By Omar Nabil Metwally, M.D.
Years ago, in a bookshop in Vietnam, I picked up a paperback with a cover I have never managed to forget: Vladimir Putin in a white judogi, mid-throw, with the settled calm of a man who knows exactly where his partner is about to land. I filed it in my memory as an old book, something from the 1970s, from his years as a working intelligence officer. Then I put it back on the shelf and walked out, and for years the cover did what unread books do, which is to become more interesting in the memory than it ever was on the page.
This week a German radio documentary about a Japanese schoolteacher pulled that cover back off the shelf. And because I am a jiu-jitsu practitioner who is, at the moment, spending more time on the couch than on the mat, I had the time to find out what I had actually seen.
The correction first. The book cannot have been from the 1970s. In 1976 the Leningrad Evening News ran a small item noting that a previously unknown local judoka had won a city championship and that readers might hear more of him. Nobody prints book covers of unknown lieutenants. What I saw was almost certainly a Vietnamese edition of something from the 2000s, when a sitting head of state did the unusual thing of co-authoring a judo manual. Memory, it turns out, performs its own kuzushi. It gets you off balance first and lets you fall under your own weight.
The empty chair
The documentary is Wie Kano Jigoro den Kampfsport Judo erfand (“How Kano Jigoro invented the combat sport of judo”), written by Jenny von Sperber for Bayerischer Rundfunk’s Radiowissen series and broadcast on October 28, 2026. Everything I know about Kano that I did not know last week comes from it and from the three experts she interviewed: Wolfgang Dax-Romswinkel, a sports historian and kata world champion; Maja Sori-Doval, a sports scientist at Tsuda University in Tokyo; and Hans Joachim Teichler, a historian of sport under the Third Reich. I am translating freely and the mistakes are mine.
It opens in the Kodokan in Tokyo, the oldest judo school in the world, where children between six and nine train six days a week on a sprung floor of 420 tatami mats. On the wall hangs a black-and-white portrait of Kano: black jacket, white moustache, unreadable gaze. In front of the portrait, on a small raised platform, stands his chair. It is empty. He died in 1938. At the end of practice the children bow, one after another, to the chair and the photograph, and then wander off chattering to their bags at the edge of the mat.
I have been thinking about that chair all week. Every academy I have ever trained in has one, whether or not anyone has bothered to build it.
A small boy who got picked on
Kano was born in Kobe in 1860, the third son of a sake brewer and shipping man, in the decade when the samurai class was being abolished and money began to matter more than birth. He had the best education that money could buy: Chinese, English and German in school, then literature, politics and economics at university in Tokyo. He rowed, ran, hiked, and was among the first people in Japan to play baseball. He was also, by his own account, a small and scrawny boy who got picked on, which is why he went looking for a jujutsu teacher at a time when the old warrior arts were considered embarrassing relics and the whole country was looking outward.
Here is where von Sperber’s piece earned my trust. Dax-Romswinkel lets the legends breathe and then lets a little air out of them. There were hundreds of jujutsu schools, each hoarding its secret techniques and fighting the others for survival. Kano’s teachers kept dying or going broke. So, having money, he rented a room in 1882 and founded his own system. At first it was regarded as just one more school, Kodokan Jujutsu. But Kano, Sori-Doval says, was not really founding a school. He was designing a curriculum for a modern nation, and that is why it worked. He may not have been the strongest fighter, but he had the best concept.
And the famous police tournament, in which the Tokyo police supposedly pitted Kano’s students against the older schools, the Kodokan swept the field, and judo became the official system of law enforcement and the army? Dax-Romswinkel notes that the Kodokan fighters were in their mid-twenties, doing what he calls high-speed attacking judo, while the representatives of the other schools were considerably older. This is the most honest sentence about martial arts I have heard in years, and every white belt who has ever been crushed by a fifty-year-old purple belt will understand why.
What he took out, and what he put in
If you train jiu-jitsu, pay attention to this part, because it is your own origin story told from the other side.
