Introduction
In 1882, a young Japanese university graduate founded judo. The fact that judo originated outside Europe has given it a peculiar place in the gallery of athletic practices. Today, various physical cultures across the world are practised under the name of sport. Almost all of these sports originated in the West and expanded to the rest of the world. However, the history of judo confounds such a diffusionist model. In contrast to many other sports practised globally today, judo is commonly associated with Japan or more widely with Asian cultures such as Zen. Indeed, the Japanese nation itself sometimes sees judo as a symbol of its traditional values and competitiveness on the global stage. Whereas these conventional narratives revolve around exoticism or national pride, this article calls into question the underlying essentialist idea that judo is a Japanese martial art and hence should embody Japanese values. It locates the history of judo over the last 130 years within the wider process of the integration and standardization of physical activities that has taken place on a global scale in modern times.
Today, the website of the International Judo Federation (IJF) lists 180 member states spanning Africa, the Americas, Europe, Oceania, and Asia.Footnote 1 Given the scale on which judo is practised, one might be surprised to see that it has only been given scant notice in the literature. This article intends to advance the field by drawing on three strands of scholarship. The first involves works specifically on judo. In English-language literature, this body of work was pioneered by Shun Inoue and Kevin Gray Carr, who examined judo as an academic subject by building a more realistic history distinct from the traditionally more hagiographical accounts of the great judo masters.Footnote 2 More recently, a group of experts including Bianca Miarka, Tetsuya Nakajima, and Lee Thompson have advanced this line of scholarship.Footnote 3 However, their main focus is on understanding judo in the context of Japanese history, and thus the task of locating it within a wider global trend remains far from complete, particularly since most of the historical studies on the globalization of judo, such as the works by Naoki Murata and Yasuhiro Sakaue, are written in Japanese and are not readily accessible to English-speaking audiences.Footnote 4
This leads to the second body of scholarship – the literature on the history of sports. Owing to the fact that a good number of modern sports developed, were institutionalized, and still thrive in the West, there is a great number of works examining the processes by which these sports originated in Europe and expanded to the rest of the world.Footnote 5 In particular, this article is inspired by Barbara J. Keys's argument about sports’ ability to connect the national and international milieus.Footnote 6 However, these studies tend to overlook the dynamic working in the other direction: that is, sports that are undoubtedly rooted in the physical cultures of Asia, Africa, or Latin America.
As an examination of just such a sport, this article also builds on a third body of scholarship: works on global history illustrating connections that develop in directions that do not flow from the West to the rest and thus are less noticed.Footnote 7 The history of judo provides a useful example through which this pathway can be studied – not because judo is a Japanese sport but because it is a global sport that evolved in a particular way. It illuminates a global physical culture that has its origin outside the West and that converged with different traditions across the world. As such, this article is a work on the global transmission, convergence, and evolution of bodily and spiritual cultures.
This article does not claim to reveal the essence of judo. Rather, it is more concerned with illustrating the historical evolution of its character. It argues that the global ‘sportification’ of judo did not so much go through a pattern of unilateral diffusion, whereby the unchanged essence was transmitted from Japan to the rest of the world, but rather followed a process of convergence, a collective construction emerging out of various physical cultures and ideas across the world.
By the term ‘sportification’, I intend to shed light on the historical process by which judo and other physical cultures came to attain the characteristics of what we call ‘sport’ today. Various authors have asked what makes a sport a sport.Footnote 8 Instead of attempting to identify the essence of sport itself or to strictly define the term, however, this article attempts to illustrate the wider context. What people meant by the term is one thing, but the very fact that they came to use it has its own significance. And it is from this angle that this article intends to analyse the sportification of judo. It will ask: what are the important economic conditions, cultural values, and epistemology (what Michel Foucault would have called the ‘episteme’) that underpin the ideas and practices of judo, and how have they changed?Footnote 9 It also addresses the dynamics of the sportification of judo, assessing whether this process was governed by a regulating agent or a central idea, or was more an accumulation of spontaneous decisions and practices.
In particular, this article will focus on the changes to the rules of judo. It examines how the geographical expansion of judo led to changes in styles, consequently affecting the rules, which in turn institutionalized those changes. Modification of the rules may be less spectacular than developments in the techniques or styles, but the long-term ramifications can be significant. Indeed, once a rule is changed, the effect can even be to transform the whole idea of what judo is. Furthermore, as will become clear, the whole idea of rule-making unconsciously carries certain assumptions.Footnote 10
Many of the official documents recording the historical changes to the rules of judo remain either inaccessible or unknown, but I have been able to consult some of the unique primary sources of the Kodokan Judo Institute of Japan and the IJF. In particular, I have collected some of the IJF records of decision-making processes. These sources will be combined with some declassified documents from the British National Archives and other published primary sources, including many writings by the founder of judo himself.
