JEROME LE BANNER is a 1.9 metre, 124kg hairy slab of muscle topped off with a crew-cut head that pinions on a 51-cm neck. His face is a pair of sunken coals nesting over a pug's nose and a mean slit of a mouth, sandwiched between a corrugated forehead and a Buzz Lightyear chin. The French and European kickboxing champion looks like he could kill with a beer-belch, let alone one of his eardrum-shattering bicycle kicks. His bout against 105kg Japanese boxer Hiromi Amada lasts just four minutes before Amada crumples to the canvas, crippled by a series of kicks to the leg. As Amada's groaning stretcher-bound bulk is being carried past the press box, Japanese supermodel Norika Fujiwara, resplendent in a bosom-hugging red evening dress, breathes into her microphone so millions of viewers on Fuji TV can hear her: 'Gosh, that looked painful, didn't it?' It's K-1 time again in Tokyo, and this is just the reserve match. The atmosphere in the giant Tokyo Dome on December 4 is an odd blend of the hucksterism and razzmatazz of pro-wrestling in the US - complete with rock music, fireworks and jugglers - and the solemnity of Japanese martial arts. Television stars and models mix with mobsters and businessmen in 30,000-yen ($2,240) ringside seats, among the 60,000 people who have come to watch combat between 12 of the world's toughest warriors from France, Holland, New Zealand, South Africa, Thailand and the US, in the annual climax to a series of competitions around the world. The origins of K-1, one branch of Mixed Martial Arts, are the sort of arguments kids have in schoolyards: Bruce Lee could have mashed Mike Tyson; Giant Haystacks would kill Muhammad Ali if he sat on him. The organisers took that simple premise and asked: who will survive if you put the top karate and kickboxing stars in the ring with kung fu and tae kwon do fighters, boxers and wrestlers? This is how one of the great modern Sumo champions, the 200kg Akebono, ended up in the ring last New Year's Eve with US football star Bob Sapp in a match that lasted less than three minutes before Akebono slammed face first onto the canvas. The sight of the slow-moving, blubbery Akebono trying to cat-punch his way to victory against the muscle-bound Sapp broke millions of Japanese hearts, dealt a huge blow to the all-important 'dignity' of Sumo, and smashed viewing records. But at least we now know: Giant Haystacks is too slow for this game. Since it started just over a decade ago, K-1 has grown into a sporting monster, regularly winning 20 per cent of the domestic television audience, generating copycat versions abroad and spawning an even more brutal offshoot called Pride, which is so violent if can only be aired after editing. In Pride, the fighters abandon the padded boxing gloves of K-1 along with the last remnants of the Queensberry rules and straddle their prone opponents on the canvas to throttle or beat them into submission. At the end of each bout, the canvas is wiped clean of sweat and blood. While many people in Japan hate the sport, fans will tell you they love its Darwinian purity: three, three-minute rounds extended to one or two extra rounds for fights that end in a draw, ensuring elimination of weaker fighters. Knock-outs and self-inflicted injuries are common thanks to regulations that allow kicks and knees to the head. There is no throwing or hitting below the belt, or hitting when the fighter is down. When K-1 moves to the US, as in last April's US K-1 championship in Las Vegas, the sport is more regulated. The winner must slug his way through three fights a night, battling exhaustion and pain, but the whole, bone-crunching spectacle comes couched in a martial-arts style tradition of mutual respect and grace in defeat. 'That's what I love about K-1,' says 20-year-old Azusa Asano, who sits with an older man in sunglasses she calls 'Papa' in a ringside seat. 'It's the difference between the respect and kindness they show each other outside the ring and the violence inside,' she says. 'It's very male; I call it romance for men.' In the night's second fight, Thai kickboxer Kaoklai Kaennorsing is up against the Samoan-American Mighty Mo, a 127kg ex-construction worker who, K-1 says, earned his nickname after he survived unscathed when a building collapsed around him. Kaoklai is a shy, almost laughably slight 80kg figure who, inside the ropes explodes into a flurry of kicks and punches that seem to bounce off his beefy opponent. 'He looks like a mosquito trying to land on a bull,' says one Japanese sports writer. But then a Thai roundhouse kick snaps Mo on the side of the head and he topples like a rubbery tree at just 2:40 in the first round. 'He faked me, then came back with a kick to congratulate me,' says the now slightly shrunken Mo, draped in a towel as big as a tent, in the post-fight press conference. 'I don't think I damaged him at all. I congratulate him: he took care of business.' K-1 fighters mostly talk like that; every sentence is a terse sound-bite of stoic, buttock-clenched manliness. Irony is thin on the ground at K-1: the 1.93m Dutch kick-boxer Remy Bonjasky, whose speciality is launching himself airborne to deliver crunching knee-kicks to his opponent's face, is nicknamed 'The Flying Gentleman'. The brutish, laser-eyed South African Francois 'The White Buffalo' Botha enters the ring to the thundering sound of Bob Marley's anti-violence and anti-slavery song Buffalo Soldier. In between bouts, teams of young karate athletes chop painfully at baseball bats to shouts of gambare! (Go for it!) from the audience. Watching ringside is six-year-old Risa Nagao, who came with her mother, Maki. 