Ryuju Nagayama aims for Asian Games title

Ryuju Nagayama turned 26 years on Friday. He’s a World Cadet Champion and a World Junior Champion. He’s also won a whopping 11 IJF World Tour gold medals. But Ryuju Nagayama is yet to win a World Senior title, and it looks like he won’t get a chance to do so this year.

At the recent All-Japan Weight Class Championships, Nagayama performed badly and crashed out.

It’s interesting to note the that player going to the Worlds, his main rival, Naohisa Takato, lost in the final of the All-Japan’s but he will still be sent to the World’s because of his good track record.

Nagayama has fought Takato a total of five times in the IJF circuit and he won two of those times. So, Nagayama is absolutely top class. Japan could have opted to send two players at U60kg to the World Championships, just as they are doing for the U66kg division with both Hifumi Abe and Joshiro Maruyama going, but no such luck for Nagayama.

Based on some reports coming out of Japan though, Nagayama has been selected for the upcoming Asian Games in Hangzhou. This is a chance for him to win a Continental Senior title, something he has not achieved before (he did win the Junior Asian Championship before though).

Although he has a variety of techniques, Nagayama is primarily a seoi-nage player, capable of doing both morote-seoi-nage and ippon-seoi-nage. He excels in both. Before it was banned, he used to do very powerful reverse seoi-nage as well.