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柔道 jūdō Judo

柔道 (jūdō) names Kanō Jigorō 嘉納治五郎's art; this history follows the word from the Edo schools of jūjutsu to Kanō and into English.

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Japanese Scroll of Judo (jūdō) — Calligraphy by Eri Takase
Judo柔道jūdō

Original art by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

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Abstract

柔道 (jūdō) is the name of the martial art and sport Kanō Jigorō 嘉納治五郎 founded in 1882, and the word is much older than his use of it: a Chinese emperor's gentle way of ruling, which a Meiji reader's edition of Chinese history renders, and in the Edo period the word some schools of jūjutsu used for the inner teaching above the technique, written on the licence Kanō himself received from his teacher of the Kitō school in 1883. Kanō explained his choice in 1889 as a way to set his teaching apart from the disrepute of 柔術 (jūjutsu) while keeping a name older masters had used. The familiar account, that 道 names the principle and 術 only the technique, is found in Japanese print, in the National Diet Library's full-text index, in 1894, in the manual of a jūjutsu teacher who noted that someone already used 柔道 as a school's name, named no one, and called it forced to read such words into jūjutsu, and in 1914, when the philosopher Inoue Tetsujirō 井上哲次郎 argued from it that 柔道 is the morality of the man who practices 柔術, and left the question to take up with Kanō; in English his pupil Arima Sumitomo 有馬純臣 gave it as Kanō's reason in 1908, at the head of an extract from one of Mr. Kano's lectures whose further reasons mostly follow the 1889 lecture, with additions, though the naming passage of that lecture, as Arima himself had printed it in Japanese in 1905, does not carry it; and Kanō gave it as his own in a lecture to the police printed in 1922, and at length in 1926–28. Whether he said it before 1908, the record read here cannot settle. The word became the art's general name slowly: a Kōdōkan pupil wrote 柔術 to his parents in 1889, and three of four readers' exchanges of 1898 to 1902 in 『国士』, the journal of Kanō's society 造士会, still said 柔術; the Dai Nippon Butokukai used 柔道 in its masters' titles and for its school's major before 1914 and for the art by September of that year, and a regulation of the Ministry of Education wrote it in 1919. In English the name arrived as Jiudo and Judo in a paper read in April 1888, beside pliancy, and the same month an English weekly in Japan reported Kanō's own preference for it; the dictionaries entered it from 1904; English had the Way of Yielding for it by 1915; Kanō's own English, in a book of 1937 as the Kōdōkan's later edition reports it, gave the Way of gentleness; and the gentle way is a gloss first found, in the Internet Archive's full-text search, in a memoir of 1940.

Overview

The sense. A standard word, the name of a modern martial art and sport. デジタル大辞泉 defines it as 《日本古来の柔術諸流派をもとに、明治15年（1882）嘉納治五郎によって創始された格闘技。心身を鍛練修養し、青少年の教育に貢献することを目的とした。》, a combat art founded by Kanō Jigorō in 1882 on the basis of the native schools of jūjutsu; it aimed at training body and mind and at serving the education of the young [1]. 精選版 日本国語大辞典 gives two senses: first, 《＝じゅうじゅつ（柔術）》, the same as jūjutsu, with its earliest example from Matsudaira Sadanobu's 退閑雑記, quoted below; second, the art Kanō founded in 1882 on the old schools, 《心身の力をもっとも有効に使うことを主眼に、素手で攻撃防御の練習をし、同時に身体精神の鍛練修養を目的とする格闘スポーツ》, a combat sport whose chief aim is to use the power of mind and body most efficiently, practicing attack and defense bare-handed while training body and spirit, its earliest example 「講道館流の柔道」, the 柔道 of the Kōdōkan school, from a magazine of 1904 [1]. Of the dictionaries and encyclopedias gathered at that address, the 日本国語大辞典 alone dates the word before Kanō [1]. JMdict gives judo [2]. The English word is the Japanese one, borrowed with the art.

The words. 柔道 is read じゅうどう, in the old kana じうだう [1]. 柔 is soft, supple, yielding; 道 is a way, a road, and by extension a teaching or the course of an art. Beside it stands 柔術 (jūjutsu), with 術, a technique or an art, the common name of the unarmed fighting schools; Hepburn's dictionary of 1872 enters it as the art of wrestling, or of throwing others by sleight, with yawara as its synonym [3]. What the two characters of 柔道 mean is plain. The question this history follows is what the word meant to those who wrote it before and after Kanō, and why he chose it.

