Current Status Report20251206

Hi, This is muchi.

A sudden cold wave hit this week, and even in our area—where it usually doesn’t snow much—we got some snowfall. ☃️

It must have come down in the middle of the night, because when I checked in the morning nothing had really settled on the ground. On the way to the gym, though, I passed a car that had flipped over and was completely wrecked, so the roads must have been badly iced. I had just written here last week about how scary driving can be, so it was a very… timely sight.

Speaking of last week, the biggest news in the Japanese fitness world was that the most famous bodybuilder in Japan finally earned his IFBB Pro card. I’m talking about Naotaka Yokokawa, widely considered a national treasure in Japanese bodybuilding. But after becoming the top amateur in Japan, he actually spent the next six years mainly working as a TV personality. With his wild, quirky character and good looks, he was basically functioning more like a comedian. To be honest, the social status of bodybuilders in Japan is pretty low, so I think he deliberately chose the path of maximizing his name recognition first. And in reality, the news of him getting his Pro card this time created a level of buzz that was on a totally different scale from any bodybuilding news before.

In a way, it feels like the reverse pattern of Arnold Schwarzenegger.

But for someone like him, who always loudly declares that he doesn’t want to “be a bodybuilder” so much as “become muscle itself,” I can’t help wondering whether those six years were really the best possible use of his time. He says he’s going to aim for number one in the world from here, so I hope that when the results are in, he’ll still feel that those six years were the right choice.

Anyway, all of this made me feel like the fitness world—something that started as a hobby for us and is now tied into our work as well—might be about to change a little yet again.

I just want more people to fall in love with big, bigger, absolutely massive bodies!!