A King's Retirement
A King's Retirement
My judo classes are back.
The Federation's calendar came out with my first fight on February 15, in less than three weeks. I really want to go, but it's difficult. I believe it will be with the new rules. I will only have the opportunity to watch a competition with these rules next weekend at the Grand Slam in Paris.
I usually don't mind watching old judo fights, but with these rule changes I stopped watching for a while. And I got the urge to check out the professional sumo, particularly the New Year's tournament. It's a fortnight long one. Starting on the 12th.
There is a Japanese channel on YouTube that broadcasts news in English. This channel broadcasts the fights of the first division of professional sumo tournaments. Not live. It is a video that lasts almost half an hour with all the fights of the first division in one day. Each fighter fights once a day. Unless they get injured or sick, or something like that, everyone fights for 15 days. It is similar to Swiss chess championships, but the fights are matched. The league does not choose who will fight who by mathematical calculation, but rather prioritizes fights between winners and losers. Sumo has been very popular in Japan for many centuries.
And of course, it was already popular in the late 19th century when the creator of judo was born. He really wanted to practice martial arts so he wouldn't get beaten up by his classmates in high school, but his father said there was no point in practicing martial arts for that reason. And the teenager Jigoro Kano simply spent his entire high school years getting beaten up.
Or so I learned from researching on the internet. Jigoro Kano's life before he began teaching martial arts is not well documented. After finishing high school and still wanting to practice martial arts, young Jigoro Kano ended up convincing his father who made him promise that he would be driven by noble goals, more than simply fighting in the street like a bum.
And that's how Jigoro Kano started practicing jujutsu. Here in Ceará, we ask a sandal factory to make us an EVA tatami mat, but at the end of the 19th century, only rice straw tatami mats were available, which were very expensive. Tatami mats have existed in Japan since long before Jigoro Kano was born, but they were a luxury flooring. They were not designed for martial arts training; they were used for meals, meetings, and important celebrations. The Samurai occasionally trained on tatami mats because they trained on any surface they could, but most of the training took place on harder surfaces. At most, sand with mats on top.
Jigoro Kano's first martial arts teacher was descended from the warrior class, bushi, or samurai, but by this time, as that class had officially been extinguished, the remnants were not doing well. Many taught martial arts or other disciplines to survive, but it was usually nothing luxurious.
It is said that the training of Jigoro Kano's first jujutsu teacher was basically limited to making students fight and occasionally making adjustments. How did they manage to fight for hours? That was a question I had. But by consuming content about sumo, I ended up deciphering this enigma. Much of the fatigue of training judo today comes from falls and kneeling. Fighting with some colleagues is like facing that maxim that Brazilians like to share on social media:
"To knock me down you'll first have to lift me off the ground."
The randori becomes a case of getting down and getting up unhappily. Every now and then, your teammates throw themselves on the ground to try to knock you down or just to take the fight to the ground. This custom is clearly due to Jigoro Kano, who popularized the use of soft ground for training: the tatami mats.
It turns out that the most basic form of fighting in Japan, the simplest set of rules, is sumo. In simple terms, you can only touch your foot to the ground. A simple knee on the ground is already a defeat. In a fighting system where touching your teammate's knee to the ground or making him sit down is already a victory, and where you can't lie down or kneel, you can fight even on surfaces that aren't so soft, like sand, grass, or carpets. And you can endure more than in a training session where you have to constantly fall and get up.
Not that jujutsu, the martial art that Jigoro Kano practiced, didn't have sacrificial techniques, where you throw yourself to the ground to knock your opponent down, but they were probably only trained in rare situations. There's no way you can constantly throw yourself to the ground on floors that provide very little cushioning. Rest assured, people in the 19th century weren't made of steel. In fact, they had slightly worse health than we do. Life expectancy was forty years for men.
It is said that Jigoro Kano needed to rely on sumo wrestling to defeat his teammates, not only because of the hardness of the ground but also because it was the only base he had. Before his father allowed him to train in martial arts, sumo wrestling was the only martial art he had access to.
The question of the influence of sumo on Jigoro Kano's life and consequently on judo is a very profound subject, and one that I have only just begun to observe. But what is impressive is what happened on my first day watching.
The highest title in professional sumo is that of Yokozuna. Whoever reaches this position becomes the star of every competition he participates in. He is never demoted again; it is expected that a Yokozuna in a bad phase will step aside or retire. When he fights, it is always the last fight, which is announced all day long.
When I went to watch the first day of the New Year's tournament, the current Yokozuna was signed up to fight, after two tournaments away to nurse injuries. There are six tournaments a year, in the six odd-numbered months. I was watching the fights on a half-hour video, but even in that video the announcer kept announcing that "today we're going to have the Yokozuna."
After all the other fights, the long-awaited fight arrived at the end of the video. He was very nervous! He looked like some beginner judokas when they debut in the senior category, shaking all over. When the fight started, he slipped, fell face down on the ground and lost alone.
I was shocked by the poor performance. They only interview the winner, and since the main fight was the most elaborately prepared interview. Beating a Yokozuna is a very important thing, you get a star on your resume as a fighter for the rest of your life. So the interview ended up being very disappointing, the winner only said something like: "Good fight, I started (the tournament) with a win."
When I finished watching, there was another video in the recommended ones that said. Yokozuna announces retirement! And that's how I started my journey watching sumo, I retired a Yokozuna!
That's all.
I'm Wahre Gesicht Teixeira.
Buy me a KO-FI
My plan is to teach about sports and war through chess and judo.
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