By Hisao Adachi

This past Friday, Japanese professional boxing celebrated all of the highlights of 2015 at the Tokyo Dome Hotel in the Japanese capital.

The annual awards ceremony was held. Japanese boxing ended the calendar year of 2015 with a total of 18 world champions, 11 are men and 7 are women.

The award for "Best Japanese Boxer of 2015" was handed to undefeated WBA super featherweight champion Takashi "KO Dynamite" Uchiyama (24-0-1, 20KOs, 36 years old and Watanabe Boxing Gym Tokyo) for his two impressive knockout wins last year.

The World Boxing Association recently ordered Uchiyama to face WBA 'regular' super featherweight champion Javier Fortuna. The sanctioning body is trying to eliminate the issue of having multiple world chanpions in each division.

Hitoshi Watanabe, the 66-years-old manager/promoter of Uchiyama, says the negogiations are going well with Fortuna's management for a WBA unification fight potentially in May. He believes an agreement will be reached between the two sides.

Watanabe is not exactly pushing for the contest to take place in Japan. He is very open to the idea of having his fighter take on Fortuna on a big stage in the United States, hopefully at a venue in Las Vegas.

Uchiyama had wanted to face former WBA featherweight champion Nicholas Walters, but there wasn't a lot of movement on the fight in terms of the negotiations and then the WBA handed down their order which called for the Japanese star to face Fortuna.

Fortuna (29-0-1, 21KOs), who knocked out Carlos Velasquez in the ninth round last September, has a very tough and tricky style. The Domincan fighter is fast, has good movement and also has very dangerous power in both hands.

Uchiyama and his team very the fight as dangerous, but they are very confident of being able to get the win whether it takes place in Japan or the United States.