Judo: Kanō Jigorō and the Gentle Way

In 1882 the priest of the Eishō-ji, a Buddhist temple in the Shitaya district of Tokyo, had a complaint. A 22-year-old schoolteacher had rented a room, laid down twelve tatami mats and started throwing people on them. The Kōdōkan's own history records the mats being torn up by the vigour of the practice. Nine students enrolled in the first year. By 1964 what they were practising was in the Olympic Games, and today it is practised in more than 200 countries.

Here is what actually happened. Kanō Jigorō, a small, bullied student who went looking for jujutsu teachers in a country that was trying to forget them, took the throws, pins, chokes and joint locks of the samurai, removed what could not be practised safely at full speed, and built a method around two ideas: seiryoku zen'yō, the best use of energy, and jita kyōei, mutual welfare. Within a generation his school had beaten the old ones, entered the police and the classroom, and begun to travel. This is the story of how a room in a temple became a sport.

Key facts

Founder

Kanō Jigorō (1860–1938), educator, later IOC member

Founded

1882, Kōdōkan, Eishō-ji temple, Tokyo

Roots

Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū and Kitō-ryū jujutsu

Principles

Seiryoku zen'yō (maximum efficiency), jita kyōei (mutual welfare)

Olympic debut

Tokyo 1964 (men), Barcelona 1992 (women)

Governing body

International Judo Federation, founded 1951

Jujutsu before judo

The samurai fought in armour with sword, spear and bow, and every warrior school also taught what to do when the weapon was gone: throw, pin, choke, break a joint, strike where the armour was open. These methods went by many names, yawara, taijutsu, kogusoku, jūjutsu, and by the 17th century, in the long peace of the Tokugawa period, hundreds of schools (ryū) taught their own versions, each with its own catalogue of techniques (kata) handed from master to student.

By the time Kanō was a boy, that world was ending. The Meiji Restoration of 1868 abolished the samurai class, banned the wearing of swords and turned Japan towards Western science, industry and sport. Jujutsu masters lost their patrons and then their students. Some taught in back rooms, some gave up, and the art acquired a reputation as a rough, old-fashioned pastime for thugs. Kanō's achievement was to see what was worth keeping in it, and to give it a form a modern nation could accept.

The small student who wanted to be strong

Kanō was born on 28 October 1860 in Mikage, a village near Kobe, into a family that brewed sake and shipped goods. He was a gifted pupil and physically small, and at school in Tokyo he was bullied. So he decided to learn jujutsu, which in 1877 was harder than it sounds: he had to search for teachers still willing to instruct. He found Fukuda Hachinosuke of the Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū, a school strong in striking, grappling and pins, and after Fukuda's death continued under Iso Masatomo. From 1881 he also studied Kitō-ryū under Iikubo Tsunetoshi, a school whose speciality was throwing and whose teaching stressed yielding and the use of the opponent's movement.

He graduated from Tokyo Imperial University in 1881 in political science and economics, and he approached jujutsu the way he approached everything else, as a subject to be analysed. He compared the schools, kept what worked and asked why it worked. His answer was kuzushi: break the opponent's balance before you attempt the throw. Kitō-ryū had practised it for generations without ever spelling it out. Once balance is gone, a small person can throw a large one, and that is the gentleness in the name he was about to choose.

1882: twelve mats in a temple

In 1882 Kanō, already teaching at a private school, rented his room in the Eishō-ji and called the place the Kōdōkan, “the hall for studying the way”. The art he called jūdō, “the gentle way”, choosing dō (way) over jutsu (technique) to say that this was a method of education, not only of fighting. Then the mats got torn up and the priest complained.

What was new was not the techniques, most of which existed in the old schools. It was the method. Kanō split the curriculum in two: kata, pre-arranged forms in which dangerous techniques could be preserved and studied, and randori, free practice in which two judoka try to throw or pin each other at full speed. To make randori safe he removed strikes and the most dangerous locks from free practice, kept throws, pins, chokes and elbow locks, and insisted on ukemi, the art of falling. A student could now train hard every day, be thrown a hundred times and come back tomorrow. That is the change that made judo a sport before anyone called it one.

He also gave it a spine. In 1883 he awarded the first dan grades to two students, Saigō Shirō and Tomita Tsunejirō; the kyū grades for beginners followed, and around 1886 the black belt (kuro obi) began to mark the dan ranks. The coloured belts for beginners that most of the world uses today came later, from Europe. The black belt is Kanō's, and almost every martial art on earth has borrowed it.

Proving it: the Kōdōkan against the old schools

A new school of fighting has to fight, and in the 1880s the Kōdōkan did. The decisive test came in 1886, when the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, choosing a system for its officers, staged a tournament between the Kōdōkan and the Totsuka-ha Yōshin-ryū, the most respected jujutsu school of the day. The accounts differ in detail, as accounts of such days always do, but they agree on the result: the Kōdōkan won almost every bout. Saigō Shirō, small, fast and famous for his yama arashi throw, was the hero of the afternoon, and the novel and film Sugata Sanshirō were later based on him.

