Yuki Yoza Meets Nabil Anane at ONE SAMURAI 4 in Tokyo on Oct. 17

The 28-year-old from Ibaraki spent five years collecting Tokyo's waste before turning pro in 2019; now he faces ex-Muay Thai world champion Nabil Anane live on October 17.

ONE SAMURAI 4 takes place Saturday, October 17, at Ariake Arena in Tokyo, where Japan's Yuki Yoza meets Nabil Anane, a former ONE Bantamweight Muay Thai World Champion, in a bantamweight kickboxing bout. The event is broadcast live from the Japanese capital.

For Yoza, the fight closes a circle of sorts. The 28-year-old from Ibaraki spent five years working as a municipal waste collector in Tokyo before his fighting career gained traction, rising before dawn and laboring through cold mornings on the city's streets.

The job required him to run alongside the collection truck, hoist sorting bins, throw heavy bags and work through cramped side streets on a demanding timetable. Sleep came in fragments, often during commutes between work, home and the gym. "I would work in the morning, which would be from 2-5 a.m., and then it would take me two hours to get to the gym. I would train, then go home to take a rest. I wake up for a night shift, go home to sleep for a few hours and then do it all over again the next day," Yoza said.

He never treated the work as beneath him. Waste collection in Japan is an organized, contracted profession regarded as an essential civic service, and Yoza carried it with pride, backed by the people closest to him. "My co-workers knew of my kickboxing career, and all of them were rooting for me," he said. "The people around me, my friends and family, have always supported me and my career. So I'm very grateful to them."

Looking back, he credits those years with the mindset he carries into training today. "That experience has always helped me to stay hungry," Yoza said. "Whenever I look back on that experience and remember all that I have been through, it makes me hungrier. It makes me motivated to work harder."

The steady labor eventually gave him the money and time to commit to martial arts full time. Yoza began his professional career in 2019 and won his first seven bouts that year. "The moment I decided to go fully into martial arts, I was just thinking, I want to have a chance like everyone else," he said. "I just wanted to compete with everybody else. It was a hard road to get to that point, but I didn't care. I just wanted to fight."

He points to trainer Masakazu Watanabe as the figure who unlocked his potential. At Watanabe's Team Vasileus, Yoza trains alongside former ONE interim champions Takeru "Natural Born Krusher" Segawa and Masaaki Noiri. "I would say the turning point of my career was meeting my trainer, Watanabe-san," Yoza said. "He helped me to compete at the highest level and guided me through some difficult times."

The results have followed. Yoza won the K-1 World Championship in 2023, signed an exclusive ONE deal in 2025, and has since defeated former champions Petchtanong Petchfergus and Superlek, the fighter known as "The Kicking Machine."

His message for aspiring fighters comes straight from that background. "My advice to the next generation, to the young fighters, is to work 10 times harder than you are now," he said. "Work 10 times harder than your competition. You have to have the determination to do that in order to be successful." The meeting with Anane at Ariake Arena on October 17 is his next test under those standards.