While not formally abroad at the request of Jigoro Kano, Yamashita did much to impress the value of the Kodokan style on the President, and to place the idealof ‘Jiu-Jitsu’ before the American public in a positive light, and the Kodokan moved to send an official delegation to America. Headed by no less senior a figure than Tsunejiro Tomita, Jigoro Kano’s first student, the accomplished Sumotori and Judoka Soishiro Satake and his friend Mitsuyo Maeda (teacher of Carlos Gracie and Luis França) traveled to America, arriving in December of 1904. The group gave several demonstrations throughout 1905, notably at Princeton University where Tomita had trouble with the large American Footballers, and in New York where Maeda lost 2 of 3 falls to American wrestler John Naething, before encountering fellow Judoka Akitaro Ohno in North Carolina in March of that year.
Ohno had left the Kodokan independently, hoping to secure a position teaching Judo at West Point. When this came to nothing (wrestling legend Tom Jenkins was hired instead), he violated the Kodokan ban on prizefighting, and began to fight professionally, losing badly to Charley Olson in a rough and tumble match. Following Ohno’s example, Maeda and Satake split with Tomita and began to wrestle professionally, first in the United States, and later in Europe and South America. Maeda’s activities in particular are of such import that we shall return to his exploits at length in the next chapter.
Ohno, Satake and Maeda had, like Masahiko Kimura famously would a generation later, violated the charter of the Kodokan, which encouraged Tarujiai (inter-styles competition), but explicitly prohibited prize fighting. Perhaps Kano hoped that the growing Diaspora of rogue Judoka would find material support through the establishment of Judo dojo on foreign shores, and often they did for a time, but the reality of touring the West without benefit of means, and of constantly piquing the curiosity of the western masses with cross styles demonstrations led these men to seek their fortunes in the ring. In little more than a generation, the unique style Mataemon brought to Jujutsu competition was being introduced to and hybridized with wrestling styles from New York, to London, to Belém.
It is here that the distinctly modern character of this story begins to come into focus: contrary to much of the romanticisation of Martial Arts in the West, the essential character of what we know today as Submission Wrestling are not founded in antiquity, either from our own history (Greek Pankration) or that of the East (classical arts of China, Japan, or India); rather it was born in the modern crucible of cross styles competition, conducted in a public sportive setting, and in which the generation that lived and fought in the period ranging from approximately 1880 to 1920 created several distinct families of an entirely modern method of grappling, in which the unique demands and constant pressure to adapt to mixed-match competition are central.
This article is part of an ongoing series, and continues athttp://mixedmartialartshistory.wordpress.com/2013/03/13/a-leg-to-stand-on/
© 2011 Matthew Phillips
