My Christmas gift to you is late this year, but it is classic judo books, so . . .

What an age we live in, in which dudes scan and share their extremely rare judo books rather than list them on ABE for hundreds of dollars. Well, dudes are still doing that too, a little, but a more enlightened breed that recognizes that all information wants is to be free has emerged. And so we have such things as these:

Judo, Sadaki Nakabayashi (et al) (1965)
Canon of Judo, Kyuzo Mifune (1958)
Higher Judo Ground Work (Katame Waza), Moshe Feldenkrais (1952)
Contest Judo, Charles Yerkow (1961)

Which you can find here.

The first point to make about all of these is that they are fucking awesome. It's only been in the last week or so that I've seen the Nakabayashi and Yerkow books making the rounds. The Feldenkrais has been around a while now, and I've spent quite a bit of time with it. The extended prose sections are worth the time, and the range of grappling techniques demonstrated is wide and varied, very much in keeping with what you'd expect from a French text of the era if you're familiar with Mikonosuke Kawaishi's influence in France. Kawaishi was a man who loved illegal kansetsu waza, you see, and it showed. Illegal in randori and shiai, that is -- the techniques still exist within judo, though they are far from central, and your average shodan or nidan isn't going to know many or perhaps any of them, really, except maybe for those preserved in kata. But they were, are, and will always be judo. Anyway, I know I have the French edition of Kawaishi's 1955 classic My Method of Judo somewhere, and I will definitely post it before too long. But, for now, enjoy the Feldenkrais, which will perhaps whet your appetite.

Kyuzo Mifune's Canon of Judo is probably of the most interest here, however. Until coming back into print not long ago, this was almost certainly the most sought after out-of-print judo book, fetching absurd prices for an incredibly poorly translated work of esoteric near-mysticism. Mifune gets . . . a little out there at times, but of course I do not wish it otherwise. I will leave it to you to discover such instances. The new Francoise White translation is quite excellent and pretty much indispensable, but you've got to take it back to 1958 to get this kind of thing:

"Hadaka Jime

(Nude Strangle)

-- The Gist --

This is to wring up the opponent's throat without touching the clothes. Either in the standing or in the lying trick, this is to bring the opponent to the state of suspended animation by wringing the throat, making him incline backward and breaking his balance in the most natural way."

I mean, exactly, right?

BONUS~

While looking, unsuccessfully, for my copy of Kawaishi, I've found a 1947 Kodokan publication called What is Judo? that you might well enjoy. It's only little, and it is here.

So how is your judo at the moment?

Thing I'm gonna do this after every class until they really start to suck. Probably more for my edification than anything else. We'll see.

I missed Thursday and missed a white belt get promoted to sankyu and a sankyu get promoted to nikkyu so that sucked. Wish I had been there for those dudes. Being sick sucks because you usually feel good enough to judo but don't wanna get anyone sick.
So tonight I was doing uchi komi with white belts and it's so weird to be telling people what to do. Because I think I know virtually nothing about judo and yet I am correcting dudes seoi nages and I never ever do seoi nage is just so weird. And pretty cool!

A couple dudes in our club are up for shodan and that is really exciting because aside from our senseis, no one has any manner of black belt. I think a lot of the guys in our club started judo very young, went away from it for a while, then came back fairly recently. At least that's the only reason I can think of that we don't have more black belts, everyone is really good and I would say that all our brown belts except for me are at least as good as 90% of the shodans at my old club.

Currently we are working on nage no kata. For fear of being branded a heretic, I kind of hate it. I understand we need to know it for shodan and we got these dudes so we're doing it but ugh no more. I wanna throw the living hell out of dudes who don't want to get thrown, not sort of gently throw a dude who is sort of letting you throw him but also doesn't wanna get slammed.

So how are you guys? How is your judo? Let me know, I like hearing personal accounts of judo's glory.

IJF Rule Changes for 2009

The International Judo Federation has recently tested and finalized a number of rule changes, and we think it's pretty obvious that no one is better equipped to evaluate these changes than a sankyu and an ikkyu who have never competed beyond the local/regional/state/provincial level. I know, right? The rules themselves can be seen here, here, here, and here.

A.W.: I had sort of expected, before reading the updated IJF rules, that there would be some radical changes. But that is not really what I see to be honest! And that's just fine!

Goodbye koka, no one will mourn you. If there's anything I hate on an aesthetic and personal level, it's anything less than ippon judo. I know that there is an argument to be made for racking up a number of small scores but I think it's sort of garbage. Why tire yourself out when you can use perfect judo to instantly win and look awesome doing it?

Let's see, what else is there to this. Defensive gripping is bad! So is flopping to the ground! Weren't these always against the rules? In any event, that is why judo isn't brazilian jiujitsu, which is a beautiful art in it's own right.

The sokuteiki is a weird lil contraption, I don't know why it is better than a referee's hand but apparently it is!

