Mark Fischer spent 12 years trying to grow the NBA in China and Japan, where he did not have the luxury of leveraging local talent.

Big-league basketball sold well. But in Japan, the league was always running at a deficit.

"As much or more as any other market, it's very important to have athletes from Japan in the league or in the organization," Fischer, executive vice president and managing director of the UFC's Asian Operations division, told MMAjunkie.com (www.mmajunkie.com). "The NBA was never able to achieve that. There was never any Japanese good enough."

Just days before the UFC's first trip to the country in 12 years, Fischer, who joined the UFC in 2010 as a key figure in the promotion's Asian expansion, doesn't have that problem. There are currently 11 Japanese fighters on the roster, and eight of them are fighting Sunday at UFC 144 (which airs live in its normal Saturday-night timeslot in the U.S.). The event takes place at Saitama Super Arena in Saitama, Japan. The event's seven-bout main card airs live on pay-per-view while preliminary-card fights air on FX and stream on Facebook.

The question now is not whether fans will be able to identify with countrymen inside the octagon; the question is whether the combat-sports market is ready for an American product.

Fischer believes other territories such as Korea and, in particular, the Phillipines, where B.J. Penn was once mobbed and Tagalog speaker Brandon Vera met with the country's president, are stronger markets than Japan at this moment. But five or so years down the line, he thinks China will overtake all when it comes to the popularity of MMA. It figures: There are more young people in the communist country than it's democratic counterpart.

"Here, you have these pockets, but you don't have everybody admitting yet that they're a UFC fan," Fischer said of Japan. "I think we're going to change that gradually, and we're going to continue to hold these events, and they'll be successful events."

UFC president Dana White said this weekend's event is already a sellout at Saitama Super Arena, which he said is configured for 22,000 seats. But there are lingering concerns over the overall health of the Japanese fight scene following years of dismal returns from domestic promotions that hoped to replace the once-mighty juggernaut PRIDE Fighting Championships.

Just as he did during his tenure with the NBA, Fischer is committed to community-outreach projects aimed at raising awareness of the sport and developing homegrown talent. There are, of course, dozens of MMA gyms around Japan and a healthy small-show scene. So far, though, no major promotion has managed to thrive since the MMA boom of the early 2000s, and the organized-crime scandal that brought down PRIDE isn't forgotten. Months before the UFC touched down, several major media outlets were recently warned by law enforcement to be on the lookout for Yakuza influence in combat sports.

So, it's wait and see. A partnership with advertising giant Dentsu and backing from investment bank Softbank are strong endorsements, and the UFC has done its best to stack the deck in its favor with Japanese talent. Media credentials for the event are at over-capacity, Fischer said, which promises ample coverage.

But nobody will know what the UFC has on its hands until Saturday. Even the UFC's detractors can agree on that.

"The comments are made, and frankly, my answer is, 'Hey, that was then; this is now,'" Fischer said. "We're coming in fresh, clean and pure with the best MMA organization in the world, and we run it extremely professionally. We want to make sure that's clear, and that's really the emphasis. We're focusing on all of the good things about the UFC.

"This is kind of a coming-out party. There's a lot of building blocks to put in place in this business in new markets like this, and that's what we're doing. I think you'll be seeing more in the years to come. It's a really exciting time."



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