Martial Arts Of The World - Webs

Wrestling.” This was a carefully choreographed act designed
to return more of the gate profits to the wrestlers than the
promoters.
1921 Ueshiba Morihei, the founder of aikidô, opens his first dôjô in
Tokyo.
1929 The Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore arranges for a Japanese
named Takagaki Shinzo to teach jûdô at Calcutta’s Bengal University
(modern Visvabharati University). Tagore’s hope was
that the jûdô instruction would spread Japanese-style nationalism
through British India. But few Indian college students were
particularly interested in physical culture, and when they were,
they preferred American barbells to Japanese jûdô.
1929 Vasilij Sergevich Oshchepkov introduces jûdô to Moscow. In
1932 Oshchepkov organized Russia’s first jûdô tournament,
and the following year he published jûdô’s first Russianlanguage
rules. Then, in 1936, the Leningrad Sport Committee
prohibited a competition between the Moscow and Leningrad
teams, causing an angry Oshchepkov to write protests to various
government offices. This in turn led to his being arrested
on the charge of being a Japanese spy, and in October 1937 he
died from what the NKVD termed a “fit of angina.” His students
took the hint, and in November 1938 Anatolij Arcadievich
Kharlampiev announced the invention of “Soviet
freestyle wrestling,” which coincidentally looked a lot like
Russian-rules jûdô. Following World War II, Stalin decided
that the USSR would compete in the Olympics, which already
had international freestyle wrestling, so in 1946 Soviet freestyle
wrestling was officially renamed sambo, which was an
acronym for “self-defense without weapons” (Samozashcita
Bez Oruzhiya). Present-day sambo has diverged significantly
from jûdô. Technical differences include sambo players wearing
tight jackets, shorts, and shoes; using mats instead of tatami
(which in turn causes sambo coaches to stress groundwork and
submission holds rather than high throws); and a philosophy
that emphasizes sport and self-defense rather than character
development.
1930 Thai boxing adopts Queensberry rules; although the introduction
of gloves and timed rounds reduce the visible bloodshed,
they also increase the death rate from subdural hemorrhage.
(Recent estimates have put the death rate at one per 1,500
bouts.)
1930 Following a year in which nine professional boxing matches
ended in fouls, the New York State Athletic Commission starts
requiring professional boxers to wear protective groin cups.
1931 After the Japanese seize Mukden, the Chinese government orders
its schoolchildren to undertake two to three hours of physical
training a week. In 1934, the Chinese Ministry of Education
published a formal fitness program designed by a YMCA
director named Charles McCloy, and with slight modifications,
this program remained the Chinese standard into the 1970s.
The designer of the taijiquan (tai chi ch’uan) forms used in the
Guomindang program was a physician named Zheng Manqing.
Chronological History of the Martial Arts 825