The article will begin by setting out the origins of judo and asking whether it was originally designed as a sport. Second, it will locate the process through which judo spread around the world in the context of Japanese imperial expansion and collapse. Third, it will examine changes in the rules of judo and discuss the underlying epistemological shift. Fourth, it will look into some of the more recent changes, which are qualitatively different from the earlier ones. The conclusion will discuss what the findings of this article can reveal about the larger process of cultural exchange.
Judo and sport
Judo emerged out of various traditions of Japanese martial arts sometimes called bujutsu (martial technique) or bugei (literally, ‘martial art’). These strands of martial arts were widely practised by the samurai lords as methods of physical training, particularly during the Edo era (1603–1868), when Japan was ruled by the shoguns of the Tokugawa family. Some scholars also claim that, during this period or even earlier, various traditional martial arts in East Asia contributed to the development of judo, although others dispute this.Footnote 11 After Japan initiated the shift towards rapid modernization and Westernization during the Meiji era (1868–1912), some strands of these martial arts started to emphasize the spiritual aspects of training and were renamed budō (martial way of life) or jūjutsu (technique of pliancy).Footnote 12
In line with these traditions, in 1882 a young teacher, Jigoro Kano (Kanō Jigorō), opened a training hall in a wooden temple in downtown Tokyo. Kano was born in 1860 to a wealthy merchant family in western Japan.Footnote 13 After losing his beloved mother at the age of ten he moved to Tokyo; at fourteen, he entered a boarding school to be instructed by Dutch and German teachers and subsequently moved to a preparatory school to learn English. After this deep and prolonged exposure to Western culture and languages, he eventually matriculated at the University of Tokyo, the first modern university in Japan. While young Kano thrived academically, he was less gifted in physical terms.Footnote 14 Japan was going through a rapid and drastic process of modernization, but underneath the cosmetic changes there was still a pronounced chauvinistic samurai culture among the elites, and Kano later recalled how he used to get frustrated with the macho attitude of his classmates.Footnote 15 Thus, he started to learn jujutsu (jūjutsu) at the age of eighteen. He was quick to prove his talent and was even invited to demonstrate his skills at an exhibition in front of Ulysses S. Grant when he visited Tokyo in 1879.Footnote 16 In fact, even from these early stages Kano's interest and ambitions transcended the confines of a nation. He later recalled that he had once studied Western martial art techniques in the library in order to develop a new method.Footnote 17
Fired by his enthusiasm for jujutsu, Kano opened a training hall of his own in 1882.Footnote 18 In high spirits, he named his training hall Kodokan (Kōdōkan) and called his style of jujutsu ‘judo’ (jūdō, way of ‘gentleness’ or ‘giving way’, in Kano's translation).Footnote 19 This shift from jujutsu to judo was partly to do with image. Kano observed that jujutsu and bujutsu had come to be seen as barbaric, particularly by the aristocrats; he therefore branded his style using a new word.Footnote 20
In more substantive terms, the difference between Kodokan judo and the other forms of jujutsu was defined by three characteristics that it shared with what we would understand today as modern sport. First, Kano categorized various techniques used in jujutsu and theorized them so that they could easily be explained in verbal terms. Inoue argues that Kano successfully promoted judo by giving it a scientific guise;Footnote 21 a series of articles entitled ‘A general guide to Kodokan judo’ published in 1914–15 conforms to this view.Footnote 22 Second, Kano established set rules for judo, the implications of which will be discussed in detail below.Footnote 23 Third, he consciously promoted judo outside Japan. Between 1889 and 1938, Kano toured around the world twelve times.Footnote 24 It is clear that he intended modern judo or Kodokan judo to ‘go global’ from the outset.
