2-weight champ Jyunjin Nakatani – in the devastated area of LA, where he started out.
Close-up look at his camp for his first defense in the super flyweight division!
In the 1970s, 80% of the residents in the 132-square-mile neighborhood of South Central, south of downtown Los Angeles, were black.
Blacks began living in the area in 1948, after World War II. In 1948, after World War II, blacks began to live in the area, and young gangs sprang up here and there to fight against whites who found them difficult to deal with. Murders are not uncommon as a result of the racial strife that continues. There is no end to the number of young people who become drug dealers in order to escape poverty. At some point, turf wars between people of the same skin color also began to arise.
In the six days following August 11, 1965, a major riot by blacks in nearby Watts claimed 34 lives, injured 1,032 people, and nearly 4,000 were arrested. According to Area Vibes, a demographics specialist, the number of crimes occurring in South Central today is 83 percent higher than the national average, and the number of assaults is up a whopping 331 percent.
In one such neighborhood, there was a community of Mexican immigrants. They, too, fought, sometimes against whites and sometimes against blacks. Time has passed, and today, two-thirds of the population living in South Central is Hispanic.
Junjin Nakatani, 25, who has been camping in Los Angeles since July 20 in preparation for his first defense of his WBO super flyweight title scheduled for September 18, recently visited the area. South Central is a place with fond memories for Nakatani, who has won 25 fights with 19 KOs since his debut, and has won two weight classes.
I’ve been living at Rudy’s father’s house here for a long time,” Nakatani said. I was staying in Rudy’s sister’s kid’s room, and one night I heard a popping sound from outside. ‘Junto, did you hear that? I remember she said, ‘It’s a gunshot.'”
Nakatani, who won Japan’s number one amateur U15 tournament, chose not to go on to high school, but went to the United States on his own “to become a world champion in the pros. The second trainer he met in the U.S. was Rudy Hernandez (60). He was a 15-year-old Nakatani, who was chasing his dream. It was an exciting time for 15-year-old Nakatani, who was chasing his dream, but he was also worried that Rudy would give up on him.
Rudy, who had trained his own brother, the late Genaro, to become a world champion and had coached top Japanese athletes such as Shinji Takehara, Takanori Hatayama, and Masayuki Ito, saw 15-year-old Nakatani in action and, touched by his extraordinary and innocent nature, accepted to coach him, saying, “This kid will definitely become a thing.