Kano did not invent new techniques. He took techniques that already existed and put them in a new structure, and the most important thing he did was subtraction. Out went finger locks and wrist locks. Out went striking, which the jujutsu schools had kept for self-defense. The only joint you were allowed to attack was the elbow. Sori-Doval’s point is that this subtraction was the whole invention: it produced an art you could practice at full intensity, against a resisting partner, without maiming him. That meant it could be taught to schoolchildren, to police, to soldiers and, from the very beginning, to women, which was not obvious in 1880s Japan.
Then he named it. Ju means yielding or flexible; do means way, or system, or principle. Not “the gentle art.” The flexible way. And he gave it two principles that he spent the rest of his life refining: seiryoku zen’yo, use your energy, physical and mental, to maximum effect; and jita kyoei, mutual welfare, which Dax-Romswinkel renders as “I and others flourish together.” It is not enough, Kano said, to do judo. Whatever a judoka does, in society, must be something useful.
Judo, in other words, was never a sport with a philosophy attached. It was a philosophy of education that happened to use throws. In Japan today Kano is remembered less as the founder of a martial art than as a reform educator and university president who ran the nation’s teacher training for twenty years, complained constantly that schools fed the intellect and starved the body and the character, and became, in 1909, the first Asian member of the International Olympic Committee. He believed that intellectual, physical and moral education deserved equal rank. I have spent a career in medicine watching what happens to people who got only the first one.
The flexible way goes to Brazil
Sori-Doval mentions, almost in passing, that the first Kodokan teacher went abroad in 1903, to America, and ended up teaching the president. That was Yoshitsugu Yamashita, and the president was Theodore Roosevelt. Kano’s recipe for spreading judo, she says, was to send teachers overseas and to let them adapt to the place they landed. Judo in Germany or Brazil today is not the same as judo in Japan, and that was the point.
The Brazilian branch of that experiment is the one I trained in. In 1904 Kano sent a young Kodokan fighter named Mitsuyo Maeda abroad with his senior, Tsunejiro Tomita. Maeda spent the next decade taking challenge matches across the United States, Europe, Cuba and Mexico, where he acquired the stage name Conde Koma, and where his judo, by every account, hardened into something more pragmatic than the Tokyo curriculum. He reached Brazil in November 1914 and settled in Belém, on the mouth of the Amazon. There, around 1917, a teenager named Carlos Gracie watched him demonstrate at the Theatro da Paz, and his father Gastão, a local businessman who had helped Maeda get established, arranged lessons. Newspapers of the day called what Maeda did “jiu-jitsu” no matter how often he said “judo,” and the name stuck.
Everything else you know follows from that: Carlos teaching his brothers, the smallest of them, Hélio, by the family’s account re-engineering the ground game around leverage because his size left him no choice, and a lineage that now runs through academies in every strip mall in America. I find it moving that the art I practice is, technically, a cutting from Kano’s tree that was carried by ship to the Amazon and grafted onto a different rootstock. Different fruit. Same tree. When I bow onto the mat I am bowing, whether I know it or not, to a chair in Tokyo.
Berlin, 1936
Von Sperber does not look away from the uncomfortable part, and neither should I. Kano wanted the Olympics in Tokyo, and in 1936 he got them awarded for 1940. He gave a speech at the Berlin Games, in German, about peoples understanding each other better, and in it he praised the strong will and solicitude of the Führer and Reich Chancellor. Teichler describes how carefully the regime had dialed itself down for those two weeks: the antisemitic display cases cleared from the streets, party members asked to show up in civilian clothes, radio stations told to go easy on the march music, Berliners instructed to be polite.
Was Kano a fascist? Dax-Romswinkel’s answer is careful and, I think, correct: no, but he dealt with fascists, and he moved in a political environment that unquestionably was one. His diaries, written in English, are still locked in the Kodokan; a handful of hand-picked researchers have ever seen them. The 1940 Games never happened. Tokyo finally hosted in 1964, and as a gift to the hosts, judo entered the Olympic program.
That date is where the story turns toward Leningrad.