Although these three features would make judo a sport, this does not necessarily mean that Kano intended to make judo a sport as we understand the concept today. In 1906, when Japan was excited about its victory in the war against Russia, Kano claimed that judo had a distinctively Japanese character. In an interview with a Japanese newspaper, he argued that, although Chinese and Korean practitioners could improve their techniques with practice and that Europeans were perhaps physically advantaged, these ‘different races’ could not access the ‘fundamental spirit’ of judo with such ease.Footnote 25 In 1933, when Japan was pursuing an increasingly narrow path in international politics after its invasion of Manchuria, he gave a speech entitled ‘The only way for the Japanese to win the competition among the best nations in the world’ at a reception in Tokyo.Footnote 26 In fact, soon after the establishment of Kodokan, he had explained to the senior officials of the Japanese government that judo would be an effective tool to implant patriotism in the ‘spines and brains’ of Japanese youngsters.Footnote 27 He also once argued for the importance of embracing patriotism in one's everyday life.Footnote 28 Thus, Kano was both an internationalist and a nationalist at the same time.Footnote 29
Furthermore, he rarely used the term ‘sport’. In an article published in 1917, he defined the term ‘competitive exercise’ (kyōgi undō) as any exercise conducted for the purpose of competition, and he included judo as well as other martial arts in this category.Footnote 30 A decade later, he further advanced his idea and argued that judo can be understood as a ‘competitive exercise’ as long as it is practised at an amateur level.Footnote 31 He also used the term ‘athletic competition’ (undō kyōgi).Footnote 32 The only example I could find of him using the term ‘sport’ (supōtsu) is a short report he published in 1930, half a century after he had opened Kodokan. There he compares judo with ‘other sports’, which implies that he categorized judo as a sport. However, it is unclear what he meant by the term, beyond contending that judo should not be confined to reclusive training halls but should be opened up to the masses and media like ‘other sports’.Footnote 33 Interestingly, before Kano used the term ‘sport’ in this report, a critique of Kodokan had employed the term in order to attack the mainstream judo establishment over which Kano presided. It argued, ‘we shall not forget the fact that judo is a fully fledged sport’, although ‘few people in Tokyo where the bastion of Kodokan lies’ would agree.Footnote 34 It is unclear whether Kano and his critic attached the same meaning to ‘sport’, but the two sides seem to have shared the view that some change needed to be brought to the mainstream judo circle in Japan.
Judo and the Olympics
While Kano and his critics were discussing the future direction of judo in Japan, judo was also expanding into the world. Kano's twelve world tours took him to Europe, North America, China, and Africa.Footnote 35 His students followed suit. In the early twentieth century, Japanese judo practitioners taught by Kano went to Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Romania, Turkey, Egypt, the United States, and Canada. Kano himself took his first trip to Europe in 1889 at the age of thirty. At this point Japan had just established a constitutional monarchy modelled after European states, and the main purpose of his trip was to study the West. It was more about learning than teaching, apart from a notable occasion when he was forced to fight a Russian navy officer on a ship sailing the Indian Ocean.Footnote 36 From these early years on, Kano and his disciples – some of whom were already abroad – frequently exchanged views not only about judo but also about the changing political landscape of Japan and the world.Footnote 37
After Kano saw the world outside Japan, his mission to expand judo globally became more pronounced. While Japan had made a mark in international politics following its wars with China and Russia, in 1909 the French ambassador to Japan contacted Kano with a letter from Baron Pierre de Coubertin. The International Olympic Committee (IOC) was seeking Japanese representation. Consequently, Kano became the first Japanese member of the IOC, making him one of the main people representing Japan in the world of sports.Footnote 38 In 1911 Kano became the first president of the Japan Sports Association. The next year, the Japanese Cabinet sent him to the Stockholm Olympic Games, the first Olympic Games for Japan.Footnote 39 In the years to follow, he would go on to lead Japan to participate in and host the Olympics.
It is important to make a distinction between Kano's desire to increase the Japanese presence in the Olympics – which was clearly the case – and his desire to make judo an Olympic sport. As Richard Bowen points out, the latter is more assumed than demonstrated, and will need to be addressed with further research.Footnote 40 However, Kano's campaign to connect Japan with the Olympics certainly did go hand in hand with his promotion of judo overseas. He was a cultural ambassador for Japan with two hats: one as the founder of judo and the other as the Japanese representative in global sports. To this day, Kano is remembered not only as the creator of judo but also as the godfather of modern sports in Japan. For example, he was listed as the top figure in a sheet of commemorative postage stamps celebrating the centenary of sports in Japan issued in 2011.Footnote 41 The duality of Kano's role would connect judo and sports in the years to come.