The text in English. Hepburn's and Brinkley's Meiji dictionaries enter jūdō only as another word, 儒道, Confucianism: Hepburn in 1872, JU-DŌ, ジユダウ, 儒道, (kōshi no michi.) The doctrines of Confucius, Confucianism, on a page that enters 柔弱, 柔順 and 柔術 but not 柔道, and Brinkley in 1896, whose page passes from 儒道 to the next headword with no 柔道 between [3][4]. The first read here to enter it is Satow and Ishibashi's English-Japanese dictionary in its third edition of 1904, revised by Hobart-Hampden and Parlett, under Wrestling: jūjutsu (柔術); yawara; jūdō (柔道), the last glossed in brackets the art of self-defence; the second edition of 1879 has under Wrestling only sumō and its ground, dohiōba, with no 柔術 or 柔道 [5][6]. Yamaguchi's dictionary of 1907 enters Judo, 柔道, n. "The old samurai art of fighting without weapons." (by Hearn) [7], which is Lafcadio Hearn's sentence of 1895 about jiujutsu [8], whose words the old samurai art of fighting without weapons are the same as Lindsay's of 1888, as The Japan Weekly Mail reported his paper, below [9]. Inouye's dictionary of 1909 is the third: Jūdō (柔道), n. Jūdō; jujutsu; "the gentle art of self-defence", and under 柔術 it sends the reader on, =Jūdō (柔道) [10]. JMdict keeps the borrowed word, judo [2]. How English took the name, and when the gentle way came, is the subject of the English section below.

The historical record

AD 41, the Book of the Later Han 後漢書, the annals of the emperor Guangwu 光武帝. At a feast in his old home the women of the clan, merry with wine, say of him that as a boy he was careful and true, never forward with anyone, 《唯直柔耳》, only straight and gentle, and now look what he can do; the emperor laughs: 《吾理天下，亦欲以柔道行之。》, in ruling the empire, I too mean to go by the gentle way [11]. The saying is carried in the 十八史略, a digest of Chinese history; a reader's edition of 1874 renders it, as the National Diet Library's full-text index shows it, 吾ガ天下ヲ理ムルモ、亦柔道ヲ以イテ之ヲ行ハント欲スト [12]. The Book of Changes has the word too, under the hexagram 姤, 《繫于金柅，柔道牽也》, where it is the way of the soft line, held in check [13]. In both, 柔道 is a way of ruling or of a line in a figure, not a fighting art.

1724, the Jikishin school 直信流 of Matsue. Tōdō Yoshiaki 藤堂良明 and Murata Naoki 村田直樹 date the renaming of the school 直心流柔術 to 直信流柔道 to 享保 9, 1724, when its fourth head, Inoue Masayori 井上正順, gave a licence, a 赦牒, whose text opens 《柔道直信之一流》, the one school of 柔道 Jikishin, and they print a slip of 1753 headed 直信柔道兵術 [14]. In the school's 中央書 of 1729, as they quote it, the word is a teaching about human nature: 《天地の間に人民を生ずるに随て性と云者備わる。其性の中に寛柔温和の徳自然と所有す。是に随ふを柔道と云。是天性備る所也》, as people are born between heaven and earth, a nature is given them, and within that nature the virtue of broad, soft gentleness is held of itself; to follow it is called 柔道; it is what heaven gives by nature [14]. They quote a dictionary of the martial schools of 1978: 《柔道の名目は、この流が嚆矢である》, the name 柔道 begins with this school [14]. The family's licence and the 中央書 were not read for this history; the claims are theirs.