KS: Yes, there is less here than we had been led to expect, I think, but the abolition (yeah, abolition) of koka is pretty significant. I was hoping that, without koka, the osaekomi times in ne waza would be reduced accordingly, so that ten seconds would score yuko, fifteen waza-arai, and twenty ippon. But alas.

The gripping clarifications are mostly reinforcing existing rules, as my most esteemed colleague has said: excessively defensive gripping is a penalty, endlessly holding your opponent down in obi-tori grip is a penalty, etc. But there are a couple of meaningful changes here, at least in the way these rules are being interpreted for now. Grasping your own lapel to prevent your opponent's grip is a penalty now, and beginning an attack by grabbing the pant legs is a penalty. Both of those changes will be noticeable. Apparently a morote gari where you shoot in, no grip, is still totally cool so long as you hook the legs with your hands or arms? This is the word. And you can grab the hell out of the pants so long as it is in the middle of an attack that you do so. But your first grip can't be a pants grip. I guess.

I like the new boundary rules. So long as one of the competitors is in bounds, and the other, even if he's out of bounds, hasn't deliberately stepped out to avoid fighting, everything is cool. That's a big improvement. It never happened to me, but it was brutal to see people penalized for completely incidentally stepping out of bounds.

Anything to to keep people from pushing the rules on gi size is a good thing as far as I can see, and so I welcome you, sokuteiki.

Finally, I am a little nervous that my drop seoi otoshi will be penalized as a false attack by the overzealous when in truth it is often a genuinely failed attack offered in all earnestness. It is just that dudes do not sail over-top me with the kind of frequency I would like, you know?

2008 Kano Cup, Tokyo, Japan: Day One

The Kano Cup is underway at the Tokyo Metropolitan Gym, and Tokyo TV has a handful of the key matches from day one available streaming from their website. You can watch them here. And you should! Two real stories coming out day one. The first is that 2004 and 2008 Olympic gold medalist Masato Uchishiba lost; the second is that Tsukuba University hotshot Kisei Akimoto didn't.

Tokyo TV has three matches from the 60 kg division up. The first is M. Fukuoka's sharp juji-gatame win, the next two are Akimoto, and he shows a nice range of technique. Everything for Akimoto comes out of the ouchi gari, which he attacks with pretty much constantly. Whether it's his low tai otoshi (which he doesn’t hit, but watch him dig dig dig) or the uchimata that scores waza ari in his second match, the ouchi seems key in setting it all up. The sukui nage (te guruma? as you like it, friends, as you like it) he scores yuko with late in the gold medal match against Choi Gwang Hyeon comes out of an ouchi gari attack as well. It's pretty neat. Choi threatens with his seoi otoshi a couple of times but from the clips it seems like Akimoto was pretty much running things on the whole. Note too that we have here a dude who goes for the Tsukuba roll whenever possible in ne waza, thereby repping his school to the fullest.

So, Masato Uchishiba, then. He blames the loss on a lack of training, and I can see how you might take it a little easier than normal coming off an Olympic win, sure. But full marks to Haskhbaatar Tsagaanbaatar for the yoko gake for ippon when he was down by a yuko. Those Mongolians, man: they do not relent.

Tatsuaki Egusa had two awesome, awesome matches. They're the last two on the Tokyo TV page right now, and they're totally worth your while. A juji-gatame win in golden score over Draksic (who almost escapes), a huge harai goshi in the dying seconds (he was already way up) to secure the win over An Jeong Hwan (KOR). I also like his insistence on the seoi otoshi that he never actually gets to work. He insists on that throw. Also, can I just say: I am digging the hell out of the osoto gari from the ippon seoi nage setup that An is after here. When that works, my god does it look like judo.

The heavyweight women's matches posted are pretty ok, though obviously the pace was comparatively sluggish. Yang Xiuli (CHN) beat Kumiko Horie (JPN) with a pretty swank ura nage in the 78 kg (I liked the tani otoshi for yuko just before), and towering giantess Elena Ivashchenko (RUS) caught Mika Sugimoto (JPN) with a pretty loose tani otoshi for gold in the +78 kg. Such enormity.

A number of preposterous judo videos on youtube

And yet this may be the strangest one

Hirotaka Kato (JPN) - Flavio Canto (BRA) (-81kg) 2008 World Judo Team Championships - Tokyo

Oh man, this is such a match.

Canto goes for the juji-gatame off of the tomoe-nage feint pretty much right away, but Kato wants no part of that game with arguably the best ne waza player in the sport. He stands, and lifts Canto off the mat for the call of "matte." Before you know it Canto tries it all again, hooking the leg this time to try and keep Kato from raising him off the mat, but Kato still manages to lift Canto for the matte. We some high-speed grip fighting, then Kato works his left arm around Canto's back and, I must say, it looks to me like Canto bails to the mat in a way that could have earned him a shido (a "slight infringement") but what do I know. After a strange scramble, we’re back up.