The 1920s was a decade of internationalism in Japan, and so it was for Kano. Between 1920 and 1932 he went to the Far East Olympic Games in Shanghai and three Olympics in Antwerp, Amsterdam, and Los Angeles. By this point, he felt that his international promotion of judo over the years was bearing some fruit. He was asked to establish ties with Italy's judo federation. In London, the rapid growth of judo in a nation that, in his words, ‘generally does not go for drastic change’, took him by surprise. He was also welcomed by the local judo community in Berlin, which even showed him a book with his name on it – although it seemed to have the wrong interpretation of Kodokan judo.Footnote 42
While Japan was becoming increasingly isolated in the international community, Kano kept on travelling abroad. Between 1933, the year that he met Hitler in Germany, and 1936, he attended IOC meetings in four countries.Footnote 43 The primary aim of the trips was to promote the Japanese case to host the Olympic Games in Tokyo in 1940, the 2,600th year in the Japanese imperial calendar.Footnote 44 In an article written in 1936, he stated: ‘Japan is sending a larger and larger number of competitors to places very inconvenient from the point of time and expense. Can there be any reason why Japan should always bear the inconvenience, and European countries should go where it is convenient for them?’Footnote 45 Thus, before the opening of the Berlin Games, the IOC selected Tokyo over Helsinki as the venue for the twelfth Olympics. In 1938, Kano visited Cairo for another IOC meeting, but died on the ship on his way back to Japan. He was 79 years old.Footnote 46 In the wider scheme of things, Japan was on course for another major war, which resulted in the cancellation of the 1940 Tokyo Olympics.Footnote 47 Kano's dream for judo and the Olympics had risen with Japan's imperial expansion and went down with its implosion.
Convergence and changes of rules
Kano's vision and his disciples’ international promotion gave judo a global character, but the globalization of judo went beyond their designs to affect the rules and even the underlying epistemology of judo. At an early stage this was manifested in the diffusion of jujutsu. While Kano attempted to differentiate judo from jujutsu and promoted judo through a series of world tours, jujutsu expanded beyond Japan through much less formal channels. For example, an American ex-sailor named John O'Brien learned jujutsu as an expatriate police officer in Nagasaki. When he returned to the United States, he even taught judo to President Theodore Roosevelt along with a Japanese teacher from Kodokan.Footnote 48 Arthur Conan Doyle has Sherlock Holmes practising ‘baritsu’, a martial art that is believed to have been derived from jujutsu.Footnote 49 Judo also seems to have been used by British prison officers to restrain inmates on some occasions. In 1939, the Prison Commission of Britain was considering to ‘propose to issue a Standing Order to make clear to Governors and Staff the extent to which the use of Judo is permissible’.Footnote 50 A guide to judo published in London in 1958 listed techniques for ‘a frail girl’ to defend herself against a male assailant.Footnote 51 In Soviet Russia, judo and jujutsu merged with various local traditions of wrestling and became sambo.Footnote 52 Although sambo has developed as a different sport, its techniques are largely transferrable to judo and can be highly effective.Footnote 53 Georgia is also known to have developed effective judo techniques by introducing skills from its own tradition of wrestling.Footnote 54 Related to this, the Kodokan Library's collection has a handwritten Japanese translation of wrestling rules from around 1930, indicating that someone affiliated with Kodokan was studying wrestling.Footnote 55 This hybridization of judo and jujitsu with various traditions of wrestling and martial arts around the world went far beyond the original expectations of Kodokan. If Kodokan manifested and spread the formal brand of judo, the spontaneous diffusion of jujutsu characterized the evolution of a parallel, sometimes informal, agglutinate strand.
The popularization of judo was accompanied by the development of different techniques and of changes in the idea of how judo should be practised and regulated. Today, judo has a set of clearly defined rules that allows competition in major matches such as those held at the Olympics or the World Championships. Two contestants, generally one wearing a blue uniform and the other wearing white, fight each other in a demarcated area sized between 8 metres by 8 metres and 10 metres by 10 metres for a fixed amount of time. A contestant can win the match by throwing their opponent, holding the opponent on his or her back for a certain amount of time, applying a submission hold on the elbow joint, or choking the opponent; a contestant can also win if the opponent commits certain rule violations.