1795, Matsudaira Sadanobu 松平定信, 退閑雑記, the miscellany of his retirement. The statesman records the day he received the transmission of a teaching: 《○乙夘十一月九日、柔道の本體の傳を得てけり、この柔道といふは、世にまれなるたとき事にて、外にたぐひはあるまじ》, the ninth day of the eleventh month of 乙卯, 1795: I received the transmission of the 本體 (the true body) of 柔道. This 柔道 is a rare and precious thing, and there can be nothing else like it [15]. The entry goes on to say that the teaching came down in the house of Suzuki 鈴木 as an old transmission nobody could follow, until the father of the present Seibei 清兵衛, who had mastered four or five schools of the sword and six or seven of 柔術, and who thought the Kitō school 起倒流 the one most at ease and a corner of that way, was crossing a bridge one day and suddenly understood; it is a most precious thing [15]. Later in the same book Sadanobu writes of the death of 鈴木邦教, the Suzuki house's teacher of it in Kikumoto's account [16]: his 《柔道の弟子》, his pupils in 柔道, stayed at his bedside, and 《つゐに柔道の事なども言出給はざりし》, to the end he said nothing of 柔道 [15]. Here 柔道 is not a school's name. It is the Suzuki teaching itself, set, as I read the entry, above the schools of 柔術, which in the same sentences is the ordinary word. Kikumoto 菊本智之 reads the Suzuki teaching, which its house called 神武の道, the way of divine martial virtue, as a way of conduct grounded in Shinto, and reports that Mizuno 水野忠通, who studied it with Sadanobu, held that one reaches the stage of the way only after full training in the technique [16]; in 1796 Mizuno wrote a book of its secrets under the title 柔道秘録 [17]. Hara 原丈二 and Uozumi 魚住孝至, reading the Kitō school's own transmission books, find no passage that says why the school called itself 柔道, and judge it likely that it meant a teaching that put first the handling of 気, the unseen energy, and the training of the mind: 《嘉納の唱えた「柔道」とは根本的に異なる意味を持つものであった》, a meaning fundamentally different from the 柔道 Kanō proclaimed [18].

1853, 柔道修行問答, questions and answers on the practice of 柔道. A manuscript of the Kitō school, dated by its catalogue to 嘉永 6, copied and kept, a red note says, by 鈴木豊徳 [19]. Its first question begins 《起倒流柔道ハ己カ本体正ク静気ヲ養ヒ》, the 起倒流柔道 makes one's own body right and nourishes a still energy, and near its end it answers on the contest: 《當流道ヲ論メ勝負ヲ不論然レハ此二ヶ条ハ下劣ノ論ニメ當流ノ本意ニアラス雖然勝負ノ位ヲ不経レハ道ノ位ニ難至カランヤ然ルトキハ勝負ノヿモ又不論ハアラサルヘシ》, our school discusses the way and does not discuss winning and losing; so these two articles would be a base argument and not our school's intent; and yet, without passing through the rank of the contest, would it not be hard to reach the rank of the way? So the contest too must not go undiscussed (ヿ is the scribe's ligature for コト) [19]. The school's own text writes 柔道, and makes the way the higher rank, hard to reach without the rank of the contest, which must also be taught; in the two leaves read, it does not set 道 against 術.

1873, 守國公御傳記, the life of Lord Shukoku, Sadanobu. A biography of 1873. It has Sadanobu in old age beginning 《寒暁柔道ノ稽古》, practice of 柔道 in the cold dawns, beside his sword practice, and a later lord of the house receiving at twenty 《起倒流柔道本體ノ傳》, the transmission of the 本體 of 起倒流柔道 [20]. In the house of the man who received it in 1795 the word stayed after him.

1882 and 1883, Kanō and his teacher's licence. Kanō Jigorō opened the Kōdōkan in 1882 [1]. He had entered the Kitō school under 飯久保恒年 in 1881 and received its licence two years later [21]. That licence survives in a photograph: it opens 日本傳起倒柔道之, the Japan-transmitted Kitō 柔道, and is dated 明治十六年十月吉辰, October 1883, signed 飯久保恒年 and addressed 加納治五郎殿, his name in a variant writing [22]. So the paper his teacher handed him, the year after he had opened his own hall, already called the art 柔道.

1888, Lindsay and Kanō in English. A paper read before the Asiatic Society of Japan on 18 April 1888, signed by the Reverend T. Lindsay and by Kanō, describes Kanō's school as an eclectic system of the art which now bears the name of Jiudo, and sets it against the old art: In Jiujutsu as formerly taught, the art of pliancy, as it has been called, the practice of the art was of most importance: in Judo, which is an investigation of the laws by which one may gain by yielding, practice is made subservient to the theory, although when studied as a system of athletics, practice plays a more important part [23]. The paper prints both spellings, Jiudo and Judo. It is a claim about the art, not about the name: nothing on the page read says the name was chosen to mark that difference.

