Jigoro Kano

 

Kanō Jigorō was born to a sake brewing family in the town of Mikage, Japan (now within Higashinada-ku, Kobe). The family sake brands included "Shiroshika", "Hakutsuru", and "Kiku-Masamune". However, Kanō's father—Kanō Jirosaku Kireshiba—was an adopted son who did not go into the family business. Instead he worked as a lay priest and as a senior clerk for a shipping line. Kanō's father was a great believer in the power of education, and he provided Jigorō, his third son, with an excellent education. The boy's early teachers included the neo-confuscian scholars Yamamoto Chikuun and Akita Shusetsu. Kanō's mother died when the boy was nine years old, and his father moved the family to Tokyo. The young Kanō was enrolled in private schools, and had his own English language tutor. In 1874 he was sent to a private school run by Europeans to improve his English and German skills.

At the time Kanō stood 5 feet 2 inches but weighed only 90 pounds. He wished he were stronger. One day, Nakai Baisei (a friend of the family who was a member of the shogun's guard), mentioned that jujutsu was an excellent form of physical training. He then showed Kanō a few techniques by which a smaller man might overcome a larger and stronger opponent. Kanō decided he wanted to learn the art despite Nakai's insistence that such training was out of date and somewhat dangerous. Kanō's father also discouraged him from jujutsu, telling him to pursue a modern sport instead.

 

When Kanō attended the Tokyo Imperial University in 1877, he started looking for jujutsu teachers. He did this by first looking for bonesetters, called seifukushi. His assumption was that doctors knew who the better martial art teachers were. His search brought him to Yagi Teinosuke, who had been a student of Emon Isomata in the Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū school of jujutsu. Yagi in turn referred Kanō to Fukuda Hachinosuke, a bonesetter who taught Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū in a 10-mat room adjacent to his practice. Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū was itself a combination of two older schools: the Yōshin-ryū and Shin no Shindō-ryū

Fukuda's training method consisted mostly of the student taking fall after fall for the teacher or senior student until he began to understand the mechanics of the technique. Fukuda stressed applied technique over ritual form. He gave beginners a short description of the technique and then had them engage in free practice (randori) in order to teach through experience. It was only after the student had attained some proficiency that he taught them traditional forms (kata). This method was difficult, as there were no special mats for falling, only the standard straw mats (tatami) laid over wooden floors.

Kanō had trouble defeating Fukushima Kanekichi, who was one of his seniors at the school. Therefore, Kanō started trying unfamiliar techniques on his rival. He first tried techniques from sumo. When these did not help, he studied more, and tried a technique ("fireman's carry") that he learned from a book on western wrestling. This worked, and kataguruma, or "shoulder wheel", remains part of the judo repertoire.

On 5 August 1879, Kanō participated in a jujutsu demonstration given for former United States president Ulysses S. Grant. This demonstration took place at the home of the prominent businessman Shibusawa Eiichi. Other people involved in this demonstration included the jujutsu teachers Fukuda Hachinosuke and Iso Masatomo, and Kanō's training partner Godai Ryusaku. Unfortunately, Fukuda died soon after this demonstration, at the age of 52. Kanō then began studying with Iso, who had been a friend of Fukuda. Despite being 62 years old and only standing 5 feet tall, Iso's jujutsu training had given him a powerful build. He was known for excellence in kata, and was also a specialist in atemi, or the striking of vital areas. In Iso's method, one began with kata and then progressed to free fighting (randori). Due to Kanō's intense practice and his solid grounding in the jujutsu taught by Fukuda, he was soon an assistant at Iso's school, and in 1881, at the age of 21, he gained a license (kyoshi menkyo) to teach Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū^.

While under Iso's tutelage, Kanō witnessed a demonstration by the Yōshin-ryū jujutsu teacher Totsuka Hikosuke and later took part in randori with members of Totsuka's school^. Kanō was impressed by the Yōshin-ryū practitioners and realized that he might never be able to beat someone as talented as Totsuka simply by training harder: he also needed to train smarter. It was this experience that first led Kanō to believe that to be truly superior, one needed to combine the best elements of several ryū, or schools, of jujutsu. Toward this end, he began to seek teachers who could provide him with superior elements of jujutsu that he could adopt.

After Iso died in 1881, Kanō began training in Kitō-ryū with Iikubo Tsunetoshi. Ikubo was expert in kata and throwing, and fond of randori. Kanō applied himself thoroughly to learning Kito-ryū, believing Iikubo's throwing techniques in particular to be better than in the schools he had previously studied

 

 During the early 1880s, there was no clear separation between the jujutsu that Kanō was teaching and the jujutsu that his teachers had taught in the past. Indeed, Kanō's Kitō-ryū teacher, Iikubo Tsunetoshi, came to Kanō's classes two or three times a week to support Kanō's teaching. However, there eventually came the day when student and master began to exchange places, and Kanō began to defeat Iikubo during randori:

“

Usually it had been him that threw me. Now, instead of being thrown, I was throwing him with increasing regularity. I could do this despite the fact that he was of the Kito-ryu school and was especially adept at throwing techniques. This apparently surprised him, and he was quite upset over it for quite a while. What I had done was quite unusual. But it was the result of my study of how to break the posture of the opponent. It was true that I had been studying the problem for quite some time, together with that of reading the opponent's motion. But it was here that I first tried to apply thoroughly the principle of breaking the opponent's posture before moving in for the throw... I told Mr. Iikubo about this, explaining that the throw should be applied after one has broken the opponent's posture. Then he said to me: "This is right. I am afraid I have nothing more to teach you." Soon afterward, I was initiated in the mystery of Kito-ryu jujutsu and received all his books and manuscripts of the school.

”

To name his system, Kanō revived a term that Terada Kan'emon, the fifth headmaster of the Kitō-ryū, had adopted when he founded his own style, the Jikishin-ryū: "jūdō". The name combined the characters jū (柔), meaning "pliancy", and dō, which is literally "The Way", but figuratively meaning method.

From a technical standpoint, Kanō combined the throwing techniques of the Kitō-ryū and the choking and pinning techniques of the Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū. As such, judo's Koshiki no Kata preserves the traditional forms of the Kitō-ryū with only minor differences from the mainline tradition. Similarly, many of the techniques (but not the forms) of the Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū are preserved in the Kime no Kata.

Initially, Kanō borrowed ideas from everywhere. As he wrote in 1898, "By taking together all the good points I had learned of the various schools and adding thereto my own inventions and discoveries, I devised a new system for physical culture and moral training as well as for winning contests. However, after judo was introduced into the Japanese public schools, a process that took place between 1906 and 1917, there was increasing standardization of kata and tournament technique.