Kodokan first established the formal rules of judo in 1900. At this point there was another body also regulating judo called Dainippon-butokukai, but in both organizations Japanese judo practitioners and trainers unarguably had the monopoly on rule-making. Imperial expansion and collapse over the following decades drastically altered this situation. As we have seen, during the early stages judo's social reach in Japan was expanded because it was promoted as an effective tool for education and the enhancement of national and imperial unity.Footnote 56 Soon after the Meiji emperor promulgated the Constitution of the Empire of Japan in 1889, Kano published an article clearly expressing his view that judo could be used to enhance ‘patriotism’ in the Japanese nation.Footnote 57 Later, with the effervescence generated by the Sino-Japanese War, Kano argued that judo would augment the imperial and patriotic spirit.Footnote 58
The Second World War dramatically affected Japan's place in the world of judo overseas, however, and even shaped judo in Japan itself. The Anglo-Japanese Judo Club Limited, for example, which was incorporated in 1934, was questioned by the British Companies Registration Office in 1942 as to whether it was still in operation.Footnote 59 A month after Japan accepted the Potsdam Declaration in July 1945, judo was ousted from the school curriculum, as it was seen as one of the vehicles for promoting militarism in schools.Footnote 60 Kodokan managed to remain in place, but Dainippon-butokukai was forced to dissolve.Footnote 61
While Japanese judo practitioners were suffering in Japan, however, their peers in Europe were thriving. In 1948, representatives from Britain, Switzerland, Italy, and Holland established the European Judo Union (EJU).Footnote 62 In July 1951, delegates from Italy, Britain, Belgium, France, Holland, Germany, Austria, and Switzerland gathered in a Chinese restaurant in Soho, London, and formed another governing organization, the International Judo Federation, or IJF. Europe was so central to the IJF that the EJU was formally dissolved so that it could be replaced by the IJF, although as it happens the EJU was re-established in 1952 as a separate entity. At this point, however, Japan was out of the game,Footnote 63 remaining a mere observer until it formally joined the IJF in 1952. At that point Risei Kano, the son of Jigoro Kano, became its president,Footnote 64 but its global nature had been firmly established. Risei himself titled one of his articles at that time ‘From the judo of Japan to the judo of the world’.Footnote 65
In 1956 and 1958, when the Japanese economy was on the course towards recovery, Tokyo hosted the first two World Championships.Footnote 66 The 1964 Olympic Games were also held in Tokyo; they included judo for the first time as an official sport and Japan won three gold medals out of four. At that point, Japan's pre-eminent position once again seemed intact. The Olympics set separate rules, but these still referred to Kodokan rules.Footnote 67 A fundamental shift was about to come, however. In 1967 the IJF established its own refereeing rules. Until then, Kodokan in Tokyo had set the international rules of judo and Japan had effectively been the only law-maker for judo.Footnote 68 Although there had been some variations in the rules of judo within Japan, all major international judo matches including the Olympics had been regulated by the Kodokan rules for a decade after the first World Championships. But now both Kodokan and the IJF were going to have their own rules. This dual regulation system persists to the present day.Footnote 69
The ramifications of the dual system proved to be serious. Japanese judo officials no longer had the monopoly on deciding what the rules of judo should be. They could hold on to their own rules inside their country, but international events were now going to be governed by rules that were decided by the IJF, which included different nations across the world. These changes in the rules at the international level were to have a lasting effect on the style and even the philosophy of judo, which in turn would change the idea of judo within Japan itself. As a result, the most widely available rule book distributed by the All Japan Judo Federation today gives the IJF and not Kodokan rules, even though the federation is physically located in Kodokan's building.Footnote 70 It is unclear whether the leading Japanese experts in 1967 anticipated such repercussions of the new rules system, but this was a major turning point in the institutional sportification of judo.
In a crucial move, the IJF rules introduced the principle of cumulative penalties, which allowed for the accrual of slight rule infringements that eventually became equal to a serious infringement, automatically resulting in the loss of the match. A useful analogy would be association football. If a system of cumulative penalties were applied in that sport, it would mean that were one side to commit minor infringements, such as an offside multiple times, it would automatically result in the loss of the entire game.Footnote 71 In judo, the scale of measuring the seriousness of minor infringements has varied over time, but the overall idea has remained the same as it was when it was introduced in 1967.Footnote 72 For example, Article 31 of the Contest Rules of the IJF published in 1974 reads: ‘The referee shall declare shido (note), chui (caution), keikoku (warning) or hansoku-make (disqualification) according to the gravity of any infringement of the regulations in Article 30. In general a simple repetition in one of the above mentioned categories shall merit a penalty of the next highest category.’Footnote 73 Effectively this meant that trapping one's opponent into a situation where he or she is forced to commit a minor rule infringement can be as effective as actually attacking the opponent. Once this system became part of the IJF rules, the Kodokan rules eventually followed suit through a series of amendments in 1980, 1985, and 1995.Footnote 74
In 1974 the IJF rules also introduced a penalty against non-combativity, stating that it was prohibited to ‘adopt an excessively defensive attitude’ and that ‘a state of non-combativity may be taken to exist when in general for 20 to 30 seconds there have been no attacking moves on the part of one or both contestants. This period may be prolonged or shortened depending upon the circumstances.’Footnote 75 Non-combativity in itself is a minor rule infringement. Yet the system of cumulative penalties means that being taken to be in a state of non-combativity a certain number of times will result in the loss of the game. Coming back to the association football analogy, this means that if one side keeps passing the ball between its own players without a clear intention to attack the goal over a certain period of time, it automatically loses the match as a result. Or, alternatively, one side could win the match without scoring any goals, as long as it succeeds in creating a situation where the other side appears to be sufficiently inactive over a period of time. To that extent, making one's opponent look inactive has become a technique as effective and legitimate as actually throwing the opponent.