And here’s where it gets really awesome: Canto hasn’t been able to take the juji off the direct entry (well, the tomoe nage entry, I guess, but come on), but he is able to secure a rolling juji-gatame after taking Kato’s back off of an incredibly quick right uchi mata that doesn’t score, but that provides him the entry into ne waza that he needs. Note how Canto tries his best to grab Kato's far leg with his left arm, which is the textbook way to perform the rolling juji, but, unable to secure it, he hooks the near leg and finishes all the same.

A training partner of mine was of the opinion that I totally needed to see this match. I kept forgetting, but he persisted, and I'm glad he did. Because it is awesome.

Review: Total MMA by Jonathan Snowden

Total MMA: Inside Ultimate Fighting is, without question, the definitive history of mixed martial arts. Author Jonathan Snowden charts the two distinct historical paths that lead us to modern MMA, the first from Brazil, the second from Japan.

He traces Mitsuyo Maeda's travels around the globe spreading the techniques and training methods of Jigoro Kano's Kodokan Judo -- but not necessarily it's spirit. Maeda fought professionally, and fought all comers, in both legitimate contests of skill and "worked" performances more akin to professional wrestling than genuine athletic competition. This is the man who quite briefly taught Carlos Gracie the rudiments of his fighting system, basic techniques and principles that the Gracie family ingeniously developed into their own distinct style of grappling. Certain members of the Gracie family (by no means all) have been notoriously inconsistent, incredible, historically inaccurate and downright dishonest in their accounts of Maeda and the origins of their art, trying to make their already impressive history all the more spectacular. This is one respect in which Total MMA shines: it does its part to set this record straight. Snowden gives the Gracie family all due credit -- and indeed much credit is due -- for their tremendous innovations, but he also calls a spade a spade, revealing many aspects of "The Gracie Myth" to be exactly that.

Even better than Snowden's account of how Maeda brought submission grappling to the Gracies, who then helped popularize it in America through the creation of the UFC, is Snowden's history of the independent and simultaneous rise of something akin to MMA in Japan. This is perhaps where the book is strongest. From the Inoki/Ali debacle, to the rise of Akira Maeda and the UWF, to the eventual experiment of the early days of Pancrase, which blended pro wrestling rules and real competition, Snowden provides the most thorough account of the emergence of Japanese MMA out of the strange world of Japanese professional wrestling that is available in print.

Total MMA is not only a study of origins, however. It's an impressively thorough account and assessment of virtually every fight, fighter, promotion, and event of any real significance to the ongoing history of mixed martial arts, from the early tournament wins of Royce Gracie, to the dark days of the UFC's largely untelevised middle years, to the modern boom of the Spike TV era. And there is considerable attention paid throughout the book to the Japanese incarnation of the sport, which attained a cultural presence far in excess of what we see even today in North American MMA. Snowden gives us the early days of Pancrase, where Ken and later Frank Shamrock competed against and alongside the young stars of Japanese pro wrestling; the early years of Pride FC, where wrestling legend Nobuhiko Takada faced the great Rickson Gracie; to Kazushi Sakuraba's emergence as "The Gracie Hunter." We're taken through the heady days of Japan's MMA peak, where fighters like Bob Sapp, "Kid" Yammamoto, and Hidehiko Yoshida drew television crowds in the many millions, and through Pride's downfall to a backroom Yakuza scandal.

Total MMA lives up to its title. It's simply all here, from a Kodokan expert far from home teaching a young Brazilian the basics of grappling eighty years ago through the build-up of Brock Lesnar's UFC title bout with Randy Couture only a few short weeks ago. Snowden's prose is never less than clear, and at times excellent, with an uncommonly fine feel of flow from one section to the next. His meticulously researched text documents every one of its many sources, which number in the hundreds. That inspires confidence: Snowden isn't "spinning"; he isn't telling half-truths here. He's got nothing to hide; he's inviting you the reader to test his facts and arguments against the source materials he's drawn upon.

In short, Snowden's mixed martial arts history is the standard against which any and all future such works will be measured. The bar has been set high.

Total MMA at Amazon.com

Getting to Know the Gogoplata

If there's one thing we can all agree on, it's that kagato jime -- which most of us know (and love) as the gogoplata -- is among the raddest of chokes. Earlier this year I wrote a semi-scholarly piece on the technique, tracing its modern history at least. I say "modern history" because you know this technique is on some Kito-Ryu scroll somewhere or something. Anyway, a fine fellow by the name of Abrantes translated this article into Portuguese! How cool is that!

2008 Beijing Olympic Judo Retrospective

Content! Here's a day-by-day recap of this year's Olympic judo tournament that originally appeared at the vaunted Total-MMA.com mixed martial arts blog. It has been converted to its present and enormous(ly readable?) PDF format by Iain Liddle. There are some passages of awkwardness due to the transition from hyperlinked html intertextuality to static PDFness, but much more is gained than lost, I think. I hope that you enjoy this more than Nicholas Tritton did -- dude was not pleased that I called his match some of the least appealing judo you're likely to see at this level. Let me again say: Nicholas Tritton is awesome; matches with six shidos are definitely not awesome. Six shidos! That's not something you see everyday.