Other/Mixed Taking up Judo at 50

[berny]

A lot of us also get the impression that they kept changing the rules to favour their own style and their own body types. Recently, leg grabs were banned, for instance. Judo in fact is based on both western wrestling and jiu-jitsu. It's an interesting take on both. It's sad how much things in Japan changed from the first generation of judo - it used to be for all ages and a lifelong activity but it turned into a children's competitive sport. Interestingly, jacket wrestling or something similar (like belt wrestling) has been popular almost everywhere in the world.

I would like to agree, but can't. Jigoro Kano was a man of his time and used his influence to make Judo part of the scary japanese militarized society. But I think Judo lost a lot by going the highly competetive sport route. Kosen Judo (Judo without throws and a focus on submission wrestling) for students and older people in some regions of japan was a briliant idea but never managed to compete with competitive judo once it became olympic. In Japan a lot of the old stuff and trainings methods have survived because there are so many great (and bad) coaches but here in europe it is hard to find coaches that know any of the old training methods. Judo von Frank Thiele

 

[Kozushi]

I would like to agree, but can't. Jigoro Kano was a man of his time and used his influence to make Judo part of the scary japanese militarized society. But I think Judo lost a lot by going the highly competetive sport route. Kosen Judo (Judo without throws and a focus on submission wrestling) for students and older people in some regions of japan was a briliant idea but never managed to compete with competitive judo once it became olympic. In Japan a lot of the old stuff and trainings methods have survived because there are so many great (and bad) coaches but here in europe it is hard to find coaches that know any of the old training methods. Judo von Frank Thiele

I suppose even though Kano is often thought of as anti-militaristic, he was part of the ruling elite at the time, so one way or another he must have been as much a product of his time as any of the other guys. I never lived in Japan so I don't know first hand what it is like there. My philosophy on enjoying foreign imported culture is that no matter what it is, it gets changed to suit yourself and your own culture, so what I call "judo" is really just a "judo based" Canadian club activity. Also, as soon as BJJ came around in the late 90s all us judo guys got super interested in it too, and learned all the moves we could and adopted a lot of the philosophy. We even did MMA. Judo after all was created as a kind of western wrestling turned Japanese in the "wako no sai" doctrine of adopting foreign ideas but making them Japanese.

When adopting foreign culture we can pretend anything we do is based on hundreds or thousands of years of foreign civilization, but we're normally just making stuff up. I'd suspect kettlebells are every bit as much of this phenomenon as judo. I'm sure our American kettlebell methods are quite different from anything done in Olde Europe. Hahaha. I don't think there was any "S&S" in the USSR, for instance.