Jul 17, 2020 (Japan Times) - Judo's founder Jigoro Kano was decades ahead of his time by empowering women to take up a sport that prizes technique over brute force.
But Japan's female judoka have long grappled for equality, enduring discrimination and a headline-grabbing abuse scandals even while they were winning recognition for their brilliance on the mat.
Kano told his early disciples the more subtle form of the martial art as practiced by women at the time "would be the real legacy" of judo — more so than power-based judo by men.
Indeed, a key principle of judo is ju yoku go wo seisu (roughly translated as, softness subdues hardness), meaning that physically weaker judoka can use an opponent's power against them.
Kaori Yamaguchi, who won bronze in the sport at the Seoul Olympics in 1988 and now sits on the Japanese Olympic Committee, said Kano had "a very advanced spirit" for his time.
As the first Asian member of the IOC, Kano's inclusion of women — and foreigners — was central to his philosophy that "judo must be open" and a contributor to world peace.
However, after Kano's death in 1938, women's judo in Japan was considered merely an add-on and competition was only open to women from 1978, Yamaguchi said.
At the Olympic level, men's judo debuted at the 1964 Games in Tokyo, but women's judo only appeared as an exhibition sport in Seoul in 1988 before becoming a full-fledged part of the program in 1992 in Barcelona.
Women's judo in Japan shot to prominence with the rise of the legendary Ryoko Tani — hailed by the International Judo Federation after her retirement as the "best female judoka ever."
The super-popular Tani was a seven-time world champion in the under-48 kg class and her Olympic golds in Sydney in 2000 and Athens in 2004 catapulted her to national stardom and boosted the profile of women's judo in Japan.
The crunch for women's judo in Japan came in London when, to the shame of a nation used to a gold rush from the sport, Kaori Matsumoto was the only judoka to return with a gold medal.
