Shinya “Tobikan Jūdan” Aoki, 38, of Shizuoka, Japan and Yoshihiro “Sexyama” Akiyama, 46, of Osaka, Japan will battle it out at the ONE Championship event “ONE: X“. They are two of the 10 Japanese athletes on the fight card.

Shizuoka and Osaka are around 328km apart. Karuizawa, Nagano, Japan is a twin town of Baguio City, Philippines, which is a sister city of Hanyu, Saitama, Japan and Wakkanai, Hokkaido, Japan.

Both Aoki and Eduard “Landslide” Folayang, 37, of Baguio City are former ONE Lightweight World Champions. They fought each other in ONE Championship three times between 2016 and 2021.

“ONE: X” in Singapore

Featuring 11 mixed martial arts fights, three Muay Thai matches, three kickboxing contests, two submission grappling contests and one hybrid MMA-Muay Thai fight, “ONE: X” will be held at the Singapore Indoor Stadium in Kallang, Singapore in three parts on March 26, 2022. The first part will start at 1:00 p.m. and the second part will start at 5:00 p.m.

The third part, which is the grand finale, will start at 8:00 p.m. One of the fights in the third part is a lightweight contest between Aoki and Akiyama.

There are five Filipino athletes on the “ONE: X” fight card. Three of them are from Baguio City namely Eduard “Landslide” Folayang, 37, Lito “Thunder Kid” Adiwang, 29, and Stephen “The Sniper” Loman, 29.

Shinya Aoki and Yoshihiro Akiyama

“ONE: X” marks Akiyama’s third outing in ONE Championship. Before joining the Singapore-based martial arts organization, he competed in the Ultimate Fighting Championship from 2009 to 2015.

Before “ONE: X”, Aoki had 16 ONE Championship fights. Here is a comparison between Akiyama and Aoki’s numbers: