Chapter 22: Sport Taekwondo

Jigero Kano

During this same time, Japan was just coming out of 300 years of closed feudalism and Jigero Kano was one of a group of young intellectuals who were trying to bring Japan into the modern era. Kano especially admired England and became fluent in English. He studied British philosophy, economics, politics, and the British sport culture. As a philosophy, sport has no counterpart in Eastern cultures; the word simply does not exist, so they had to adopt the Western word, "sport."

Kano was an avid martial artist but the Japanese martial arts were unsatisfying. He observed that the 300 years of peace under the military dictatorship of the Shoguns had robbed the martial arts of their vitality. Most of the martial arts seemed to be more concerned with the form of movement, rather than the realistic usefulness of the movement. When movements were applied realistically, they tended to promote injuries, so no one really practiced realistic movements. The arts preserved technical skills that had little practical usefulness under the guise that they were good for self-improvement.

Kano believed that martial arts training should be "full-contact," to realistically test the techniques and the performer of the techniques. He believed that the training should be in a free-movement context, so the performer would have to adapt to a wide variety of circumstances. Ultimately, Kano developed Randori  (free sparring). Kano was a Jujitsu practitioner and knew of its dangerous training techniques. Kano used his Jujitsu training to develop an entire curriculum of techniques (Kotokan Judo) that permitted full power application, but with limitations that reduced the risk of injury. Since these modified techniques were not as "deadly" as their predecessors were, practitioners could develop much greater speed and power in their application. To counter this, Kano developed new break-fall techniques skills to absorb the greater power and speed of the new throwing techniques. Sport techniques were substituted for older combat techniques. To practice Judo, you had to execute the techniques in a proper manner, without harming the opponent, while still developing high-level technical skills. A competition format, Shiai, was developed from the Randori concept. This idea of free movement and full power in martial art practice was revolutionary.