An interesting contrast with the IJF's non-combativity clause can be found in Britain. In its rule book published in 1960, the British Judo Association listed as one of the prohibited acts ‘to attempt to avoid defeat by persistently adopting a defensive, negative, ugly, crouch’. However, the commentary reads:
A defensive position is permissible, especially in the case of a lighter man, provided that he sometimes comes out of it to attack. When he does not make an attack for say two minutes, it would be grounds for warning him that a continuance would lead to disqualification. To ensure that the true spirit is maintained this rule should be conscientiously applied.Footnote 76
Koji Komata et al. argue that the IJF's non-combativity clause symbolizes the fundamental difference between the Kodokan and IJF ideas of judo.Footnote 77 Whereas the former tended to emphasize the importance and beauty inherent in the application of an offensive technique, comparable to scoring a decisive goal in association football, the latter opened the door towards winning the match with a more negative tactic, such as the simple repetition of an offside trap. In 1990, the penalty against non-combativity was further toughened. It thus became even easier to win the game without actually throwing or performing an effective grappling hold on the opponent.Footnote 78
Given the significance of the non-combativity clause, one would have expected the Japanese judo leaders and practitioners at that time to react to these changes, but instead there was an intriguing silence. Even Judo Shinbun, one of the most critical and reflective media publications on judo during the period concerned, took six years after the 1974 amendment to appreciate its implications fully. In 1978 it discussed the problem of the non-combativity clause, but only in 1980 did it report that the clause was being abused by contestants attempting to score by showing fake attempts to attack, thereby making the other side look defensive.Footnote 79 A similar pattern can be found in relation to more recent changes. For example, in 2012 the IJF took the drastic step of withdrawing the principle of cumulative penalties. However, Kodokan's reaction to this has again been surprisingly modest.Footnote 80
These changes do not pertain to any particular technique, and hence appear to be relatively minor at first sight, and yet they turn out to have had a significant impact in deciding the course of judo's evolution. The Japanese judo establishment tends to be self-restrained and slow to digest their consequences, however. The most plausible key to understanding this contradiction is a difference in the ideas underlying the act of rule-making. On the one hand, the Japanese leaders seem to assume that judo should reflect a metaphysical ideal beyond what is stipulated in the rule book, an approach that was and is still shaped by the strong charisma of Kano. On the other hand, contestants want to win, and once a rule is codified and set, the rule itself becomes the ideal and the contestants do their best to win the match by using the rule to their maximum benefit. The difference between these two understandings seems to indicate a fundamental shift in the episteme of judo.
On the whole, these changes were viewed by the interested Japanese parties as an attempt by the IJF and more widely the international judo communities to move judo away from its origins. The idea was that judo, which had been founded not just as a martial art but also as a way of life – that is, the way of pliancy, embodying a set of values – was now becoming a sport, something resembling Western wrestling. Although there was little commentary on rule changes, in 1986 Yukimitsu Kano, the grandson of Jigoro and the then president of Kodokan, agreed that the question ‘What is judo?’ was one that needed to be answered.Footnote 81
Commercialization
An even bigger shock to the Japanese judo leaders than rule changes came in the form of the introduction of coloured uniforms. The traditional colour for the uniforms had been white, but in 1997 the IJF decided to use blue in order to differentiate contestants. The main protagonist behind the introduction of coloured uniforms was also a former rival of Japanese judo. Anthonius Geesink was a widely respected Dutch judo master. He was awarded the 10th dan, the highest honour in the judo circle, and he also received the Order of the Sacred Treasure from the Japanese government. Earlier in life, he had won two world championships against top Japanese players and, most importantly, he won the gold medal in the open category at the Tokyo Olympics, which is still remembered in Japan as the moment when the Japanese hegemony in judo was decisively challenged. Twenty years later, in 1986, it was Geesink who proposed the introduction of coloured uniforms at the IJF meeting in Maastricht as a member of the IOC.Footnote 82
It may sound logical to have one contestant in a white uniform and the other in a blue one in order to differentiate the contestants. Yet, once again, the issue was tradition. For the Japanese leaders the uniform was not just functional but had a cultural, symbolic, and spiritual value. Changing its colour was seen as a major concession.Footnote 83 Why should a tradition of such spiritual importance be changed simply to make it easier for a third person to identify the different contestants? Unlike team sports such as association football or basketball, there is only one contestant on each side and the contestants themselves should know who is fighting on which side. Moreover, the referees should also be sufficiently acquainted with judo to tell which side is which.
The answer to this question can be found in the minutes of the IJF meetings. In 1993, the Directing Committee (DC) of the IJF gathered in Manchester to discuss various matters, including the introduction of coloured uniforms. At this stage, it ‘was emphasized that the use of coloured judogis [uniforms] would be limited to Olympic Games and World Championships in order to improve acceptance by and income from TV’.Footnote 84 Commercialism was thus coming into play.
