Each week sports reporter ROBERT CARRY tries out martial arts from around the world. This week it’s amateur wrestling
There may be a huge number of far-eastern martial arts knocking around but one is easy to recognise – when you see someone being thrown, flipped or skimmed along the ground like a pebble across a lake then you're probably looking at judo.
Judo, or 'gentle way' in Japanese developed out of the older Japanese martial art of jujutsu around the turn of the 20th century under the guidance of its founder Jigoro Kano.
Kano's story is straight out of a Karate Kid movi. He was a skinny little dude who the local bullies had a field day with. Kano was the son of a brewer but the local tough guys disregarded the potential benefits this might have brought and pressed ahead with his persecution.
Eventually, Kano came to the conclusion that martial arts could help bring an end to the torment and he decided to sign up for a jujustu class which was at the time an extremely popular form. Sadly, Kano was so puny that he initially struggled to find a martial arts instructor to take him on.
Happily, when Kano headed off to study literature in Tokyo Imperial University his nerdy profile became less evident and he found an instructor, Fukuda Hachinosuke, who was willing to teach him.
Hachinosuke was a stickler for technique and set aside regular physical exercise so that he and his students could perfect jujutsu's often tricky manoeuvres. A year after the hapless Kano arrived, his fitness-shy instructor became sick and died. Undeterred, Kano moved on to his next Jujutsu instructor Iso Masatomo. Masatomo was big into incorporating the pre-arranged strike movements called kata, and the slightly built Kano excelled. By the time he was 21 Kano had become an instructor. However, his run of luck with regard to instructors hadn't changed and Masatomo ended up sick and bed-ridden.
Rather than see his second instructor downed, Kano bolted and took up with teacher number three – Tsunetoshi Iikubo. Iikubo liked to keep it real and focused on sparring. By this stage Kano was fairly experienced and was more than capable of mixing it up with other members of the class despite his size.
A year after taking up with Iikubo, Kano began to get itchy feet. He opted to nick a few of his students and set up camp in a Buddhist temple. From there, Kano developed his own style – it incorporated a lot of what he had learnt, but discarded anything he felt was unusable. The resultant art of judo, was tough, varied and extremely practical so it wasn't long before it became hugely popular.
Judo practitioners, or Judoka, practice for competition which makes fitness and strength indispensable and renders redundant any move that doesn't work.
For some reason, it has become hugely popular in colleges and universities and Ireland is no different – with all major institutions having judo societies and classes. The only downside to this is that summer tends to be a quiet period in the sport.
The fight style, incorporates takedowns, grappling, joint-locks and strikes in the form of kata but its emphasis is very much on the takedown end of things. The martial art is probably one of the most hard-core to feature in the Olympics, which it has done since the 1960s (and '80s for women) and is often pointed to as a good reason for the inclusion of a mixed martial arts (MMA).
The real litmus test for the viability of a martial art form in one-on-one competition is whether it is ever used successfully in MMA tournaments. Happily for the judoken, judo has reared its head inside the MMA cage and most good MMA instructors will encourage students to pick up some of the throws that are the judoken's bread-and-butter.
As well as that, many of the top names in MMA were originally students of judo, including a number of the top names in the MMA franchise Pride.
Competitors such as Fedor Emelianenko, current Pride heavyweight champion, and contender Karo Parisyan.
Other Olympic gold medalist and world champion judokas such as Pawel Nastula and Yoon Dong Sik also fight in PRIDE. Ground fighting has become a staple in MMA tournaments but the manner in which the fight gets to the ground is often of supreme importance – this is where judo comes into its own.
Kano wanted to make 'the gentle way' something that would improve it's adherents mentally, emotionally and morally as well as making them better fighters. I've no idea whether it can or should achieve these betterment of mankind-type goals but one thing is for sure it will improve your ability to ‘kick arse.’