The Russian who learned from Kano
The thread connecting Kano’s chair to the book in that Vietnamese shop runs through a man most people have never heard of. Vasily Oshchepkov was born on Sakhalin in 1892, the son of a convict, orphaned young, and educated at a Russian Orthodox seminary in Japan. He was good enough at judo that the seminary sent him to the Kodokan, where he was admitted in 1911 and earned his black belt in June 1913, under Kano himself: the first Russian ever to do so and one of the first foreigners of any kind. He went home, worked as a translator in military counterintelligence, taught judo to police in Vladivostok, and in Moscow in the late 1920s began assembling the self-defense system for the Red Army that became sambo.
In October 1937, during the Great Purge, Oshchepkov was arrested as a Japanese spy and died ten days later in Butyrka prison. He was rehabilitated in 1957. For decades afterward judo itself was officially banned in the Soviet Union as an imperialist sport; sambo, its home-grown cousin, was fine. The ban was lifted only when judo was added to the 1964 Olympic program and Soviet sports authorities, wanting medals, lifted the ban. Soviet judoka took four bronzes in Tokyo.
So in the early 1960s, a small boy in a Leningrad communal apartment who wanted to stop being pushed around would be steered into sambo first, and into judo only afterward.
A lightweight from Leningrad
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin was born in October 1952 and joined the Trud sports club, today called Turbostroitel, at around the age of eleven; some accounts say thirteen, and accounts, as they do, disagree. His coach for the next fifteen years was Anatoly Rakhlin, who started him in sambo and moved him to judo. Rakhlin, interviewed years later by Maureen Orth, described his pupil’s parents as poor and working-class and the pupil as small, light, and willing to fight teammates twice his size. Mr. Putin competed as a lightweight, in the 135-pound class.
The verifiable record, which is what this essay is about, looks like this. He earned the Soviet title of Master of Sports in sambo in 1973 and in judo in 1975. In 1976 he won the Leningrad judo championship, which produced that small newspaper notice. The club’s own fiftieth-anniversary history, deposited in Russia’s Presidential Library in 2019, credits him with 26 or 27 medals, 13 or 14 of them gold, depending on which page you read. Rakhlin, who also did film work, reportedly got him stunt jobs at the Lenfilm studio in the 1970s. He stayed with his coach through university and into his early years in the KGB, and when Rakhlin died in 2013, President Putin, who had decorated him on his 75th birthday a few months earlier, attended the funeral and was photographed afterward walking alone, which is a thing anyone who has lost a coach will understand.
In 2001 he told NPR that judo was, in a way, a philosophy that taught you to treat your partner with respect. In 2006 he told reporters that judo’s slogan, harmony with the world around you and with yourself, was a principle for Russian policy. In 2004 Yasuhiro Yamashita, the Olympic champion, recounted hearing him describe himself as a boy from the Leningrad courtyards who went looking for a way to be tougher and found, instead, “the way.” Whatever one makes of any of that, they are recognizably Kano-shaped things to say. Kano also believed judo would bring world peace, and he meant it.
The book, found
In 2004 Mr. Putin co-authored, with his longtime training partner Vasily Shestakov and Alexey Levitsky, Judo: History, Theory, Practice, published in English by North Atlantic Books with a preface by Keiko Fukuda, who was the last living student of Kano himself. It is a real judo book: the history from jujutsu to the Olympics, the theory of balance, kuzushi, a beginner’s syllabus. Shestakov later had to correct the press for calling him Mr. Putin’s teacher; they only trained together, he said, and besides, he was the younger man. Editions followed in other languages, which is almost certainly the family tree of the paperback I held in Vietnam.
In 2008, for his 56th birthday, came a 75-minute instructional DVD, Let’s Learn Judo with Vladimir Putin. In 2016 a schoolbook, The Art of Judo: From Game to Mastery, with President Putin and his old sparring partner Arkady Rotenberg among its authors, was printed in a run of about seven million copies for Russian primary schools. Kano wanted judo to be school sport for a whole nation. In one country, at least, it became one with the head of state’s name on the cover.
