more of a problem with myself."
She said she experienced the same feeling against Tokuhara. Instead of focusing on wrestling her own match, her mind wandered into how she could avoid losing.
"What I learned from that match was that my mind was filled with, what the opponent is going to do, what do I do when she does it?" she said. "I was wrestling from another person's perspective.
"It was my first All-Japan after the Olympics, and part of me was thinking, it's not acceptable for me to lose. That made it difficult for me before the tournament. I think that's why I had a match like that. But I also feel that I gained much from this experience. I have to do my own wrestling with the focus on me, and not think too much about things that don't matter."
Meanwhile, Ito continued on a career that by most measures cannot but otherwise be deemed a success. On the global stage she was as unbeatable as any of the top Japanese wrestlers. Between 2017 and 2025, she entered 11 international tournaments and won 10 of them, including world U17, U20 and U23 titles.
Her only loss so far to a non-Japanese opponent came in the semifinals of the 2024 World U23 Championships, when she was winning 12-4 against Sage MORTIMER (USA), but got too aggressive pressing to finish off the match. Trying to force a turn, she got reversed to her back and lost by fall.
"It's no secret that in the lower weights, it's almost a given that Japan will win the title," Ito said. "When I lost, I wasn't really sure what happened, to be honest. I was in a situation where I couldn't sort it out.
"But as I said before, it's a past result, so I didn't let it bring me down. I started looking ahead. My goal is the Olympics, and that didn't end just because I lost at U23."
Epilogue: Next big challenge
When Fujinami made her well-publicized move up to 57kg, talk immediately started about who would emerge to fill the open slot on the Japanese roster at 53kg. There was even speculation that Susaki might move up from 50kg, but she quickly ended that discussion.
With Ito's main nemesis staying at 50kg, would she consider giving 53kg a shot? Might it not increase her chances of making the Olympics? Currently Moe KIYOOKA is the frontrunner, but the competition is still wide open.
"No, I'm staying at 50kg," Ito said. "My objective has been to make the Olympics at 50kg, and I have never thought of changing weight classes."
Having beaten two future Olympic champions in her younger days, Ito doesn't let herself get caught up in "what might have been..." Her focus is always dead ahead, leaving the past behind.
"It's not like I have none," Ito said of regrets stemming from the depth of women's wrestling in Japan. "Many people have gone to the Olympics, so it's not just limited to those two. It's disappointing that they are from the same generation."
For the Japanese wrestlers in the Olympic weight classes, the Los Angeles Olympics' qualifying process will start at the Emperor's Cup in December. A victory there, combined with another one at the Mejii Cup All-Japan Invitational Championships in the spring (or in a playoff if the champions are different) earns a berth on the team to the 2027 World Championships -- a medal there earns an automatic ticket to Los Angeles.
For Ito to make it through, it means having to beat Susaki twice (or beating the person or people who beat Susaki). That's a tall task, given that she has a 0-4 record in head-to-head meetings. Against Yoshimoto, she is 0-7.
"Even if I knock off those two," she said, referring to Susaki and Yoshimoto, "it doesn't make me the true champion yet. As such, I don't think of it as being difficult because it's a high barrier. I just have a strong desire to beat those two and get to the Olympics."
Also Read: Fujinami Makes Golden Debut at 57kg
While Fujinami's long-range goal is an Olympic repeat, at the moment she is looking no further than the upcoming Asian Games in Nagoya.
Following her scare at last year's Emperor's Cup, she made sure to have no slipups at the Meiji Cup last May, where she cruised to the 57kg title without giving up a point. That was a key victory, as it clinched her place on Japan's team to both the Asian Games and this year's World Championships in Astana.
The former was at the top of Fujinami's to-do list for the year, while she's leaning toward giving the latter a miss, given that it's only three weeks after the Asian Games and two months before the All-Japan.
"After the Paris Olympics, I had a drastic drop in motivation, but I thought, the Asian Games will be here in Nagoya," Fujinami said. "I want to be there. It probably makes me more happy to be able to have people in my home area see me win a championship, and that becomes a huge source of motivation.
"It's a big deal. To be able to win [a major international title] in front of Japanese people, it may be my first and last chance in my career. I want them to see me do it live, and I want to see how happy it makes them."
At the time of the interview, she said she was undecided about going to the worlds, although she indicated that she didn't want to enter without being totally committed.
"The World Championships is important to me and I want to be No. 1 in the world," she said. "Right now I'm torn about it. But it's not a tournament in which you can go in halfway. Also, after that is the Emperor's Cup which is a must-win event, so I have to think about that as well."
It is worth noting that by skipping the World Championships, it would deprive wrestling fans around the world of potentially one of the most anticipated matches in Women's Wrestling history: Fujinami vs reigning world champion Helen MAROULIS (USA).
And nobody should entertain the notion that Fujinami would be ducking Maroulis; she welcomes the chance to face a wrestler who she has long admired, ever since the American denied wrestling legend and fellow Mie Prefecture native Saori YOSHIDA a fourth Olympic gold with a stunning loss in the final at the 2016 Rio Olympics.
"When I watched the Rio Olympics on TV, Saori Yoshida was someone I looked up to and of course I supported her, and this was someone who beat her," Fujinami said. "On top of that, she is pretty, strong, and to be honest, I became a fan of her. I thought, wow, such a remarkable person exists.
"Among the reasons behind my move up to 57kg was because Helen was there. I totally respect her and I really want to face her. But more than admiring her, I want to exceed her. She's one I want to beat. The prospect of facing her is really motivating me."
That would certainly be a memorable clash. And as Fujinami has shown, she remembers the big matches win or lose, even if there have been very few of the latter.