Judo’s North-South Effect

I was speaking with a friend and this topic came up, and it was about judo’s role in the development (or lack of) of martial arts in North America as well as south America.

Judo came to north America looking to prove itself, with some elite judo practitioners ready to take on America’s best. They took on mostly catch wrestlers, these are the submission wrestling specialists that were around that travelled from town to town taking on locals to wrestling matches with a cash prize to whoever could beat them. Most of these wrestlers were schooled in traditional wrestling and then learned the submission arts from an experienced catch wrestler.

The judo players did not always fair to well against these experienced submission pros, thus giving the impression that judo was inferior to wrestling that led to a long absence of a grappling based eastern art from entering into the northern hemisphere.

So what about south America? Judo entered here as well, but the challenges came to the Jiu-Jitsu clubs that it found, and was a traditional match up as judo’s parent art is based from jiujitsu.

As was the case in japan, jiujitsu had a hard time dealing with the takedowns and pinning techniques of judo, and as was the result in japan, jiujitsu suffered from the defeats.

But unlike japan, the brazilians were able to work through this dilemma. Instead of trying to compete in takedowns with judo, let’s assume they take the jiujitsu down, and let’s build from there. You can see that the elemental foundations of brazilian jiujitsu are starting from positions that a judo practitioner would put them in.

It was a brilliant concept and resolved the great problems of countering judo. Now it was jiujitsu that started becoming the dominate eastern arts based grappling style in brazil that started to migrate north ward, took on western wrestling and had initial success, however it must be stated that the wrestlers that it first faced were not catch wrestlers (unlike when judo first came to north America).

This some thoughts of mine. My next blog I will tell you how my father trained me in catch wrestling that he learned.