Mr Hiroshi Yaoita, founder of Yasaka table tennis, passed away on 8 December 2007 and around 350 people attended a ceremony at the Tokyo Grand Prince Hotel on 24 January 2008.

Mr Yaoita was a table tennis player himself, and his aim was to offer other players products with high technical quality and superior performance.

In the 1950s Yasaka developed rapidly, in close cooperation with the top Japanese players, and Yasaka supplied several champions all over the world with their original rubbers.

At the end of the 1960s, Yasaka made a break through in rubber development and introduced superior table tennis rubbers to the market.

Players using Yasaka Mark V rubbers won the men's singles in the 1970 European Championships and the 1971 World Championships and since that time, Yasaka Mark V rubbers have become one of the most well known table tennis rubbers in the world.

In the 1990s Yasaka started a new blade factory in Sweden and in 1993 the Gatien EXTRA blade was introduced.

EXTRA is a blade that was created by their wood technicians, in close cooperation with the 1993 men's singles World Champion Jean-Philippe Gatien of France, and since then, Gatien EXTRA has been one of the best selling blades all over the World.

In 2002 Yasaka launched a new rubber, V-STAGE and their own laboratory tests showed that V-STAGE offered more spin and more speed than any previous rubber.

And in the same year, Yasaka also surprised the table tennis world when they produced a 17-layer blade, DYNAMIX.

Since then, Yasaka has successfully entered the biggest single table tennis market in the world, China, where their Yasaka blades are very much in demand.

In 2010, Yasaka introduced their new rubbers, Rakza 7 and Rakza 7 Soft.

They claim that RAKZA 7 uses mainly natural gum for the top sheet which improves the level of grip and the power of spin drastically. And that the shape/geometry of the pimples are designed to give a good balance between speed and spin.

The topsheet is combined with their newly developed "Power Sponge", enabling huge elasticity. Together they work in perfect synergy, producing the "Hybrid Energy" rubber RAKZA 7.

When a player hits the ball hard, the rubber "grips" the ball and the stroke can be used to place the ball accurately, both in direction and length.

And thanks to the higher proportion of natural gum, they say that the life expectancy of the rubber has increased.

China's Ma Lin, a former Olympic Games Gold medallist is sponsored by Yasaka.

After the 2010 World Championships, Ma Lin tested the new RAKZA 7 rubbers from Yasaka.

He chose the softer version, RAKZA 7 SOFT, which gives him the right balance between speed and spin, ideally suiting his playing style.