Itsuki Hirata waited four years and seven months to get Jihin Radzuan back in a cage. On Saturday at the Ariake Arena in Tokyo, she finally got even. Hirata won a unanimous decision over Radzuan at ONE SAMURAI 4, going the full three rounds in their 115-pound MMA bout and avenging the first loss of her professional career.
ONE Championship didn’t bother with subtlety on X. While the event was still live, the promotion posted the result with a single all-caps word calling it redemption. A day later it followed up with a clip of Hirata celebrating, with a caption about that winning feeling.
Hirata’s own reaction was quieter. She posted on X in Japanese that she had won the revenge match, putting the gap between the two fights at four years and seven months. She wrote that there had been a lot of painful moments in the lead-up, and she gave the credit for getting through it to the people who stayed by her side, saying she never could have pulled it off by herself. About two minutes later she added a second, shorter post, a sign-off that translates roughly to until the day we meet again.
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The fight was one of only a handful of MMA bouts on a mixed card that also featured kickboxing, Muay Thai and submission grappling. Hirata’s win was a decision on a night that mostly belonged to finishers. In the main event, Jonathan Haggerty kept his ONE bantamweight kickboxing title by stopping former champion Hiroki Akimoto with punches and a knee at 0:42 of Round 3. Akimoto had won three straight to earn that shot at the belt he lost in 2022. In the co-main, Nadaka Yoshinari kept the atomweight Muay Thai title with a head kick TKO of Malaysia’s Rifdean Masdor at 0:58 of Round 2.
The other MMA fights on the card ended quickly. Kota Abe stopped Shozo Isojima with punches at 1:34 of Round 1, and Ryoto Nishiyama flattened Yu Takeuchi with a single punch at 0:58 of the opening round. The night also included Takeru Segawa’s retirement ceremony and his induction into the ONE Hall of Fame. One fight fell off the card entirely: Superlek’s matchup with Jon Di Bella was cancelled after Superlek hurt his knee.
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None of the posts from Hirata or ONE said anything about her next fight, and no opponent or date has been mentioned.
A three-round decision is going to get buried under Haggerty’s knee and Nadaka’s head kick in every highlight package from this card, and that’s fine. Avenging a first loss is one of the heaviest things a fighter can carry into a cage. You spend years hearing the name of the person who beat you, and if you lose the rematch the question is settled for good. Hirata didn’t need a knockout. She needed three judges to say her name in front of a home crowd in Tokyo, and they all did. Read her post again: she spent most of it thanking the people around her and almost none of it talking about herself.
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