A Record of One Man’s Love, Passion, and Lifelong Dedication to Myanmar’s Ancient Art of Bare-Knuckle Fighting
Based on original testimonies by Takuya Takamori, coordinator of the Myanmar-Japan Lethwei goodwill tournaments (2004–2017) and identifier of the Bagan Lethwei murals (2005).
A Child’s Promise at a World Exposition
In the scorching summer of 1970, a ten-year-old boy from Hyogo Prefecture stood with his family at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan’s first World Exposition, a spectacle that drew millions from across the globe.
Pavilion after pavilion was packed beyond entry. Searching for somewhere to go, the family wandered until they found a lone pavilion with almost no visitors at all. They went inside, looked around briefly, and left. The boy glanced at the nameplate on the way out. It read: Burma Pavilion.
He had never heard the name before.
“How lamentable,” he thought to himself, “to have so few people when everywhere else is full.” And then, with the quiet certainty that only a child can possess, he made himself a promise: When I grow up, I will definitely help this country.
That boy was Takuya Takamori.
He would spend the next five decades keeping that promise, and in doing so, he would help uplift an ancient, local martial art from obscurity, broker a historic international tournament, and document the oldest known visual proof of Lethwei’s existence, buried in the ruins of a 1,000-year-old civilization.
An Education in Compassion
Takamori grew up in a household where Sumo and Boxing flickered on the television set, watched by his grandfather and father in the evenings. Somewhere during his middle or high school years, he encountered a manga that described mysterious martial arts from Burma, referred to as “Muay Katchua” and “Burma Kenpo.” The terms were strange and half-forgotten even then. But the connection to that childhood memory at the Expo lodged them permanently in his mind. (The identity of the manga title Takamori read is lost as he cannot recall.)
This was the first exposure for Takamori to Lethwei, something he will become deeply intertwined with later in life.
His grandfather, born in 1905, had been drafted as a young man and fought across China, Manchuria, and Singapore. And before the war’s end, found himself on the northernmost reaches of Japanese territory. Three days after Japan’s surrender, the Soviet Union invaded. Takamori’s grandfather was captured, deported to Siberia in winter, and subjected to forced labor before finally returning home. He never spoke a single word about the war to his family.
Takamori spent years tracing his grandfather’s footsteps through military records and memoirs, learning what the man could not bring himself to say.
Through that search, he encountered another story, one told repeatedly in the journals of Japanese soldiers who had survived the Burma front in World War 2 in the Southeast Asian theater. Takamori learned through these records that, even as their own land was turned into a battlefield, the locals had sheltered Japanese soldiers retreating through jungle and disease, fed them, nursed their wounds, and buried their dead. They had done the same for Allied soldiers. Of the roughly 300,000 Japanese men sent to Burma, over 180,000 never returned. Burma’s civilian death toll reached an estimated 250,000.
“Though I was born after the war,” Takamori has said, “I am deeply moved by this. Not just as a Japanese person, but as a human being. It fills me with feelings of gratitude and a desire to apologize.”
This was the final thread pulling him toward Myanmar. Lethwei was going to become the vehicle with which he would express his gratitude.
Building Something From Nothing
At age 22, Takamori opened a private school (juku) in Tokyo. At 30, he returned to his hometown in Hyogo Prefecture and continued teaching children there.
In 1995, he founded an NGO called Futokoro, motivated by rising rates of juvenile crime and suicide in Japan, and by what he had seen of suffering and resilience in developing nations abroad. Futokoro’s first project was delivering polio vaccines to children in Myanmar.
He finally set foot in the country in 1997, after years of longing, after considerable difficulty obtaining a visa, and after arranging permission for travel outside the major cities.
While working on his humanitarian activities, he enquired about Lethwei and where he may find out more about it.
A staff member at Tour Mandalay, a Yangon travel agency, told him, “If you’re talking about Lethwei, it has to be U Win Zin Oo.”