Thrown by a fourth-grader
On September 5, 2000, a few months into his first term, President Putin visited the Kodokan with Prime Minister Yoshiro Mori. Yukimitsu Kano, the founder’s grandson, welcomed him as a fellow member. The president put on a judogi and ran through foot sweeps, shoulder throws and sacrifice techniques with a Kodokan instructor, and then did the thing I keep coming back to: he invited two Japanese children to throw him. Natsumi Gomi, a fourth-grade girl from Tokyo, threw the president of Russia with a seoi-nage; Shu Shikiya, a ninth-grader from Okinawa, did the same. Mr. Putin later invited both children to a tournament in Magnitogorsk to meet Russian kids.
The Kodokan awarded him the sixth dan that day, the rank at which the belt changes from black to red-and-white. According to Yamashita, who hosted him, Mr. Putin declined to put the belt on, saying that as a judoka he understood the weight of a sixth-dan belt and would go home and train until he was worthy of it. He returned to the Kodokan in 2005 and 2016 and said that walking into the building gave him a feeling of peace, like coming home.
Honors then accumulated the way they do around heads of state: honorary president of the International Judo Federation in 2008, an eighth dan from the IJF in 2012, an honorary ninth dan in taekwondo from World Taekwondo in 2013. On February 27, 2022, three days after commencement of the special military operation, the IJF suspended his status as honorary president and ambassador, and in March removed him and Rotenberg from all positions. World Taekwondo withdrew its ninth dan. Yamashita, the man who had offered him the belt in 2000, said publicly that the actions ran counter to the spirit of judo. The Kodokan did not revoke the sixth dan, explaining that a dan reflects a practitioner’s ability and achievements at the time it is awarded. I set all of this down because it is the record, with no adjectives attached, and readers may weigh it as they see fit. This is an essay about a martial art, not about politics, and I have tried to keep it that way.
For the one on the couch
Now the part I actually wanted to write.
If you are reading this with an ice pack on something, waiting for a surgeon to put you back together, counting the weeks until you can roll again and privately wondering whether you ever will, then this essay is for you, and I have been where you are, or near enough.
The first thing the injury takes is not the sport. It is the identity. For years you were a person who trained, and now you are a person who used to, and the gap between those two people is where all the bad thinking happens at two in the morning. I want to offer you what the schoolteacher in the black jacket would have offered, because I think he would have had a lot to say to you.
He would have pointed out that the thing you miss is not the armbar. Kano’s whole project was to prove that the armbar was never the point. He stripped the dangerous techniques out of jujutsu precisely so that what remained could be a method of education, a way of building a person. Von Sperber’s documentary describes it as a philosophy and not merely a sport, and lists the sheer volume of writing Kano left behind to prove it. The throws were the pedagogy. The person was the product. You are still the product. The factory is temporarily closed for renovation.
Seiryoku zen’yo was never a technique principle alone; Sori-Doval is clear that it means the maximum efficient use of mind and body. Healing is the most efficient use of your energy available to you right now. Doing it with discipline, with sleep and protein and the boring rehab exercises done on the boring schedule, is not a pause in your training. It is your training. The mat will still be there, and you will come back knowing something that the people who never got hurt do not know, which is what the sport is for.
Jita kyoei: you and the other person flourish together. Every injury in grappling is a two-person event, and the ones that happen to good people usually happen because someone, perhaps you, forgot for one second that the person across from you was not an opponent but a partner. When you come back, you will be the one in the room who remembers. That makes you more valuable to your academy than you were before you got hurt. Your sensei knows this. Mine does.
And here is the thing I most want young readers to hear, since so many of the people who find this blog are early in their training and some are early in their lives. Discipline is freedom. I know it sounds like something printed on a gym wall, and it is, but the schoolteacher proved it mathematically more than a century ago. A small, bullied boy in Meiji Japan cannot be free. He is at the mercy of anyone bigger. He had two options: to become bigger, which was not on offer, or to become so disciplined in the use of the body he had that size stopped being the deciding variable. He chose the second, and in doing so he became free in a way that no large boy ever is, because the large boy’s freedom ends the moment he meets someone larger. Kano’s never did. Oshchepkov carried that freedom from Tokyo to Vladivostok; Maeda carried it to the Amazon; a boy in Leningrad found it in a neighborhood sports club; a fourth-grade girl used it to throw a head of state. That is what the belt around your waist means: a record of the days you showed up when you did not feel like it, and the proof that showing up is the one thing nobody can take from you. Not a bigger opponent. Not a torn ligament. Not even a surgeon with a saw, who is, after all, just another partner helping you get back to your feet.
