Kano Jigoro — The Man Who Never Said "I'm Tired"

Come On, Then

"How do you do that move?"

His teacher had thrown him. The young man got right back up and asked.

"Come on, then."

That was all the teacher said. Then, without warning, he threw him again.

The young man did not back down. He stood up to him again and pushed harder.

"What do I do with my hands for this move? What do I do with my feet?"

"Come on, then."

He was thrown again.

The third time, he asked the same thing. This time the answer was a little longer.

"Bah. Do you think you would understand if I told you? Just do it enough times and you will be able to. Come on, then."

And he was thrown again. Years later, he told this story himself. He added that the throw was a sumigaeshi, a corner throw, he thought. He did not figure out the name of that throw until much later.

Kano Jigoro. This is what jujutsu practice was like for the man who would later create judo.

In 1877, Kano was studying in Tokyo. He joined the school of a teacher named Fukuda Hachinosuke in Nihonbashi.

He was born in what is now Hyogo Prefecture, in Nada, in a family that brewed sake. His mother died when he was about eight. At twelve by the old way of counting, his father, who lived in Tokyo, sent for him, and he moved to the capital.

Kano was a small young man.

As an adult, he said he was five shaku two sun, about 158 centimeters (5 feet 2 inches). Yokoyama Kendo, who wrote a biography of him, wrote that he may have been a little short even of that.

His sister later told why he turned to jujutsu. Her small brother could not win even at school sumo wrestling. So he went looking for a way for a small man to beat a big one. Perhaps that was not the only reason.

As a child he was so weak, a record from the Kodokan says, that even the weight of his kimono was too much for him. Jujutsu practice made him strong, like a different person. Yokoyama, on the other hand, wrote that this sounds a little exaggerated. It seems he was not that weak a child.

Weak or not, he was stubborn.

As a student, he got a fixed amount of school money from his father. Even when he used it up early, he never once asked for more, they say. When he had no money for rice, he would get broken bits of rice from the rice dealer. When cooked, it turned sticky like paste and was hard to eat. On that, he kept studying for days, half starved.

Later, it is said, he once told his wife:

"You people could never cook a pot of that broken rice."

With his fellow students he played baseball and sometimes pitched. But once he was caught up in jujutsu, he lost all interest in baseball and tennis. He never touched cards, they say. He had played a little go and shogi, but he gave up all the other games. A young man who hated to lose had started looking for a way to win.

In 1879, Teacher Fukuda died of illness. He was fifty-two. His family handed all the school's secret writings to Kano, and Kano took over teaching at the dojo too, it is said. Kano had been his student for only about two years.

The next year, 1880, men from the Totsuka school, a famous jujutsu school in Chiba, were invited to Tokyo University. They turned the lecture hall into a dojo and showed their forms and their free practice.

Free practice, called randori, is training like a match, where two people try their throws on each other freely. When it began, one student jumped out from the crowd of watchers. He got the judge's permission, threw off his Western clothes, put on a practice kimono, and joined in, they say.

It was Kano. Inoue Tetsujiro, who was at the university then, told this later. There is also a story that Yamada Akiyoshi, who had come to watch, praised him as a spirited student.

The next year, Iso Masatomo, who had taught him after Fukuda, died too. Kano went to study with Iikubo Tsunetoshi of another school.

This teacher was far too strong for him.

"Until Master Iikubo turned fifty, I could not take a single point from him."

Kano said this himself once, the biography records.

In February 1882, twenty-one-year-old Kano moved into a temple in Shitaya.

He planned to throw himself into jujutsu once he had a home of his own, they say. His live-in students lived there with him.

Now it was his turn to teach. When they asked him why, what would he answer?

The Temple Where the Memorial Tablets Jumped

The temple was called Eishoji. It was a Pure Land Buddhist temple in Kitainaricho, in Shitaya.

At first, all he rented was a study room of twelve mats and another of seven. It was Kano's study, his bedroom, his guest room, and his dojo.

When he came home from his teaching job at the Peers' School, he changed into his practice clothes and sat down at his desk. When a guest came, he is said to have thrown a haori coat over his practice clothes to meet them.

