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Give the DREAM bosses some credit, these guys sure know how to build suspense into what otherwise might be a fairly straightforward and pleasing night of MMA fights. As it turned out, there was no surprise run-in from Alistair Overeem and the Japanese promotion with the fly-by-the-seat-of-its pants matchmaking style never found a fight for Ricco Rodriguez. We hope it paid for the flight and the sushi, at least.  On the bright side, DREAM finally did manage to convince Gegard Mousasi to put in the 31 seconds of work it took to defeat an overweight Jake O’Brien and Shinya Aoki likewise bounced back from an embarrassing loss in Strikeforce a few months ago to put a quick and typically stoic beating on Tatsuya Kawajiri.

Like “Sweet and Sassy,” Aoki called it an early night, withstanding some heel kicks to the face as he locked up an Achilles lock that secured the tap and appeared to damage his Kawajiri’s leg in just one minute, 53 seconds. A couple of days after possibly declaring his bi-sexuality at the event’s weigh-in (we assume he was being ironical), Aoki ditched his trademark colorful tights for relatively conservative board shorts and rushed from the ring following his win to get some lovin’ from his (possibly female) fiancé.

After the jump, O’Brien vs. Mousasi, where it will take you all of the first 15 seconds to see why the American had a little trouble making weight …

O’Brien begins the bout with an automatic yellow card and a 10 percent purse reduction for excessive fatness. He also tries to take heed of Mousasi’s comments after his recent loss to Muhammed Lawal that he “didn’t know a lot about takedowns” by shooting immediately. Unfortunately for O’Brien, neither works out too well for him, as Mousasi quickly puts him out with a standing guillotine.

Play-by-play man Michael Schiavello, naturally, yells his “Good night, Irene!” catchphrase after O’Brien slumps to the canvas, which seems more applicable than the three times Schiavello yells it after Aoki’s submission win. At least O’Brien appears to lose actually consciousness for at least a few seconds.

After he recovers a bit, O’Brien gets to his knees and drops a frustrated F-bomb, as if to say: “Man, I wish I would’ve trained, or even put forth any of the effort  – before or during – that it would’ve taken to win this fight.” 

In other action, Melvin Manhoef appeared game for his fight against Tatsuya Mizuno … until Mizuno took him down and tapped him out with a kimura in the first round. Seriously Melvin, if you’re going to keep going with this whole “MMA” thing we must insist that you make at least some pretense of trying to learn a bit of ground.

Recent Strikeforce signee Gesias "JZ" Cavalcante snapped a two-fight losing streak and got his first win since 2007 by earning a split decision over Katsunori Kikuno.

Complete results:
Shinya Aoki def. Tatsuya Kawajiri via submission (Achilles lock), round 1, 1:53
Gesias "JZ" Cavalcante def. Katsunori Kikuno via split decision
Gegard Mousasi def. Jake O’Brien via submission (guillotine choke), round 1, 0:31
Tatsuya Mizuno def. Melvin Manhoef via submission (kimura) round 1, 7:38
Michihiro Omigawa def. Young Sam Jung via submission (guillotine choke) round 1, 7:31
Mitsuhiro Ishida def. Daiki "DJ.taiki" Hata via unanimous decision
Kazuhiro Nakamura def. Karl Amoussou via unanimous decision