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TI: But more than your coaching at San Jose State, you, one, helped establish judo as a national sport in the United States. So talk about that. How do you take something like judo, that people viewed it as this Japanese thing, to make it a national sport in the United States?

YU: Yeah, that was something that I had thought about when I was still twenty-six years old, and I had, I had students... well, judo, we have, let's go back, judo did not have that good reputation that it's a great sport or anything like that. It's, judo was in martial arts, and students learned judo in the service, and they would come back from the service and they'd say, "I learned judo. Let me show you." And they would maybe pick up the sisters or the girlfriend or boyfriends or whatever, and they would throw 'em. Now, they'll throw 'em on the floor or something like that, or they'd miscalculate or take a step the wrong way and they'd fall, they'd lose their balance and they drop on top of them or something like that, and they always had an injury. And of course, with all these injuries, judo became, was not a popular sport. It was a dangerous sport, and you have to get the confidence of people. And also, judo, these were taught by former veterans, ex veterans, and it was not a, not taught well.

So when I start teaching, the students would, I had two or three students come up and says, "I want to drop the judo class." I said, "Why?" He says, "Well, I just want to drop it." "Well, you must have a reason." And he said, "Well, my mother said I wouldn't learn anything from a Jap, so I'm dropping it." I said, "Well, do you like judo?" Said, "Oh yeah, I love it." Said, "Well why don't you stick it, stay in here, and then at the end of the semester, if you feel the same way, you go ahead and drop it." I said, "You're, we're close to the half, half the semester's over." And they say okay. So as they go along, they get to know judo, they find that I'm, I'm just as normal as they are, and it was a real public relations tool, became good public relations too. But also, I also feared that if we kept judo going the way it was there would be a lot of, a lot of injuries, and that was because the students that I had were all big. They were veterans of the World War II, and they had been in the Pacific Theater and places like that, where they had fought the Japanese. And they, and I would say, "Okay, how do you do this technique here?" And I would show 'em this, like this, and so when they do it they just with the strength and the power they had. They would throw people very hard, and I knew that judo was a martial art that did not have any weight, not weight but size. And like, I was the smallest guy in the class, all the rest of 'em were big guys, and I knew that if they really came at me, hooked me, they could injure me. So I started to think, "This is a dangerous sport. We should, I should put, change it some way."

And this is when I went to see a man named Henry Stone at University of California, and Henry Stone was the chairman of the physical education and he was on the NCAA wrestling board. So he had been chair of the University of California department and a member of the board; he had a lot of power in the field of sport, so I talked with him and I told him about this. He says, he says -- and at the same time, our students would go to the Civic Auditorium right down here and say, and they would say, "Hey, Yosh, I don't see why the hell we have to learn judo for, why, as a self defense." I said, "Why?" He says, "I saw this boxer just knock the hell out of a judoguy." "Oh yeah?" "And then also a wrestler beat the crap out of a judo guy." I said, "Well, that was a show, and I don't think that's correct." He said, "Well, it's happening, and I don't think I should take, do anything like this." So I said, "Okay, let's just keep it up, we'll see what we can do." I told Henry Stone about this, people getting, knocking out judo guys and this and that. He said, "Yeah, it's an exhibition." He said, I said, "How can you stop this?" He said, "You can't stop it." He said, "Because it's not a sport." I said, "What? I thought it was a sport. We all practice this as a sport." He says, "No, no, no." He said, "It's a martial arts, but not a sport." I said, "How do you change this?" He said, Henry Stone said, "Okay, you go see this guy Al Sandel." He was a commissioner for the boxing and wrestling in the state of California. "And he can tell you." So I said, "Mr. Sandel, we would like to make judo into a sport." And he says, he looks at, "Well, tell me a little bit about it." So when I got through, he says, "You mean to tell me a big man can work with a small man and the big man beats him?" Says, "That's okay? And small man throws him? That's okay, that's the point?" I said, "Yeah, that's right." He said, "No way." He said, "No way can a small guy beat a big guy who has the weight and the strength and the technique of a small guy." He said, "That's true." And I talked to Henry Stone. He says, "You know, what I learned, in judo if a big guy really learns the technique right and the small guy learns the technique right, the small, the big guy will win every time." And Henry Stone says, "Yeah, that's right." Says, "The best example is Japan." He says, "No small guy has ever won in all Japan championship. They were all big guys." So that convinced him right away, "Yeah, that's right." So says, "What shall we do?" He said, "Okay, we'll have to take the weight. You have a lot of big guys." He says, "I have judo, but my students are Japanese Americans, and they are not big." Said, "They're all small." He said, "Why don't we put 'em together, get a weight, break it down into weight and make four weight divisions?" And we made four weight divisions, and that was a start. But we thought this would go over easy with the Japanese, but it didn't go over that way. They said, they felt that we're taking the whole judo and messing it up with the weights. I said, "Well, it's the safest way to do it."

TI: Because the Japanese believe that it was all technique, that a small person with good technique could still beat a bigger person?

YU: Right, right, right. So we had a lot of unhappy people, and of course, they weren't happy with me because I'm supposed to, I'm the youngest of all these older judo people. And they say, "What the hell? That's not gonna work." So I said, "Well look, we'll take from a hundred and thirty to a hundred and fifty, there's a twenty pounds difference, hundred and fifty to a hundred eighty there's thirty pound difference, and then the heavyweight, and then we compromised that the winner, that there'd be a grand championship with four weight division winners."

TI: And the four division winners would fight each other?

YU: Fight, yeah, the hundred fifty would meet the hundred and thirty pounder, and hundred and eighty would meet the heavyweight, and the winners of these two divisions would be in the final for grand championship. So that sort of cooled everybody down. Okay, that seems like... So we set, at San Jose State we did all the preliminary work and all the data gathering that we, that the Amateur Athletic Union wanted, and we got it all put together. And Henry Stone presented it to the Amateur Athletic Union, and it was accepted as a sport. So from there on, we were... but the, we had Japanese people from Kodokan come, and they thought that was absolutely stupid way of doing, doing it. So they said, "Well, you, Uchida-san, you don't know anything about judo and you're destroying judo." I said, "No, no, I'm not." "But you're putting something in here and it's not our Japanese culture." I said, "But your culture is not going to be destroyed by it. It's going to get popular and it will be good for the Japanese. And the public relations purpose too, so people get to know, they associate with Japanese, they'll get to know more about them."

TI: And this was all being done in the, what, early '50s, like 1953?

YU: Yeah, '50, from '50s on.

TI: Okay.

YU: Then the next thing was strengthening the U.S. and the Amateur Athletic Union accepted judo as a sport, so we had to rewrite rules and many things. And then getting into the, then it came out, "Okay, let's get into the Olympics."

<End Segment 20> - Copyright © 2012 Densho. All Rights Reserved.