Born in Nagoya, Yoshihiro Asai grew up as a "puroresu" wrestling fan dreaming with becoming a wrestler and idolizing Terry Funk, Antonio Inoki, and obviously, Mil Mascaras and Tiger Mask (Satoru Sayama)
After finishing high school in 1986, he went to Tokyo to join New Japan Pro Wrestling's training dojo, known as "Hell Camp". Some of his dojo partners at that promotion were Chris Benoit, Brian Adams (Crush), Darryl Peterson (Maxx Payne, Man Mountain Rock) and Osamu Matsuda (El Samurai). He passed the physical training, but due to his lack of size he wasn't offered a professional contract. In a very smart move, he went to Mexico, "the land of the small wrestlers" and joined the UWA.
In the UWA he wrestled as an unmasked Japanese boy called Yoshihiro Asai. In there he polished his lucha libre skills, showing an incledible mix of Japanese/Mexican wrestling along with stiff martial arts kicks, and creating the high-flying move known as Asai Moonsault (springboard moonsault bodyblock). This move is also called La Quebrada.
His first taste of gold was getting the UWA World Welterweight title in 1988, defeating Ray Richard to get it.
In March 1990, when Hisatsune Shinma founded the old Universal promotion he called Asai to wrestle in Japan. There he had the oportunity to compete with and against some of today's top stars like The Great Sasuke, Super Delfin, Gedo and Jado.
In October 1991, Antonio Pe¤a (then one of Mexico's EMLL bookers) signed Asai away from UWA and gave him a mask and the gimmick of the last student of "The Dragon" Bruce Lee: El Ultimo Dragon.
At the same time he signed to SWS (which later became WAR) and became a top superstar in Mexico and in Japan. Thanks to co-promoting, he was also able to wrestle for New Japan Pro Wrestling, wrestling classic matches against El Samurai and Jushin Liger.
In Japan he became IWGP Junior heavyweight champion twice, and in Mexico he held various titles. In Mexico he also wrestled for AAA, but those were short runs, as most of his Mexican career has been held in EMLL.
In 1996 he competed in the J-Crown tournament, in which 8 world junior champions unified their titles. He reached the finals, losing to the Great Sasuke, but two months after the tournament, he defeated Sasuke for the unified J-Crown in Osaka.
At the time, Ultimo Dragon was also wrestling for WCW and he became WCW World Cruiserweight champion. This created confusion, as it was billed that Dragon held nine belts at the same time (the WCW belt and the J-Crown), but it was actually TEN titles, as he had been NWA Middleweight champion for the past four years. The problem is that New Japan didn't want to advertise the NWA middleweight title since the idea was that the J-Crown represented
every major junior heavyweight belt in the world and there was another NWA name belt, the junior heavyweight title, which wasn't an authentic historical title, that was already included among those eight belts.
Mexico's EMLL has a rule that a champion is stripped of the belt if he doesn't defend the title in six months. As he was unable to defend that title due to his international bookings, Dragon informed EMLL several times of his willingness to drop the title to anyone, but it never happened and Dragon left EMLL in January 1996.
Dragon owns a gym in Naucalpan called Ultimo Dragon Gym, and he has trained many young Japanese wrestlers such as Magnum Tokyo, Little Dragon, Shiima Nobunaga, Saito, Sumo Fuji, Judo Suwa, as well as taught lucha libre techniques to young Japanese women like Rie Tamada and Yumi Fukawa. He's also an ambassador between Mexico and Japan and he's even been able to attract big name Japanese corporate sponsorship such as NGK and Panasonic.
Asai is a successful teacher, a succesful business man and a successful wrestler. Nowadays he's back and forth between Japan, Mexico and the US, and he's thinking very seriously about moving to New York City.