In the first year, nine students joined. The next year, eight. The world did not yet know the name judo. Even the notices sent to Kano still said "jujutsu," they say.

Once he brought back a strong sixteen-year-old boy from Shiga. The boy was a big fellow who could finish a whole one-sho (about 1.8 liters) box of rice for lunch. But he turned out to be rather timid, and he was hopeless at practice. He cried that he wanted to go home, so in the end Kano sent him back, it is said.

Even so, on Sundays practice started four or five times a day and went on until eleven or twelve at night, they say.

As the hard practice went on, the floor under the study room came loose. The sound of bodies hitting the mats carried to the head priest's ears. A complaint came.

This is how the story of that night is told.

In the middle of the night, teacher and students quietly pulled up the mats. Kano held a light to shine under the floor, while two of his students, Tomita Tsunejiro and Saigo Shiro, wrapped cloths around their faces and crawled under. They brushed away the spiderwebs and, lying flat on their bellies, patched the floor with scraps of wood. They drove the nails in nervously, so that the noise of the hammer would not leak out.

The teacher and his students looked at each other and giggled, it is said.

Just when the floor was fixed, the head priest came himself. He is said to have made this request:

"For some days now, the memorial tablets in the hall of tablets have been moving right and left and getting out of order. I thought it might be mischief by mice. But lately they have been falling down and scattering. So I kept watch, and I saw with my own eyes that in time with the sound of your practice, the tablets leap up bravely and tumble over. I ask you to think about this."

The hall of tablets is the heart of a temple, so it could not be taken lightly. Kano said so, and he rented a corner of the temple garden and built a dojo of twelve tatami mats, they say. It was the first dojo the Kodokan ever had that was meant only for judo.

Kano paid for all of the dojo himself. He is said to have charged no fees, either.

Around the same time, Kano took in a guest who was more than he could handle.

His name was Shirai Kosuke. In the last years of the shogunate, he had led a unit of soldiers in Choshu. When sober, he was very quiet. But when he drank, he went wild, in the street or in a house, it made no difference. Even his old friend Yamagata Aritomo gave up on him, and sent him to Kano as a kind of lodger.

So an old man past sixty went to live with Kano, who was in his twenties, in that same study room of twelve mats and seven. When drunk, he told the students to show him the way to Yoshiwara, the pleasure quarter, and made the innocent young men run away from him. Later, he once took a big box of castella cake as a gift when he went to visit someone, and at the end of the month the bill for it arrived. Many stories like these are told.

At first, he even struck at Kano. Many times he threw things at him. Kano later told what he did about it.

Blows could be dodged, since Kano had martial arts training. He dodged the thrown things too and jumped in close. And then he said:

"Now, now. Please calm down."

Because Shirai was older, Kano kept his words polite. But he held him firmly in his arms, so that Shirai could not move.

After this happened again and again, Shirai became quiet in front of Kano, he says himself. Kano said he had heard that it was Shinagawa Yajiro's idea to leave Shirai with him. His story goes on:

"I think the viscount saw my good points well."

It sounds a little proud.

Shirai, for his part, is said to have praised him: Kano is young, but he is my big brother.

That same Shinagawa and his wife also offered the unmarried Kano all sorts of marriage matches. Kano turned them all down. At the time he had no thought of taking a wife, he says himself.

In August 1888, Kano gave his students a seven-day lecture. A student's notes from it still survive.

His judo, he said, was something he had built anew out of the old jujutsu. So:

"It is the only one under heaven, and there is nothing else that could be called its source."

If a student later came up with new ideas, he said, that student should simply call it "Kodokan such-and-such school."

The young man who was once told to just do it enough times was now spending seven days explaining to others what judo is.

In time, Kano took a wife too. Her name was Sumako, the only daughter of the scholar Takezoe Shinichiro.

When he married, Kano is said to have made one promise. He would leave the household and the raising of the children entirely to his wife.

Later, one of their daughters fell seriously ill and had to go into the Red Cross hospital. When his wife came to ask what to do, he is said to have answered:

"This is not what we agreed."