by Cichorei Kano Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:09 am
I agree with what Ben writes. One should not forget that competitive judo is a "strategic play", a play form of a budo, with the competitive element designed to make one's budo better. This is quite different from something developed for the mere purpose of being a competitive sport. As different as it is from a pure sport, as different it is from a pure combat form, hence why yotsunbai (position on knees and hands/forearms in Anglo-Saxon/American countries popularly referred to as 'turtling') is a valid strategic position in judo shiai but insane for the MMA-er who looks at is from a pure true fight point of view.
Judo as a competitive activity today has enormously changed not just by fighting rules of engagement but also by its competitive framework. When I started competing virtually all tournaments had a single tatami. This made the entire atmosphere entirely different. Now the final is usually the only contest where everybody is watching a single thing, but it does not create the same effect as then because the build-up towards that final simply is missing. Saying that 40 years ago the whole was more 'intimate' is probably not the right terminology, but as an audience you were far more a part of the game than you are today. Prewar tournaments in Japan had a crowd gathered around a single tatami often in open air. The contests lasted much longer, but despite some inevitable stalling the tension was tangible and when one scored there was a relief among the audience. The stalling usually was not anti-judo but the natural process of a heavy ongoing match; the stalling did not equal 'boredom'. I remember the 1979 European Championships. The Heavyweight final positioned Rougé against Kuznetsov. It was a slow contest, with lots of blocking. Finals were 7 minutes then. And then there was this sudden explosion by Rougé with a tomoe-nage that had Kuznetsov suspended in the air for a second before landing flat on his back. That was the only thing shown in the entire contest, but it was brilliant and worth the wait for, and we all jumped up elated by this fine display of judo technique. There were just 2 tatami and the audience was part of what happened on the tatami. As competitions grew and women's contests were held on the same day the number of mats grew and the judo more and more became "conveyor belt judo" with the audience being less and less part of the game. The whole thing got something unpersonal.
The multiple tatami is particularly disturbing in kata contests. A kata demonstration used to be something intense that could make you part of it too. Multiple kata contests going on at the same moment, different kata, with the noise of slapping the tatami while you are watching jû-no-kata is odd. Count in the disturbing noise of announcements in the middle of kata performances and there isn't much left of concentration and serenity. Judo's success or desire to expand into mass entertainment is the nail to its own coffin.
In 1979 we still had had tears in our eyes when Fujii during the Worlds in Paris won his 4th world title, and in 1981 in Maastricht we were in awe for the display of Kashiwazaki in his category and the absolute domination of Yamashita in the double (heavy/open). The difference was not just the rules on the tatami or the personalities, but the judo framework, the number of mats, the nature of the matches.
Around 1981 though there was a change. Penalties were increased, and the -95kg final was disturbed by a highly disputed chû'i (or was it still keikoku then, can't exactly remember) when one of the players attacked but the head referee decided that he positioned more than half of his body outside of the red border hence the action being interpreted as fleeing away from fighting, whereas the action in reality had been a sincere attempt to throw. In this way it became possible for the referees and the rules to literally destroy the flow and nature of a contest; the most offensive and leading player could lose the contest through a travesty of a rule that was being employed for something different than the spirit of that rule.
There had been precedents before. In the 1978 European Championships in Helsinki, Finland, a te-guruma was performed while the person throwing supported his body at one point by putting down his hand outside of the red border an action therefore to be awarded with keikoku, an impossible penalty score to recover from. Penalties in judo were considered as something quite apalling, something that manipulated the true course of the fight, and we were very apprehensive when in 1981 additional penalties were going to be introduced.
Looking back the number of penalties and number of events in contests that attracted penalties were nothing compared with what it is today. Contests had something much more spontaneous then.
Another part that isn't really the judo itself but the framework is the availability of video equipment. The availability of video has increased and intensified the studying of opponents in a way that may have affected the spontaneity of fights. Potential opponents can now be studied and studied over and over again, analyzed in a way that previously was not possible.
The problems judo is facing are multifactorial. It isn't just the last IJF rules that destroyed judo. It has been a slow, yet steadily ongoing process that has been going on for 30 years but that now has been pushed so far to the other side that it no longer can spontaneously recover. Judo shiai today is not a patient who is sick, but a patient in coma that is just there as a study object to experiment with rather than attract the attention of genuine human concern and efforts to make the patient healthy again.
Last edited by Cichorei Kano on Thu Feb 28, 2013 3:28 am; edited 2 times in total
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this solution is something the IJF should take. Punishing the active player is sure way to improve Judo contests. Judoka on the belly is typically the active one not the passive one. 