1889, Kanō's own reasons. On 11 May 1889, before the Japan Education Society at the Imperial University, Kanō gave a lecture printed the next month as 「柔道一班並ニ其教育上ノ價値」, an outline of 柔道 and its value in education [24][25]. Early in it he allows that 柔道トハ耳新シイ言葉ノ樣ニ御考ヘノ方モ, some of you may think 柔道 a new word, as the National Diet Library's full-text index shows the 1889 print [24]. The first print is served to readers in Japan only; the lecture was reprinted whole in 1905, in the appendix to his pupil Arima Sumitomo's 『柔道大意』, the outline of 柔道, and the naming passage is quoted here from that reprint, which differs from the index's text of 1889 in spelling, in one verb ending and in the place of one particle [26]:

先ヅ私ガ普通行ハレテ居ル柔術ト云フ言葉ヲ用ヒナイデナゼ殊更ニ唯々高尙ナ一二ノ流儀ノミデ用ヒテ居マシタトコロノ柔道ト云フ名稱ヲ附ケマシテカノ説明ヲ致シマセウ今日柔術ト云ヘバ世人ハ恰モ一種ノ咽喉ヲ絞メ關節ヲ挫ジクトカ殺シタリ活カシタリスルトカ劍呑ナコトヲノミスル術デ身體ヲ害スルトモ益スルコトノ無イモノノ樣ニ考ヘテ居リマス

Let me explain why I did not use the common word 柔術 but gave it the name 柔道, which only one or two refined schools had used. Today, at the word 柔術, people think of an art that does nothing but dangerous things, choking the throat, breaking the joints, killing and reviving, harming the body and doing it no good. He gives two more reasons: since the old licensing had loosened, half-trained men had begun to teach false jūjutsu, and show booths charged admission to watch it beside sumō and acrobatics, so that the word had come to seem base, and he did not want his teaching taken for that; and he would not take a wholly new name such as 柔理學, the science of the principle of softness, because it would sound like his own invention, when he wished the work of the men before him not to be lost, so he kept a name that already existed and put the name of his hall on top of it, 講道館柔道 [24][26]. The naming passage, read at the 1905 leaf, does not set 道 against 術 as principle against application, and the index's windows on the first print, searched on fourteen keywords, show no such sentence elsewhere in it; the lecture's frame is three aims served together, 體育・勝負・修心, physical education, contest and the training of the mind [24][26].

1889 and 1890, the pupils' word. Sayo Kaiki 佐用海輝, reading the letters and diaries of Kōdōkan pupils, finds that even they wrote 柔術 to outsiders in these years: the naval officer Takarabe Takeshi 財部彪 wrote 柔術 to his parents in 1889, and in his diary of 1890 wrote 《柔道ヲ試ム》, tried 柔道 [27].

1894 and 1895, Kumamoto Jitsudō 隈元実道, 武道教範, a manual of the martial way. A teacher of a jūjutsu school of his own, writing on the name of his art, sets out the distinction usually credited to Kanō's choice: 《古來漢文ニ認メタル傳書ニハ劍道柔道並ヒニ之ヲ稱ス而メ兼テ道義ヲ意味スル塲合ハ柔道ト云ヒ單ニ技藝ヲ指稱スル塲合ハ柔術ト云ヘリ》, the transmission documents written of old in Chinese call them 劍道 and 柔道 alike; where the moral way is meant as well, it is called 柔道, and where only the technique is meant, 柔術 [28]. His own school, he says, uses neither. He notes that 《或者已ニ柔道ヲ以テ流名ノ如ク唱ヘルアリ》, someone already chants 柔道 as though it were the name of a school, and that the emperor Guangwu said he would rule the empire by 柔道, and calls it forced (牽強附會) to take the sense of such words, set it on the application of jūjutsu, and talk from it of ruling the country [28]. In the one-volume edition of the next year he keeps the objection, drops the sentence that his own school says neither, and writes in its place 《故に諸流を通して、柔道と云ふへし》, so across all the schools one should say 柔道, adding that since the oldest scrolls write やわら, one may say that too [29]. The 道 and 術 distinction is here in Japanese print by 1894, from a teacher outside the Kōdōkan who noted that someone already used 柔道 as a school's name and called it forced to read such words into jūjutsu; he names no one.

1898 to 1902, 『国士』, the journal of Kanō's society 造士会. In 1898 Kanō said, in a lecture a pupil took down for his society's journal 『国士』, that 柔道 is 《一種独立の学問であつて、昔の柔術の一流ではない》, a learning of its own, not one school of the old jūjutsu; yet in the journal's readers' questions of 1898 to 1902 three of the four exchanges still say 柔術, and Sayo concludes that before the journal even the Kōdōkan's own pupils did not readily use the name [27].