Later that year, the DC discussed the revenue from broadcasting rights.Footnote 85 In fact, just after Geesink started the campaign for the coloured uniforms, the committee contemplated a sponsorship contract with Adidas.Footnote 86 Concerns regarding revenue and public presentation went hand in hand. In a DC meeting held in 1996, the committee first discussed financial matters, including income from television rights and sponsorship from Hyundai and Coca Cola.Footnote 87 They then discussed how to promote judo to the wider public, including ways to make judo easier for the public and media to follow, such as greater differentiation of fighters, blue and white uniforms with names on the back, better identification of whether the contestants were medallists or champions, and commentary about the trend of the match and who was winning.Footnote 88
In 1997, the DC again discussed new ‘ideas on presentation in TV, in the venue, screen, public speakers, info on athletes, etc.’ There was also a proposal for a ‘fanfare or IJF tune’ to announce the beginning of a competition.Footnote 89 Later that year, at another DC meeting, held in the Seychelles, one committee member suggested that there be ‘more emphasis on the winners and make them like heroes and so make Judo more attractive and popular for the public’.Footnote 90
The pursuit of an increasingly commercial path is, of course, not unique to judo. Indeed, it has arguably resisted financial temptation more than some other sports. In the case of cricket, for example, concerns have been raised about how commercial imperatives can be reconciled with moral principles.Footnote 91 Since judo is for the most part an amateur sport, it is less amenable to commercial incentives. Nonetheless, the adoption of a blue uniform for the TV audience marked a distinct change from what Kano envisaged in 1889 when he was promoting judo by distinguishing it from jujutsu:
Jujutsu was at one time highly respected in our country as a noble art … later generations look on it as no more than a form of entertainment … many practitioners are obsessed only with mere appearance and beauty of form, and because of this jujutsu has come to be slandered as just a means of scraping out a meagre livelihood.Footnote 92
Despite Kano's comments, however, the entertainment value of judo had been recognized much earlier than the 1990s. In 1923 an anonymous journalist published an article from Kodokan commenting that ‘judo should be popularized as other sports (kyōgi undō) are and entertain many people watching it’.Footnote 93 Kano himself would actually come to share this view. In 1929 he confessed that he had been thinking ‘for quite some time … whether it is appropriate to charge an entry fee to the spectator’, and that he had reached the conclusion that it was, as long as the fees were used for good purposes and judo itself was practised as an amateur sport.Footnote 94 Yet it remains the case that in the early years Kano thought of judo as a ‘noble art’ and not primarily a spectator sport. Thus there is a significant distance between his aims and those of the IJF, which sought to make judo a ‘form of entertainment’ able to generate revenue from TV licensing rights, and which, in 2012, declared that ‘Judo is a spectator sport’.Footnote 95
Yong Sung Park was the president of the IJF between 1995 and 2007, the period when many of these new initiatives were discussed. Given his background with a master's degree from the business school of New York University, it might seem plausible that he would have exerted a great deal of influence on the commercial direction of judo.Footnote 96 However, there is no direct evidence in the IJF internal records that are available and other reports of the IJF discussions to support this case. He is said to have intervened in a heated debate about whether to introduce Spanish as an official language.Footnote 97 Other than that, however, the exact role of this long-time president in the commercial direction of judo remains unclear.
Most recently, the IJF announced further major changes to the contest rules, decided on unanimously by the committee members. First, it has banned the grabbing of an opponent's uniform anywhere under the belt, for the purpose of making judo ‘more affordable [sic] to the public’ – presumably meaning to make it easier to understand the intricacies of the techniques and more interesting to watch. Even more importantly, the IJF made the radical decision to withdraw the principle of cumulative penalties, ‘in order to avoid that [sic] an increasing number of competitors trying to win by penalties instead of trying to win with a score, and in order to restore the balance in favour of the scores obtained by judo techniques’. It announced that: ‘During the fight there will be three Shidos [warnings against slight infringements], and the fourth Hansoku-make (3 warnings and then disqualification). Shidos do not give points to the other fighter, only technical scores can give points on the scoreboard. At the end of the fight, if scoring is equal, the one with less Shido [sic] wins.’Footnote 98
These changes mean that it has now become much more difficult to emerge victorious by merely trapping the opponent into a situation where he or she will commit minor rule infringements. The stated rationale for these changes was the need for ‘a much more dramatic and attractive judo’, but at the same time the IJF stated: ‘Our aim is to preserve the spirit of judo’. Another line also proclaimed this double message: ‘Judo is a spectator sport as long as the goal is clearly defined.’Footnote 99 Statements such as these signify the ongoing shift resulting from the attempted transformation of judo into a form of entertainment. But qualifications such as ‘as long as the goal is clearly defined’ or statements about ‘the spirit of judo’ may also indicate the IJF's desire to see judo as different and to differentiate it from wrestling as a unique sport in order to keep judo as part of the Olympic Games. Judo's process of constant change appears set to continue.
