Judo and Jujitsu in Japan: From the Samurai Battlefield to the Olympic Games

The history of Japanese jujitsu did not begin with entertainment or sport in the slightest. It was part of a comprehensive battlefield system developed from close-quarters fighting in full armour, known as katchu kumiuchi. Ordinary punching was close to useless against a heavily armoured opponent, so warriors threw their enemy to the ground, twisted and broke joints, and drove a dagger through the gaps in the armour.

The oldest school on record is Takenouchi-ryu, founded in 1532 by Takenouchi Hisamori, who set out a system of five unarmed arresting techniques and twenty-five techniques combined with the dagger.

When the long peace of the Edo period arrived, the need for armour fell away and jujitsu became suhada jujutsu, unarmed fighting in ordinary clothing. This is the point at which two important schools emerged: Kito-ryu, specialising in advanced and sacrifice throws, and Tenjin Shin'yo-ryu, which excelled at strangles, joint locks and striking the body's vulnerable points. These two became the direct technical foundation of modern judo.

What is judo in the eyes of its founder? Not merely a combat sport, but a way, do, replacing the older technique for killing, jutsu. Kano Jigoro, a physically weak young man, trained in Tenjin Shin'yo-ryu before moving to Kito-ryu, saw both the value and the danger of the old systems, and founded the Kodokan in 1882 at Eishoji Temple on just 12 tatami mats.

He removed dangerous techniques such as strikes to vulnerable points and wrist locks from free practice, randori, preserving them in formal kata instead. That let practitioners exert themselves fully without risking their lives. The heart of judo comes down to two phrases: seiryoku zen'yo, the maximum efficient use of energy, and jita kyoei, mutual welfare and benefit. This matches what I have watched in my children's judo hall for two decades — children who respect their partners go further than children who are skilled but arrogant. For the principles in more depth, read what judo is.

The turning point that won judo official acceptance was the 1886 contest against the Tokyo Metropolitan Police, when the Kodokan's Yokoyama Sakujiro decisively beat the old-school jujitsu side, though some bouts ran so long the judges had to call a draw. The result led the police to adopt judo as a required subject, and Kano, later principal of the Tokyo Higher Normal School, pushed for judo in secondary schools nationwide.

People often ask me how judo and jujitsu differ. Ancient jujitsu placed no limit on technique — throws, locks, strangles and strikes to vulnerable points were all included. Judo removed the dangerous techniques so that sparring could be done safely. The interesting part is that jujitsu never disappeared. It simply branched.

Maeda Mitsuyo, known as Conde Koma, emigrated to Brazil between 1914 and 1915 and passed ground technique, ne-waza, to Carlos Gracie. The Gracie family developed it further into Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, with its complete ground game.

A note on the numbers: it is often repeated that Maeda fought more than 2,000 cross-style matches without losing. That figure comes from the promotional records of touring challenge shows and is hard to verify today, so it is better read as a story handed down than as a confirmed statistic.

Kano was the first International Olympic Committee member from Asia, and judo was contested for gold for the first time at the Tokyo Olympics of 1964. Kaminaga Akio's defeat by Anton Geesink of the Netherlands in the open category became the moment that proved judo was no longer Japan's alone. Competition rules today sit with the International Judo Federation.

At home, though, judo faces a participation problem. Registered membership of the All Japan Judo Federation is widely reported to have fallen from roughly 200,000 in the mid-2000s to around 120,000. Those figures circulate across several outlets and are best treated as an indication of the trend rather than a directly verifiable official count. What is clearer is the direction: the number of young people practising judo in Japan keeps falling.

This is the issue I care about most as founder of IMAC Dojo. Research by Dr. Ryo Uchida and the National Association of Victims of Judo Accidents documented 114 school judo deaths in Japan between 1983 and 2010, the great majority caused by acute subdural haemorrhage after a throw drove the head into the ground.

Those numbers pushed Japan's education ministry to require that beginners have solid breakfalls, ukemi, before taking advanced throws. For what the biomechanics can and cannot show, read ukemi and safe falling in judo, and for the school-safety context, read martial arts and school violence.

On 18 March 2022 the All Japan Judo Federation announced the end of the national elementary school judo championship, saying that an excessive focus on winning had led adults to push children beyond reasonable limits. When children compete, parents can end up competing through them, pressing them to win. This is what I repeat to every student: a black belt matters less than safety and mutual respect.

The question that always follows is whether ancient jujitsu still exists. It does, in three different forms.

• As living koryu lineages. Takenouchi-ryu and other classical schools still transmit their kata in Japan as cultural heritage rather than as competitive sport.
• As preserved records. The Kodokan is said to hold an archive of well over a hundred Tenjin Shin'yo-ryu techniques so that the root system is not lost.
• As branches that grew away. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu took the ground game and developed it into its own system, while judo took the throwing and control system in another direction.

For a learner in Thailand, the most accessible of these is Kodokan-lineage judo, which still keeps kata and randori side by side. That is the judo we teach at IMAC Dojo; schedules and fees are on the judo class page.

From the samurai battlefield to the tatami of the Kodokan, on to the Olympic stage and even to a small training room in Hua Mak 20 years ago, the path judo and jujitsu travelled shows that the best martial art is not the most destructive one, but the one that adapts best to build people. Japan itself keeps reforming to hold the balance between excellence and safety, and that is the same principle I have held to in teaching at IMAC Dojo all along.