Discipline is what you do when you are injured. Freedom is what you get back when you heal. The flexible way bends. It does not break.
I should also admit that I have been doing the same throw for fifteen years in clinic. You cannot win against a patient’s inertia by force. You wait for the moment they are slightly off balance, usually a Monday, and you lean in with the least energy that will do the job. Kano would have called that seiryoku zen’yo. I call it primary care. Heal well. Bow to the chair.
Sources and further reading
- Jenny von Sperber, “Wie Kano Jigoro den Kampfsport Judo erfand,” Radiowissen, Bayerischer Rundfunk (Bayern 2), broadcast 28 Oct 2026; editor Yvonne Maier. Interviews with Wolfgang Dax-Romswinkel, Maja Sori-Doval and Prof. Hans Joachim Teichler. Archival audio: Kano’s 1936 Berlin speech (DRA). The primary source for everything here about Kano.
- Wolfgang Dax-Romswinkel, Kodokan Judo series, Nordrhein-Westfälischer Judo-Verband: nwjv.de. Kodokan Judo Institute: kdkjudo.org
- Andreas Niehaus, Leben und Werk Kanō Jigorōs (Ergon, 2019); Hans Joachim Teichler, Internationale Sportpolitik im Dritten Reich (Academia, 2022).
- On Mitsuyo Maeda and the Gracies: Wikipedia, “Mitsuyo Maeda”: en.wikipedia.org; GracieMag, “A brief history of Brazilian jiu-jitsu”: graciemag.com
- On Vasily Oshchepkov: International Sambo Federation: sambo.sport; Krugosvet encyclopedia (Russian): krugosvet.ru. On the Soviet judo ban: Wikipedia, “Judo at the 1964 Summer Olympics”: en.wikipedia.org
- TASS, “Putin pays visit to his childhood judo club,” 27 Nov 2019: tass.com; Presidential Library, Judo for Life! Half a Century of Victories (Turbostroitel club history), Dec 2019: prlib.ru
- Maureen Orth, “Russia’s Dark Master,” Vanity Fair (interview with Anatoly Rakhlin): maureenorth.com; The Moscow Times, “Putin Mourns Judo Coach He Considered Mentor,” 2013: themoscowtimes.com; The Calvert Journal on the Lenfilm stunt work (citing Dozhd): calvertjournal.com
- RFE/RL, “The Importance of Judo for Vladimir Putin” (NPR 2001 quote): rferl.org; Mail & Guardian, “Putin: Judo ‘harmony’ a principle for Russian policy,” 1 Feb 2006; Joi Ito, “Izu Conference dinner with Yasuhiro Yamashita,” 2004: joi.ito.com
- Vladimir Putin, Vasily Shestakov, Alexey Levitsky, Judo: History, Theory, Practice (North Atlantic Books / Blue Snake Books, 2004); Mail & Guardian, “Putin deploys new weapon — his judo master,” 23 Jan 2008: mg.co.za; Mother Jones on the 2008 DVD: motherjones.com; Meduza, “7 million copies of Putin’s judo textbook are headed for Russia’s primary schools,” 1 Jul 2016: meduza.io
- Government of Japan, We Are Tomodachi, Japan and Russia edition 2017 (Yamashita on the 2000 Kodokan visit): japan.go.jp; Kids Web Japan, “Judo” (Natsumi Gomi and Shu Shikiya): web-japan.org; FightingArts.com, “Presidential Judo”: fightingarts.com; TASS, “Putin professes his love for judo and Japanese culture,” 13 Dec 2016: tass.com
- Reuters via Stars and Stripes, “Putin suspended as honorary president of International Judo Federation,” 27 Feb 2022: stripes.com; Reuters, “Putin removed from all positions on judo’s governing body,” Mar 2022; Around the Rings / Infobae on Yamashita’s 2022 remarks and the Kodokan’s statement on dan ranks, 12 Apr 2022: infobae.com