<figure id="attachment_367331" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367331" style="width: 700px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="259ac963"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2024/04/f082e7647aa73be67b2e8b14a7972f8a.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367331" class="wp-caption-text">A string of arrests and a cancellation fiasco. Is Mirai Asakura having a headache?</figcaption></figure>
 The one-minute martial arts event &#8220;Breaking Down&#8221; (BD), organized by Mirai Asakura (31), continues to damage its image. A succession of participants have been arrested for assault and extortion, and in March alone, a total of five people were arrested. Amidst the public&#8217;s harsh scrutiny, the &#8220;BD 11.5&#8221; mini event held on March 30 had its main card cancelled, and fans voiced their dissatisfaction.
 The event on March 30 had been scheduled to feature a card in which round girls Lea Hanasaki (26) and Hikaru Uranishi (24), who had been engaged in a verbal battle on SNS, would settle their differences in the ring, but the event was canceled. The media was privately informed of the cancellation of the card on the 26th, but the announcement was &#8220;bound&#8221; to be made on the 29th. The information that Cowan Okamoto (27) would participate in the tournament as an alternative card was also released the day before the event. 
　Tickets to the tournament were priced at 100,000 yen for the best VIP seats. A paid subscription plan was also available for 9,500 yen per year. I think it is fair to suspect that they knew they had no choice but to cancel the tournament, but in order to sell tickets and pay-per-view subscriptions, they planned to keep notifying fans until the day before the tournament on the premise that Hanasaki vs.
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 Hanasaki, nicknamed the &#8220;problem child&#8221; gradol, has been on fire on social networking sites since the end of BD11 on February 18, spewing vitriol against other round girls, including popular fighter Komeo (29) and Uranishi. Mirai Asakura asked, &#8220;Why don&#8217;t you have a match on &#8216;11.5&#8217;?　Wouldn&#8217;t it be fun to have a real fight? and a &#8220;match&#8221; was announced on Asakura&#8217;s YouTube channel on March 5.
 Hanasaki had no martial arts experience, and Uranishi had only a little experience with capoeira (a martial art for self-defense created by Brazilian slaves disguised as a dance), so the fight was between two amateurs. Hanasaki uploaded a video of her training with Rukiya Anbo (28) and Uranishi with Nijika Kawamura (28), a female fighter who has experience in the RIZIN ring, to fuel anticipation for the matchup.
 However, expectations for the bout were suddenly dampened by a &#8220;single e-mail&#8221; sent to media representatives at 12:00 pm on March 26, four days before the event.
 The main purpose of the e-mail was to request coverage of the March 30 match and to explain the procedures for those wishing to cover the match. A media source revealed, &#8220;The e-mail included the following message.
 The e-mail was annotated with the words, &#8220;This has been changed since the time of the press release,&#8221; and a list of the 10 matches after the change was made was written in the e-mail. I could tell that the Hanasaki vs. Uranishi card was no longer there, so I knew it had disappeared, but the first sentence of the e-mail said, &#8216;Please release the information on Friday, March 29, 2024, at 19:00 (the time of the press conference announcement),&#8217; so I figured I couldn&#8217;t write about it until the 29th. I thought I couldn&#8217;t write about it until the 29th.&#8221;
 Later, before the official announcement was made, Uranishi tweeted the following via X This was six hours after the management sent out the e-mail to the media.
 The Breaking Down match on 3/30 has been cancelled. It was a unilateral cancellation of the match without any consultation or discussion with me. The other side also skipped the 3/17 incitement V shoot without permission, and on 3/21, Breaking Down management informed me that the match might be cancelled because they could not contact the other side. (omitted). The day after the tweet, on 3/25, I received a notice from the management that the match had been scrapped.
 The tournament&#8217;s official account made the announcement shortly after 19:00 on March 26. This was about an hour after Urasai&#8217;s post.
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<div data-friday-nextpage-lead=" He was trying to deceive the fans and keep quiet until the last minute."></div>
<figure id="attachment_367332" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367332" style="width: 774px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="25cb5618"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2024/04/91b31f4895c0b2ccbdf804f649256e38.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367332" class="wp-caption-text">Hikaru Uranishi announced on her Instagram on March 7 that she and Mirai Asakura would be in the ring to fight alongside each other (from Hikaru Uranishi&#8217;s Instagram, partially processed).</figcaption></figure>
 If Uranishi&#8217;s X post is true, Hanasaki missed the inciting VTR filming scheduled for March 17; on March 21, the management side informed Uranishi that the match might be canceled, and as of March 25, she had already been informed that the match had been scrapped. In response to this, Uranishi reported the cancellation to his fans on his own X on the 26th, ahead of the management side.
 Furthermore, Uranishi left the following reply to a follower&#8217;s tweet in response to his post on the 26th.
 I was trying to deceive the fans and keep quiet until the last minute, so I sent out the message. (Mom)