1909 to 1914, the Dai Nippon Butokukai 大日本武徳会. The national association of the martial arts, as Sakaue Yasuhiro 坂上康博 sets out, after the scholarship before him, printed 剣道範士 and 剣道教士, master titles in 道, in its journal from 1909; named the major of its school 「剣道又は柔道」 in 1912; amended its rules for masters in September 1914 so that the arts were called 「剣道」「柔道」; and in December 1914 divided its examiners into 「柔道」「剣道」「居合」「弓術」「槍術」 [30]. Before that, as Sakaue reads it, 剣道 and 柔道 had been reserved for the masters' titles, a goal to which 剣術 and 柔術 led; the 1912 major ended that restricted use, though as the goal of a school that trained masters it did not go far beyond it; by September 1914 the words named the arts themselves, before the general renaming of 1919 [30].

1914, Inoue Tetsujirō, 「宮本武藏と武士道」, Miyamoto Musashi and bushidō. The philosopher, in the journal 『東洋哲學』, as the National Diet Library's full-text index shows it: 今は柔術を多くは柔道と言つて居りますが、柔道をやるとか云ふことは言へない、柔道は本當は柔術をやるべき人の守るべき道德なのであります、故に柔術と柔道は自から區別しなければならぬものかと思ふ。是は嘉納君と直接問答しなければならぬから預りと致しまして, today people mostly call 柔術 柔道, but one cannot say that one "does" 柔道; 柔道 is properly the morality to be kept by the man who does 柔術, so I think 柔術 and 柔道 must be told apart. This I must take up with Kanō directly, so I shall leave it there [31]. The distinction is used here to question the art's name, not to explain it.

1916, Nishikubo Hiromichi 西久保弘道, 西久保氏武道訓. The later vice-president of the Butokukai has a section on the name, 柔道と名稱, which credits Kanō with the name 柔道 and with the use of 道 in place of the old terms, as the full-text index shows it [32].

1919, the Ministry and the Butokukai. The Ministry of Education's regulation for higher schools, gazetted on 29 March 1919, says of gymnastics: 《又劍道及柔道ヲ加フルコトヲ得》, and 劍道 and 柔道 may be added [33]. The Butokukai's own change of 剣術, 柔術 and 弓術 to 剣道, 柔道 and 弓道, with 武道 over them, led by Nishikubo as vice-president, has been dated by the scholarship to 1 August of that year; Sakaue shows that for 剣道 and 柔道 it had come by September 1914, above [30].

1922, Kanō before the police. In a lecture to the police association, as the full-text index shows it, Kanō says he has defined 柔道 several ways and どうも納りが附かぬ, it never quite settles, and of the name: 以前は柔道と言はずに柔術と言つて居ります、偶まには柔道とも言ひますが多くは柔術、ヤワラ、とか申して居ります, formerly people did not say 柔道 but 柔術; now and then 柔道, but mostly 柔術 or yawara; it became general, he says, because the old art studied only as attack and defense was not worth a lifetime's study [34]. And of his own choice of the name, in the same lecture: …ものであらうと云ふ考を起しましたに付て、柔術の〔術〕と云ふ詞は當らない、是れは一つの道であるから柔道と云ふ詞を遣はなければならぬ、昔も偶まには柔道と言つたこともありますから…, having come to think that it was …, the word 術 in 柔術 does not fit; this is a way, so the word 柔道 must be used; and since 柔道 had been said now and then of old …; the index's text prints two garbled glyphs before と云ふ詞, read here as the one character 術 by the sense [34]. In the full-text index it is the earliest known Japanese print of the 道 reason in Kanō's own words, fourteen years after Arima's English, below.

1926 to 1928, Kanō's 道 and 術. In a book of 1928, and in a course on sport printed in volumes between 1926 and 1928, Kanō sets the distinction out at length, as the full-text index shows it: 講道館に於ては、道を教へるを本體として、技術は道の應用として教へ始めたのである, at the Kōdōkan we began to teach the way as the substance, and technique as the application of the way, the way being what he now calls 心身最有効使用道, the way of the most efficient use of mind and body [35]. In the same passage he says the word was not his invention: 柔道といふ言葉は、維新前に全く用ひられて居なかつたのではなく、出雲に行はれて居た直信流といふ柔術の如きは、自ら直信流柔道と稱へて居た。又極稀には柔道といふ言葉も用ひられてはゐたが、世間では殆ど用ひなかつたのである, the word 柔道 was not entirely unused before the Restoration; the jūjutsu called 直信流, practiced in Izumo, called itself 直信流柔道; the word 柔道 was used, very rarely, but the world at large hardly used it; and he complains that once the Kōdōkan used it 在來の柔術をも皆柔道といひ出し、遂に區別が立たなくなつて仕舞つた, people began to call the old jūjutsu 柔道 as well, until no distinction could be made [35].

