The Japanese Freestyle Handfighting System
The Japanese Freestyle Handfighting System
Japan's wrestling team just had their most dominant Olympic run in the country's history. I break down the handfighting system that lead them to glory.
Japan’s Olympic Wrestling team just had the greatest performance in the program’s history. They won a whopping 8 gold medals (2 in Greco, 2 in men’s Freestyle, and 4 in women’s Freestyle) for a total of 11 medals altogether. While the exclusion of Russia from this year’s Olympic games certainly helped, especially in the 74kg weight usually dominated by Zaurbek Sidakov, several wrestlers who have previously represented Russia ended up competing under different flags anyway, such as 74kg gold medalist, Razambek Zhamalov, who brought home the gold for Uzbekistan.
Japan is usually one of the top three countries in Freestyle wrestling, along with Russia and The US, but this year’s dominance is unprecedented for them. While watching their Freestyle matches, the main thing that stood out to me was their handfighting dominance. The Japanese wrestlers all executed a fairly similar system, employing many of the same primary scoring attacks and setups, though each added their own individual flair to it. Their comfort and ease in mid-range tie ups made it very difficult for opponents to find positions they could score from and allowed them quick access to reliable setups, while also defusing their opponent’s pressure.
Handfighting Basics & Distance Management
A wrestler’s head and hands are his first two layers of defense for keeping his man off the hips - a simple matching of levels and frame with the head, or a stiff-arm can keep even the most explosive shot from finding its target. In sports with striking involved, getting past these layers tends to be fairly easy. Striking necessitates a higher stance, leaving the head unavailable to block, and a quick feint or punch upstairs can draw the guard up, freeing up the hips for attack. But nothing’s that easy in wrestling, where stances are built to get underneath an opponent and the hands are focused on denying them takedown opportunities while creating your own.
While the handfighting in wrestling is often high paced and difficult to follow at first, for the educated striking fan there will be some recognizable similarities. Pay attention to what the hands are doing as wrestlers first make contact, and you’ll see many of the same tactics used in striking - feints, probing rhythm breaks, even parries. Every wrestler has different ties they favor and different positional goals, but ultimately the objective is a familiar one: finding and maintaining their ideal distance, setting up attacks, and denying opponents the ability to initiate.
Japanese and American wrestlers both tend to wrestle high-paced, grueling styles in comparison to the more patient and defensive Russians, or the explosive big-move Cubans. But the way they implement their pace and pressure differs greatly. In general, American wrestlers like to pressure with physicality, pushing with underhooks, snapping the head down with heavy collar ties, forcing their opponent to bear their weight and tire out.
Japan’s pressure, on the other hand, comes more from mobility. They stay active with buzzing hands, constantly feinting level changes, re-adjusting ties, and taking angles. It creates a sort of pressure applied not just to the body, but to the senses. Moving around in a wrestling stance is tiring enough, but constant fakes and motion pull opponents in and out of alertness on split-second intervals, dulling the senses to committed attacks.
The sort of heavy collar tie pressure that Americans are more known for operates best at close range. A collar tie uses a hand on the back of the head or neck to pressure the opponent’s head, and with it his balance, through a bent elbow straight to the floor. The closer the tying elbow is to one’s ribs, the more leverage they can get on the snap, and the better defensive value in closing off their own hips. It offers a way of slowing down an opponent while wearing on them and setting up offense.
In contrast, Japan’s wrestlers all have a fairly similar ideal distance and that’s a short step back from a tight collar tie. They operate best when they have a bit of space to move around and their opponent has to step in or reach out to find their head.
Japan prefers to enter on wrist control grips, looking to keep the match at mid-range while blocking their opponents from closing distance into tighter ties. They were very diligent in clearing any ties their opponents secured, looking to peel off collar ties to regain their desired range. In the first few clips above, you can even see 57kg gold medalist, Rei Higuchi, almost parry Spencer Lee’s collar tie attempts, slapping them off before they even reach his neck. If they lose the wrists, they move to a post on the bicep or shoulder with an extended arm, keeping the mid-range frame that affords them the mobility and space they work so well with while denying their opponent’s attempts to establish tighter control.
One of the primary downsides to this kind of looser, more mobile style is that it doesn’t afford constant control of the head and posture the way heavy collar ties do. But Japan’s wrestlers still make liberal use of snapdowns. Their snaps just come in motion and through handfighting transitions, rather than constant head pressure.
Level change feints and snapdowns play off each other, punishing the opponent for either staying too upright in anticipation of the snap, or too low to defend the shot. Snaps are also used often by the Japanese wrestlers to break opponent’s collar ties, briefly threatening their balance while they circle away from the tie.
They would enter on the hands and quickly move up to the head to throw the opponent’s weight down, disguising the snap behind handfighting. They also played them well off their constant lateral movement, controlling the opponent’s posture with the dual threat of snaps and level changes. It lead to several lovely sequences where a Japanese wrestler would threaten a snapdown or front headlock to set up a shot, taking an angle outside their opponent’s defenses as they tried to address it. Or alternatively threatening the angle first, prompting a level change from their opponent that they could exploit with a snap down. The above clip shows Akari Fujinami and Hayato Ishiguro hitting these snap to angle mixups.
The primary goal of Japan’s wrestlers was to drag their opponents into wrist ties and beat them with greater experience and superior process in those exchanges. The constant tying up of hands and blocking or stripping ties conditioned opponents to expect it and reach out in return to avoid surrendering the grip. But when the opponent reached out, they would time a level change underneath it, giving them access to their high percentage single leg attacks.
Rei Higuchi destroyed eventual 57kg bronze medalist, Aman Sehrawat, with this simple but effective strategy. He would strip his ties at range and constantly tie up the hands, frustrating the Indian who was looking to work into close range ties that he could use to physically pressure Higuchi. Once Sehrawat freed up his right hand for a moment, he would automatically reach out to take a grip on Higuchi, but Higuchi would change levels underneath it and penetrate onto the legs unimpeded.