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 BD&#8217;s &#8220;&#8230;5&#8221; series has been held as a mini event that is an extra event to the main series, and has been held by selecting fighters who could not participate in the main series, fighters who were on cards where the matches could not be held due to accidental injuries, and fighters who were injured and wanted to take revenge.
 The past &#8220;&#8230;5&#8221; events have been distributed for free, but this &#8220;11.5&#8221; event will be the first to introduce PPV (pay-per-view). At a press conference held after the &#8220;BD11&#8221; event in February, Asakura had stated that &#8220;&#8230;the more &#8216;11.5&#8217; we do, the more we lose money,&#8221; and he was eager to make the &#8220;&#8230;11.5&#8221; series profitable.
 The plan was to distribute the first two matches of this event for free, with the third match between Hanasaki and Uranishi to be distributed for a fee. The fact that the Hanasaki vs. Uranishi match was the first match in the &#8220;.5&#8221; series to be distributed for a fee suggests that the Hanasaki vs.
 We could not shake off the suspicion that the cancellation of the match was intentionally moved up in order to sell tickets and pay-per-view distribution for this event, which featured Hanasaki vs.
 When we asked the management about this, they replied, &#8220;We sent a press conference and information about the tournament to all members of the media on the same day (26th). At that time, Mr. Uranishi had already sent out information about the cancellation of the fight card, and we were planning to send out an official announcement, so we consider the cancellation of the BreakingDown Girl match to be public information. Therefore, we have not made any request regarding the time to release this information. (We have not received any inquiries from the media regarding this point either.)
 Please note that the &#8220;Request for release of information regarding the match-up card&#8221; in the press release refers to the new match-up card that will replace the BreakingDown girl&#8217;s match-up. We included this information in the guide for your consideration, but since the official announcement of the card would be made at the time of the press conference on the 29th, we asked that the information be released at that time.
 However, as mentioned above, a member of the media who received an e-mail from the management on the 26th said 
The article &#8220; Hanasaki vs. Urasai&#8217;s card disappears&#8221; was written after the e-mail was sent to the media and after receiving Urasai&#8217;s post. If there had been no announcement by Urasai, none of the media would have been able to report on the &#8220;disappearance of the Hanasaki vs.
 Regarding the refund of the ticket price, Urasai wrote, &#8220;We have received some inquiries and comments regarding the ticket price, although they are small. We are responding to those who have inquired, including refunds&#8221;.
 With five arrests in March alone, the management should have taken a good look at the situation, but with the adverse winds against BD strengthening, if they wanted to show their sincerity to the fans who were eager to buy tickets, they should have informed the fans as soon as the cancellation was decided on March 25. The evidence of the e-mail sent to the media
<div data-friday-nextpage-lead=" Email evidence sent to the media"></div>
<h4>Email sent to the media</h4>
<figure id="attachment_367431" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367431" style="width: 857px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="2d3c3318"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2024/04/23fb2a9f662ac8065185cfa2e9be3789.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367431" class="wp-caption-text"> Email sent to the media on March 26, 2012 at 12:00 pm. The first part of the e-mail, which begins with a greeting message, states that the information release should be made on March 29, 2012 at 19:00. The response that came from PR is incomprehensible.</figcaption></figure>
<h4> Hikaru Uranishi&#8217;s message posted on X</h4>
<a href="#" data-ident_hash="51a924fa"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2024/04/5264e9fc0dca2359a4f94f076a6b3834.jpg" alt=""></a>
<figure id="attachment_367438" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367438" style="width: 703px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="2efedc09"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2024/04/3baa61a04edb7e454853f6d8b4a38ec1.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367438" class="wp-caption-text"> The contents of Uranishi&#8217;s message and reply posted at 6 p.m. on March 26, six hours after she emailed the media. Even at this time, the tournament management had not announced to the general public that the Hanasaki vs. Uranishi card was no longer available</figcaption></figure>
<figure id="attachment_367333" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-367333" style="width: 937px" class="wp-caption alignnone"><a href="#" data-ident_hash="5bf3cb56"><img src="https://res.cloudinary.com/fridaydigital/image/private/t_article_image/wpmedia/2024/04/f5b7f0438b43387ace48e8806e0f0ee6.jpg" alt=""></a><figcaption id="caption-attachment-367333" class="wp-caption-text"> On March 16, the suspect Mikihiro Okiyama was arrested on suspicion of robbery. The suspect has kickboxing experience and had been competing in &#8220;Breaking Down&#8221; since last November.</figcaption></figure>

 Shinji Hasuo (Okiyama suspect)

 At the "BD 11.5" mini-event held on March 30, one of the main attractions of the event was cancelled. Fans voiced their dissatisfaction. A follow-up investigation into the background of the cancellation revealed inexplicable media restrictions on the part of the event's management.

Unexplainable media restrictions” behind the “cancellation” of the high-profile Breaking Down showdown.

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