1941, Inoue's recollection. In the biography of Kanō published in 1941, Inoue recalls Kanō consulting him and saying, as the full-text index shows it, 「柔術」も「柔道」といつて、修養と結びつけないと、結果は宜しくないから、「柔道」といふことにする, unless 柔術 is called 柔道 and joined to self-cultivation, the result will not be good, so I shall call it 柔道; and he adds: それより前は、「柔道」といふことは無くして、皆な「柔術」といつた, before that there was no 柔道; everyone said 柔術 [36]. The recollection is undated and set down nearly sixty years after the event. Its last sentence is contradicted by the Edo witnesses read here (1724 as reported, 1795, 1853) and by Kanō himself in 1889, 1922 and 1928.

The word in English

1888, Lindsay and Kanō. Jiudo and Judo on one page, with the art of pliancy given as an English name for jūjutsu [23]. The Japan Weekly Mail of 28 April reported the meeting: Lindsay read that Ju-jutsu might be described as the old samurai art of fighting without weapons … the peculiar principle of which was to gain the victory by yielding to strength, and Mr. Kano exhibited and explained a few of the niceties of ju-jutsu, or ju dō, as he himself preferred to call it [9]. Kanō's preference for the name is on record in English a year before his lecture explained it.

1901–02, Brinkley, Japan, its History, Arts and Literature, vol. 3, p. 85. The students of ju-jutsu, or ju-dō (the path of pliancy), claim a great deal for it in moral training, quoting a paper read by T. Shidachi to the Japan Society in London in 1892: Not to be irritated by any emergency, but to be always calm and composed is one of the first principles of ju-dō [37].

1904, jiu-jitsu as the gentle art. An American manual of that year says of jiu-jitsu: Literally, it means the gentle art [38]. The same year a Tokyo-printed history of the war with Russia writes of the name of Judo, the "art of pliancy" [39]. So in 1904 English had gentle for 柔術 and pliancy for 柔道.

1904 and 1907, the dictionaries. Satow and Ishibashi's third edition sets 柔道 beside 柔術 under Wrestling as the art of self-defence [5]; Yamaguchi moves Hearn's definition of jiujutsu, the old samurai art of fighting without weapons, to 柔道 whole [7][8]. The English of jiu-jitsu begins here to pass to 柔道.

1908, Arima's Judo. Arima Sumitomo, Yodan (fourth grade) of Judo at the Kodo-kwan on his title page, published in Tokyo an English revision of his Japanese book, its preface dated 1906. It says that originally the term judo had been used by the Jikishin-ryu, and was afterwards adopted by the Kodo-kwan, and then gives the following extract from one of Mr. Kano's lectures: "The reason why I adopted the name judo instead of jujitsu is that my system is not simply a jitsu or art, but a dō. Of course the art is cultivated but my judo is essentially a dō. Now-a-days people speak of judo rather than of jujitsu, but up to the time when I began to expound my judo before the world, the term was but rarely used except by the Jikishin-ryu.", with the footnote dō means road or way literally, and doctrine figuratively [40]. The rest of the extract mostly follows the 1889 lecture's reasons: the dangerous schools, the ill-disciplined pupils, the unwillingness to coin a name for what he had learned from his teachers; it adds that his system has a wider scope for its object and the training is different, and that some pupils made themselves obnoxious by wilfully throwing down innocent persons [40]. The two opening sentences are not in the naming passage of the lecture as Arima's own Japanese book of 1905 prints it (pp. 22–24), which says only one or two refined schools and nothing of 道 against 術 [26]; the 直信流 sentence is Arima's own in a second book of 1905, 元來柔道とは直信流で稱へた名稱なれども, the name 柔道 was originally the 直信流's [41]. The 道 sentence may be Arima's gloss set at the head of his teacher's words, or a Kanō text not found here; either way, English readers met it as Kanō's reason from 1908, and Kanō's own Japanese print of it is found from 1922 [34].

1909, Inouye's dictionary. Jūdō (柔道), n. Jūdō; jujutsu; "the gentle art of self-defence", with the example that the art was then in vogue abroad after the war with Russia [10]. It is the first dictionary read here to bring gentle to 柔道.

1910, Lady Lawson. In Highways and Homes of Japan, jūjutsu, or judō, as Professor Kanō … prefers to call it, and: Professor Kanō explained to me during my lessons that the old word jūjutsu is in vogue only among foreigners and others whose knowledge of the art is derived from hearsay, whereas Japanese students and those who practise it invariably use the newer word, judō. The next paragraph, in her own voice, glosses the pair: jūjutsu (jutsu=art) means literally the art of pliancy … judō (dō=doctrine) is the principle or doctrine behind jūjutsu, by the application of which jūjutsu is practised [42].