Four early students, the shitennō or “four guardians”, Saigō Shirō, Tomita Tsunejirō, Yamashita Yoshitsugu and Yokoyama Sakujirō, carried the Kōdōkan's reputation through the challenge matches of the years that followed, and by the 1890s the question of which school was best had been settled. Judo entered the police, the navy and, through Kanō's day job, the schools. In 1895 the Kōdōkan published the Gokyō no Waza, the “five sets of techniques”, forty throws arranged for teaching. The revised version of 1920 is still the backbone of the syllabus.

The educator: judo as a way, not a fight

Kanō's other career explains why judo spread the way it did. He was a schoolmaster and then an administrator: head of the Fifth Higher School in Kumamoto, and from 1893, with interruptions, director of the Tokyo Higher Normal School, the institution that trained Japan's teachers. His students became teachers, and they took judo with them. He worked to have judo and kendo included in physical education, wrote about the art as a system for training body, mind and character, and formulated the two principles that hang on the wall of every Kōdōkan-lineage dōjō: seiryoku zen'yō, the most efficient use of mental and physical energy, and jita kyōei, mutual benefit for oneself and others.

He was also Japan's first international sports official. In 1909 Kanō became the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee; in 1911 he founded the Japan Amateur Sports Association and led Japan's first Olympic team, two athletes, to Stockholm in 1912. He spent the 1930s campaigning for Tokyo to host the 1940 Games, won that vote at the IOC session in Cairo in 1938, and died on 4 May 1938 aboard the ship Hikawa Maru on the way home, aged 77. The 1940 Games were cancelled by the war. One thing Kanō never campaigned for was judo in the Olympics; he worried that competition would narrow it. That decision was taken by others, after his death.

Judo travels

Judo left Japan with its teachers. Yamashita Yoshitsugu taught President Theodore Roosevelt in Washington in 1904 and instructed at the US Naval Academy. The same year Tomita Tsunejirō and a young Maeda Mitsuyo sailed to America; Maeda's later years in Brazil are told in our article on Brazilian jiu-jitsu. In London Koizumi Gunji founded the Budokwai in 1918, the oldest judo club in Europe. In France Kawaishi Mikinosuke built a teaching method in the 1930s that used coloured belts to keep beginners motivated, which is where the white-yellow-orange-green-blue-brown sequence now used almost everywhere comes from. And in 1926, unusual for its time, the Kōdōkan opened a women's section, with Kanō himself teaching.

After Japan's defeat in 1945 the occupation authorities banned martial arts in schools as part of the demilitarisation of the country, and judo survived in private clubs until the ban was lifted in 1950. The international sport organised itself in those years: a European Judo Union in 1948, the International Judo Federation (IJF) in 1951, and the first World Championships in Tokyo in 1956, held, as Kanō would have wanted, without weight classes. Weight categories arrived in 1961 and were resented for a while by the Japanese as a foreign idea. A larger one was on its way.

1964: the Olympics, and a Dutchman

When Tokyo hosted the Olympic Games in 1964, the organisers used the host's right to add a sport, and judo made its debut with four categories: three weight classes and an open division. Japan won the three weight classes. The open final, on 23 October 1964, was supposed to crown Kaminaga Akio. Instead Anton Geesink, a 1.98-metre Dutchman who had already won the 1961 World Championship, held Kaminaga down for the win. The Budokan fell silent. Geesink waved away the Dutch supporters who tried to storm the mat, a gesture Japan has never forgotten, and judo was a world sport in fact as well as in name.

The sport was dropped for Mexico 1968, returned for Munich 1972 and has been on every programme since. Women's judo appeared as a demonstration event in Seoul in 1988 and became official in Barcelona in 1992; the Paralympic version, for visually impaired athletes, dates from 1988 as well. Today the IJF has more than 200 member federations, runs a world tour and awards Olympic qualification through a ranking list, and France, Brazil, Korea, Georgia and the countries of the former Soviet Union compete with Japan for the medals.

The rules keep changing

Sport judo has never stopped editing itself, usually to stay distinct and watchable. Scores below ippon have come and gone: kōka was abolished in 2009 and yūkō in 2017, leaving only ippon and waza-ari. Time limits shrank to four minutes and “golden score” overtime settled draws. The most contested change came in 2010 and 2013, when the IJF first restricted and then banned attacks on the legs with the hands, the morote-gari and kata-guruma family, to stop judo looking like wrestling and to reward upright throwing. Traditionalists still object. The sport's Olympic future was the reason.

Outside the IJF rule set judo keeps its other faces. Kōsen judo, from the old Japanese technical schools, allows unlimited groundwork and is the closest thing to what Maeda took to Brazil. Kata competition preserves the techniques removed from randori. And in every club, the basic unit of the art is still what Kanō set up on twelve mats in 1882: two people in white jackets, taking hold of each other's collar and sleeve, trying to break balance and throw.

Where to go next

• The judo discipline hub lists training articles and gear for the sport.
• Glossary: ippon, waza-ari, kumi-kata, ne-waza.
• The story continues in Brazil: BJJ: From Maeda to the Gracies.
• For the strength side of grappling, try Kettlebell Strength for Fighters.