Kazuyoshi Ishii

Quick Facts

Date of Birth6/10/1953

Country of OriginJapan

Biography

Kazuyoshi Ishii was born on 10 June 1953 in Uwajima, Ehime Prefecture. He is the founder of Seidokaikan karate and of the K-1 tournaments. According to biographical sources, he came to Kyokushin karate after reading a book by Masatoshi Nakayama and seeing a film with Sonny Chiba.

In January 1969 he joined the Kyokushin kaikan as a student of Hideyuki Ashihara; he earned his first-dan black belt after roughly a year of training. At sixteen he founded a local dojo under Ashihara's supervision, in 1975 he opened a branch, Ashihara dojo Osaka, in Osaka, and from 1976 he was Ashihara's right-hand man as general manager of the Kansai region.

In June 1980 he broke away from Ashihara and founded the Seidokaikan karate organisation in Osaka, which he renamed Seido kaikan in 1981. After the tournament victories of its students, among them Masaaki Satake, Nobuaki Kakuda and Toshiyuki Yanagisawa, it was nicknamed the Ever-Winning Corps (josho gundan). Japanese sources give the names of two of them as Nobuaki Tsunoda and Satoshi Yanagisawa. In 1983 he became the first chairman of the All Japan Budo Promotion Association.

After 1990 he turned to kickboxing; in March 1992 he organised the Martial Arts Olympics event, regarded as a forerunner of K-1, and in April 1993 the first K-1 Grand Prix. In June 2009 he published the autobiography Karate Super Baka Ichidai. Sources date the founding of the International K-1 Federation (FIKA) differently: Japanese ones say he had been pushing for it since 2009, English ones report an announcement of its founding on 3 November 2011 in Beijing. In 2023 he became an adviser to WAKO and founded the Japan Kickboxing League Organizations (JKL).

Teachers, students and family

Associated Martial Arts