1913, E. J. Harrison, The Fighting Spirit of Japan. The term judo is not in itself new, but until its adoption by Mr. Kano to designate his system it was by no means so much in vogue as the expression jujutsu … jujutsu means an art; do means a road or way; in other words, Mr. Kano insists upon the ethical as well as the purely physical aspect of his system [43].

1914 to 1928, Terry's guide. Kanō's art, calling it by the name judo ('principle,' or 'doctrine' of pliancy; by which name it is now commonly known), in the editions of 1914 to 1928 [44].

1915, The Japan Evangelist. A missionary monthly in Japan, noticing the first number of the magazine 『柔道』: the similar world (sic) Jūjutsu has become so common that it is not necessary to give any translation. The latter word means literally, the Art of Yielding … The former word means the Way of Yielding, and it is a suggestive title for a magazine [45]. Brinkley had glossed the whole name the path of pliancy in 1901–02, and Arima and Harrison had given road or way for 道 alone [37][40][43].

1918, the Los Angeles Times. Judo, which means "soft way" [46].

1937, Kanō's own English. The Kōdōkan's Kodokan Judo of 1986 says in the note to its foreword that its first chapter, and paragraphs of its second and third, were composed in English by Professor Jigoro Kano and appeared in Judo (Jujutsu), published by Maruzen in 1937 [47]. In that chapter Kanō writes of the art he built from jūjutsu, The resulting body of technique, which I named judo to distinguish it from its predecessor, is what is taught at the Kodokan, and glosses the two words: The ju in both is the same and means "gentleness" or "giving way." The meaning of jutsu is "art, practice," and do means "principle" or "way," the Way being the concept of life itself. Jujutsu may be translated as "the gentle art," judo as "the Way of gentleness," with the implication of first giving way to ultimately gain victory [47]. The 1937 book was not opened; the words are given as the 1986 edition prints them, on its own note.

1940, Thomas Firbank, I Bought a Mountain. The Japanese have made a national cult of judo, which means the "gentle way", in a memoir; it is the earliest gentle way known from the Internet Archive's full-text search, once six hits in five items the archive dates 1901 to 1935 are set aside as later items misdated, as their contents show; the archive's copies of the book, dated 1940 to 1946 and 1954, carry it [48].

1948, Philip J. Rasch, "Judo the Gentle Way." In an American coaching magazine: taught under the name of Judo, meaning "gentle way," that is, the art of first giving way [49], words close to Kanō's first giving way of 1937 [47].

1986, the Kōdōkan's own English, Kodokan Judo. The Kōdōkan's English compilation, of Kanō's writings and its editors', first made in 1956 and remade in 1986, prints his chapter of 1937 as its first; its gloss is the Way of gentleness, and the gentle way is not in the shelf copy's text layer [47].

2001 and 2026, the English Wikipedia. The article's first revision, of October 2001, says of the art's origin only that it originated in Japan and is said to be a refinement of Jiu jitsu, and was founded by Jigoro Kano in 1882 [50]. The current one glosses the name lit. gentle way, and notes that the Jikishin school had used the word 柔道 before him, but its use was rare [51].

Today. The design is sold as Judo, with the line Judo, the gentle way. This history's gloss gives what the dictionaries say the word names, the art Kanō founded in 1882. The gentle way is what the two characters say, 柔 soft, gentle and 道 way; as a gloss of the name it is known from 1940, in the Internet Archive's full-text search; the English of Kanō's lifetime said pliancy, doctrine, the gentle art (1909), the Way of Yielding (1915) and soft way (1918), and Kanō's own English of 1937 the Way of gentleness, which is the Kōdōkan's English today [23][37][42][10][45][46][47][48].

A reading

The story usually told is that Kanō took the rough old 柔術, made it a way, and so changed 術 to 道, and that the other arts followed him. The sources read here tell it in a different order. The word was not his: it was a Chinese emperor's, and the Edo schools' for their inner teaching, from the 直信流 of 1724 as its scholars report it and from the Suzuki house's Kitō school in Sadanobu's miscellany, in an entry of 1795 [14][15]. It was on the licence Kanō received in 1883 [22]. When he explained the name in 1889 he gave reasons of reputation and of piety toward the old masters, a name only one or two refined schools had used, and nothing about principle against technique [24].