Conclusion
The rules of judo have undergone various changes, and the judo practised today in international competitions hardly resembles the judo of 1882, when it was officially founded. Jigoro Kano energetically promoted judo for the world, but its evolution went beyond his design. Whereas in the earlier years the changes in the rules appeared to be driven by Europeans’ desire to make judo match their own traditions of wrestling, recent changes exemplify the commercial pressure to differentiate judo from other televised sports and make it easier for spectators to understand and appreciate. Thus, globalization has entailed a constant evolution in the character of judo and has changed even the very idea of what judo is and should be.
Overall, there have been four important dimensions to the sportification of judo over the last 130 years. The first was codification: ideas of judo were put into words and set as rules. This accompanied the second dimension, which was the increasing emphasis on competition. Kano placed a great deal of importance on the spiritual training and educational value of judo, but many practitioners started to pursue what they saw as the most effective strategy to win the game. The third important dimension was the presence of spectators and the shift towards entertainment. Kano despised some martial arts that were practised as entertainment, but today the IJF officially proclaims that ‘Judo is a spectator sport’. Related to this is the fourth dimension: commercialism. The IJF records demonstrate that at least since the end of the 1980s it has become more conscious of increasing its revenue by attracting sponsorship and selling broadcasting rights. On the whole, these trends imply a fundamental shift in the episteme of judo, something that is mostly at an unconscious level and rarely directly addressed beyond reciting the tenets of Kano. Yet this episteme underlies the idea of what judo is and should be – for whom it is practised and for what purpose.
The sportification of judo is one example of the global sportification of physical cultures in modern times. It may also serve as an example of two larger trends in global history. The first is the importance of overcoming a diffusionist model of modernity.Footnote 100 The history of judo was more of a convergence than a diffusion. This suggests that the global sportification of physical cultures can be more fruitfully examined by widening our horizon to sports other than those that come, or are believed to come, from the West. In this new picture, sport is not something that unilaterally diffused from the West to the rest of the world, but more a collective construct with multiple strands expanding in various directions and fusing with each other. According to this line of argument, sport can be understood not as an idea or practice with an essence that one can grasp and transmit to others, but as an ongoing reverberation produced by the contacts between various physical cultures. It is a resonance and not an entity. Here I am inspired by C. A. Bayly's idea of the growth of ‘uniformity’ of ‘bodily practices’, which could be expanded to the standardization of cultures more generally.Footnote 101 Standardization does not mean that the world adopts a single monolithic culture; it refers to a process through which various cultures come to attain a certain level of similarity as a result of the synchronization effect. And this standardization may or may not take place with an overarching authority.
This leads to the second point, on regulation and spontaneity, where we can make an analogy with cheese and bread. On the one hand, Kodokan and later the IJF have been the central governing bodies in charge of the rules of judo. In this sense, the evolution of judo has been regulated top-down with a clearly stipulated set of rules, just like Camembert cheese, whose manufacturers are required to adhere to the appellation d'origine contrôlée standards. Authentic Camembert can only be produced in one region of France by those who follow these standards. However, the actual practice of judo followed a different trajectory. Various techniques were developed all over the world, and a transformation of judo also took place bottom-up. Here we can make an analogy with bread: there are many variations of bread all over the world, with different ingredients, recipes, shapes, and colours, and there is no point in declaring a certain type of bread as more ‘authentic’ than the others. These two dynamics, the top-down regulatory force and the bottom-up spontaneous momentum, are intrinsically related to each other, but the latter is often overlooked owing to the myth of cultural authenticity.
Finally, this article points to the significance of the standardization of cultures and systems. Standardization is a powerful platform for coexistence because it allows different agents to connect with each other. In the case of judo, the standardizing element was the norm of sport. By allowing itself to be defined as a sport, judo became more accessible to the broader population both inside and outside Japan. That was the attraction of standardization. However, standardization can also become an autonomous force. Once judo subscribed to the standardized norms of sport, it could no longer be controlled by Kodokan or by any particular individual or group, but had to change when those norms changed. This was the ultimate result of sportification.
Shohei Sato is a JSPS SPD Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, University of Tokyo, Japan. He works on the global history of modern times on various topics ranging from the evolution of judo to the British empire in the Middle East.
