Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

Naturally, it was immediately compared and contrasted with the unarmed
combative sports most common in the West, boxing and wrestling,
and early jûdô manuals in English devote much space to instructions on
countering these methods. “Challenge matches” were not uncommon in
the early days of Western jûdô, and since these matches were not overwhelmingly
decided for or against any of the sports, speculation (informed
or otherwise) on the relative merits of the methods was even more common.
Matters were complicated further by a certain confusion about the
distinction between jûdô and jûjutsu, with practitioners of either using
both terms freely.
Yoshiaka Yamashita, still Kanô’s senior student at the turn of the century,
was one of jûdô’s pioneers in the West. No less a personage than the
American president Theodore Roosevelt (a lifelong enthusiast of combative
sports) requested a jûdô instructor in 1904, and this prestigious duty
fell to Yamashita, who was already touring the United States. Roosevelt
was a good student and an influential voice in support of the new sport,
and his studies (coinciding with much American and British sympathy for
Japan in the Russo-Japanese War) helped ignite the first Oriental martial
arts boom in the English-speaking world. For many years jûdô remained
the dominant Oriental martial art outside the East and was in fact often incorrectly
used as a catchall term for unfamiliar forms of Asian fighting.
Jûdô was uniquely suited to dissemination across cultures, and in
Japan Kanô was pioneering the dissemination of jûdô in another direction
as well. Joshi jûdô (women’s jûdô) began with his acceptance of his first
female student in 1883. Over the following years, a Women’s Section of the
Kôdôkan, with its own separate syllabus and eventually with women’s
sport competitions, developed. Kanô is said to have commented that the
Women’s Section preserved more of his intentions for jûdô, with its lesser
emphasis on competition.
The growing emphasis on sport jûdô probably occasioned this comment.
The evolution of mainstream jûdô has progressed steadily in the direction
of competitive sport in the manner of Western wrestling, much to
the chagrin of many instructors. An Olympic event since 1964, jûdô is often
coached today simply as an athletic activity, without regard to Kanô’s
principles of strategy or character development or to martial arts applications
outside the set of techniques useful in competition.
However, Kôdôkan Jûdô retains its traditional elements, including all
seven divisions of technique. These include, of course, the throws, immobilizations,
and chokes (nage-waza, osae-waza, and shime-waza), but also
dislocations and strikes (kansetsu-waza and ate-waza), formal exercises
(kata), and resuscitation methods (kappô). Jûdô ranking (indicated by the
color of belt worn with the traditional dôgi [training uniform]) is depen-
Jûdô 213