In Japanese print, as the full-text index shows it, the 道 and 術 distinction reached the name first from outside the Kōdōkan. Kumamoto in 1894 drew it to say that 柔道 carried the moral way as well as the technique, and that to read such words into jūjutsu's application was forced; the someone he says already used 柔道 as a school's name, he does not name [28]; Inoue in 1914 drew it to say that one could not do 柔道, and left the question to take up with Kanō [31]. English has it earlier in Kanō's name: his pupil Arima set it in 1908 at the head of an extract from one of Kanō's lectures whose further reasons mostly follow 1889's, though the naming passage as Arima himself had printed it three years before does not carry it [40][26]; Lawson in 1910, beside what Kanō told her, and Harrison in 1913, reporting Kanō's position, give the gloss in their own voices [42][43]. Kanō's own Japanese print of it is found from 1922, when he told the police that 術 did not fit because this was a way [34], and he set it out at length in 1926–28, when his doctrine of the most efficient use of mind and body gave him a way large enough to set above every technique [35]; Inoue's recollection of 1941 turned it into the story of the naming [36]. So the story did not come only from outside: within twenty years of the 1889 lecture the Kōdōkan's own pupil was telling it abroad, and within thirty-five Kanō was telling it himself. Whether he said it before 1908, to Arima or to the foreigners he taught, the record read here cannot settle; Arima's sentence may be his own reading of his teacher. What the record does settle is that the reasons Kanō printed in 1889 were reputation and piety. Lindsay and Kanō's English of 1888 had already put practice under theory, outside its athletics [23], so the thought was early in the art. What came later, in Kanō's own print by 1922, was reading it into the word.

The Edo 柔道 and Kanō's were not the same teaching. Hara and Uozumi call the Kitō school's a training of the mind in handling 気, fundamentally different from Kanō's [18]; the 直信流 of 1729 as quoted grounds it in a virtue of gentleness given by heaven [14]. Kanō said himself that he kept an old name for something new [24][35]. I read the name as an inheritance he chose deliberately, and the 道 he later preached as his own filling of it. A buyer who hangs these two characters hangs a word the Edo masters wrote for the way above the technique and Kanō gave a whole art and a sport, and the gentle way is a fair reading of its characters, near Kanō's own Way of gentleness of 1937, that English found in the twentieth century.

Notes

Japanese Scrolls by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase

Japanese Scroll of Judo (jūdō) in a block font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
柔道OB2ABlock
Japanese Scroll of Judo (jūdō) in a cursive font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
柔道VC3BCursive
Japanese Scroll of Judo (jūdō) in Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase's own style (jiun)
柔道VD2BJiun
Japanese Scroll of Judo (jūdō) in a semi-cursive font by Master Japanese Calligrapher Eri Takase
柔道VS2CSemi-Cursive

Sources not seen

A reader with access to any of these is invited to write to Takase Studios at Tim@Takase.com.

References

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  2. 柔道, JMdict, at jisho.org. https://jisho.org/word/柔道
  3. J. C. Hepburn, A Japanese-English and English-Japanese Dictionary, second edition, American Presbyterian Mission Press, Shanghai, 1872, p. 190. Internet Archive japaneseenglishe00hepb_0. https://archive.org/details/japaneseenglishe00hepb_0/page/n227
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  24. 嘉納治五郎「柔道一班並ニ其教育上ノ價値」, 『大日本教育會雜誌』 87, June 1889, served to readers in Japan only; known from the full-text search's snippets. National Diet Library pid 1569093. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1569093
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  41. 有馬純臣『通俗柔道図解』, October 1905, pp. 13–14, scans 12–13. National Diet Library pid 860394. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/860394/1/12
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  49. Philip J. Rasch, "Judo the Gentle Way", Scholastic Coach 17(8), April 1948, read in the Internet Archive's full-text search windows. Internet Archive sim_scholastic-coach_scholastic-coach_1948-04_17_8. https://archive.org/details/sim_scholastic-coach_scholastic-coach_1948-04_17_8
  50. "Judo", English Wikipedia, revision of 20 October 2001. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=260501
  51. "Judo", English Wikipedia, revision of 3 October 2026. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?oldid=1378298357

Authors

Tim Jackowski (Systems Architect, Takase Studios, LLC) · 典 Ten (Anthropic Claude Opus 5.5, Takase Studios, LLC)

AI written · Ten wrote the history. Tim Jackowski commissioned it and answers for it.

Not yet reviewed.

Cite as: Tim Jackowski and Ten, "Philology of 柔道 (jūdō)," Takase Studios, 2026, https://takase.com/library/philology/judo.