Judo is to give you something for life

In the East, a traditional way of washing clothes was to soak them in soapy water, jerk the dirt out of them, rinse and then dry them in the sun. In India the jerk was given by whirling the wet cloth in the air and slapping it down on to a clean flat stone. This…

When the time comes, we have to jump. We should learn the right technique, but there is something else that judo can give us if we really train. We have our tokui waza – this is how I am going to win. We rely on it. But the psychological training is to go in and…

To translate onshi there is no single word in English, ‘revered teacher’, ‘beloved teacher’: these are not natural English phrases. The single word ‘teacher’ can refer to anyone from Verrocchio who taught Leonardo da Vinci, to an irritable old lady forcing spelling into unwilling children. Master can mean the head of an Oxford college (e.g….

The way to progress is: give up one’s ippon-yari, one’s strongest throw, for a time. The pupil who does this will look weak, until he gradually develops other techniques. People will laugh at him perhaps. They will say: ‘Oh, he cannot do much now; his old ippon-yari does not work any more, so he has…

I was once sitting on the edge of the mats, with some other spectators, watching some contests. It was not a big affair, and the little audience was mostly former students of the universities competing. I was there because I practised every day at one of them, and wanted to see how the team got…

When I was practising judo at the Kodokan in 1940, Japan and Britain were moving nearer and nearer to war. There was fairly widespread belief in Japan that they were being encircled by potential enemies. I experienced hardly any hostility on the personal level. There was, however, one man at the Kodokan, a tough young…