'I don't think it harms children,' says Maki. 'All the violence is in the ring and they remain friends afterwards. It's very civilised.' Risa's favourite fighter is Musashi. 'Gambare Musashi,' she says, her little fists clenched. Musashi is the Japanese contender, whose pulped, hangdog face seems to carry the weight of local expectations against the foreign hordes. He enters the stadium to the sound of Metallica's Master and Servant and a huge roar of approval from the crowd, and even, worryingly, cheers from the judges. In his first match he is up against New Zealander Ray Sefo, a broody favourite with K-1's female fans. As Sefo walks by on his way to combat, 17-year-old Seira and her friend Natsumi squeal in excitement. 'He's so cool. He's got such a great face and body,' says Seira. 'I love him,' says Natsumi. In the ring, Sefo lives up to his nickname, the 'black leopard of the South Seas', stalking his wary opponent around the canvas. After three uneventful rounds, it looks like a victory for Sefo, but the Japanese judges, with their eyes fixed on the giant television audience at home, call a draw and eventually give the fight to the homeboy. A furious Sefo stalks past us again, leering at his young admirers, before a press conference in which he criticises the judging. It is almost impossible to resist mining K-1 for clues to the state of Japan. Certainly a constant if unexpected theme that comes in from organisers and fans is the stress-reducing properties of the matches. 'I come to clear my head and refresh myself for the week,' says 37-year-old housewife Kazuko Sakamoto. 'I love the simplicity of it: there is only one winner.' Sari Lee, one of the ringside lovelies, agrees. 'It's like a movie,' she says. 'There is the tension of not knowing what is going to happen next, but with the promise of a satisfying conclusion.' Patrick Washburn, publicity head of Fighting and Entertainment Group, which runs K-1, believes the violence is cathartic. 'There's a lot of repression in Japanese society and I suppose the confrontation part of K-1 helps people deal with that,' he says. It is probably no mistake that the rise of the sport, with what one commentator called its 'simple, rough narratives', mirrors the decline of Japan's economic ambitions in the 1990s and the return of doubts about where the country is heading. A huge roar goes up for Bonjasky, who won last year's final and who still has an improbably pretty face despite 59 fights and 30 KOs. Out of the ring, Bonjasky wears wire-framed glasses, talks softly and looks like a Benetton model. Inside he is distilled kickboxing, a lanky windmill with a terrifying repertoire of punches and kicks. Tonight he is up against fellow Dutchman and four-time champion Ernesto Hoost, who is the oldest fighter at nearly 40. The crowd waits for his trademark flying kicks but Bonjasky, fighting in front of his beautiful blonde wife in a ringside seat, seems subdued, while old pro Hoost hammers away with his combination punches. Another disputable draw is awarded and then, after Hoost slips, the match is awarded to Bonjasky. Like Sefo, Hoost is furious: 'I landed the most blows, I won the fight,' he says, making him the third fighter (after Botha and Sofa) to question the decisions. He demands international judges at K-1 events. Are the judges reliable? Washburn acknowledges previous problems at K-1 fights. 'Two or three judges were suspended earlier this year for questionable decisions,' he says. The audience seems unfazed by the questionable decisions. 'I just want to see Musashi up there in the final,' says 22-year-old Kuriko Okamoto. Her wish is granted. Musashi narrowly beats the Thai kickboxer Kaoklai and Bonjasky sends South African Botha to the canvas with a kick to the side of the head, so it's a crowd-pleasing Musashi-Bonjasky climax. Both men look weary as they enter the ring to deafening cheers and an unashamed 'Gambare Musashi' from one of the judges. But it is Bonjasky who pulls off the most memorable moment of the night when he launches skyward and ends up head-first outside the ropes - twice. He looks by far the most lethal opponent, inside and outside the ring, where some of the photographers have pulled back to avoid him. But the judges call one, then another extra round. Five seconds before the final bell, Bonjasky's foot catches Musashi's head and the Dutchman wins his second K-1 Grand Prix title, along with US$400,000. As the K-1 crown is placed on his head he cries. Once again he is the model rather than the Flying Gentleman who nearly took out a row of photographers. 'I am happy to win, and I love Japan,' he says. 'He's nice,' says Norika Fujiwara. 'It's a shame about Musashi though, isn't it?' Afterwards Bonjasky, his arm in a sling, says he found the decision to award the extra rounds 'strange', and K-1 event producer Sadaharu Tanikawa promises that the judging will be investigated. In a ringside seat, Kuriko Okamoto says she is looking forward to the K-1 year-end party in Tokyo on December 31, which she's heard Mike Tyson will attend. 'We are animals with an instinct to fight for what we want and need,' she says after I ask why she comes to these matches. 'K-1 takes off the mask and shows us what we are.' As she talks, wind machines blow paper confetti around the Tokyo Dome and a group of young boys are mimicking what they've just seen in the ring. 'It's the kicks I love,' says nine-year-old Keisuke Uchida. 'I'm going to be able to do that one day.'