Masahiko Kimura

Masahiko Kimura: One Thousand Push-Ups a Day

He practised his outer reap against trees. Not pads, not partners — trees, because his training partners had asked him to stop using osoto gari on them for fear of injury. He did a thousand push-ups a day and trained nine hours a day. In a competitive judo career that included three consecutive All-Japan titles, he is reported to have lost four matches in total, all of them in 1935, when he was eighteen. Masahiko Kimura is the closest thing combat sport has to a control experiment in what happens when a gifted body is subjected to an unreasonable amount of work.

Kumamoto, Age Nine

Kimura was born in Kumamoto on 10 September 1917 and began judo at nine. The initial motivation was reportedly the ordinary one of a stubborn child: he wanted to beat his teacher, Mr Tagawa.

The ascent was immediate and vertical. He earned his first dan at Chinsei Junior High after throwing five opponents. By fifteen he was fourth dan, having defeated six consecutive opponents ranked third and fourth dan. In 1935, at eighteen, he became the youngest fifth dan in the history of the Kodokan after beating eight men in a row.

His principal teacher was Tatsukuma Ushijima. But the more revealing detail is where he chose to train: randori at the Tokyo Police dojo as well as the Kodokan. Police judo in prewar Japan was the roughest available — bigger men, fewer courtesies, an emphasis on control rather than points. Kimura deliberately sought out the hardest room in the city.

The Training

The regimen has become legend, and the legend is well documented: a thousand push-ups daily, nine hours of practice, work against the makiwara striking board borrowed from karate, and the osoto gari repetitions against tree trunks.

He also cross-trained outside judo, which was unusual to the point of eccentricity for a Japanese champion of the era. He studied Shotokan karate under Gichin Funakoshi for two years, then Goju-Ryu under So-Nei Chu, becoming an assistant instructor alongside Masutatsu Oyama and Gogen Yamaguchi — two men who would each go on to found major karate lineages of their own.

Total Domination

Kimura won the All-Japan Collegiate Championships in 1935, the Takudai Kosen championship in 1936, and then the All-Japan Judo Championships three years running: 1937, 1938 and 1939. He took the Ten-Ran Shiai in 1940, the West Japan Championship in 1947, and the 1949 All-Japan Championship, where he drew with Takahiko Ishikawa. He reached seventh dan at thirty; his rank was then frozen, the Kodokan objecting to his move into professional wrestling.

Rio, 1951

In 1949 the São Paulo Shimbun invited Kimura to Brazil, and he travelled with the judoka Toshio Yamaguchi and Yukio Kato. What followed, in 1951, is the single most consequential fight in the history of grappling.

The venue was the Maracanã, before around 20,000 spectators including Brazilian President Getúlio Vargas. The match ran under "Gracie Rules": no wins by throw or pin, only submission or unconsciousness. This stripped away most of the scoring system Kimura had spent his life mastering.

He adapted inside the fight. He blocked Hélio Gracie's osoto gari and ouchi gari attempts, then threw him repeatedly — ouchi gari, harai goshi, uchi mata, ippon seoi nage — throws that scored nothing but progressively wrecked his opponent. He pinned Gracie with kuzure-kami-shiho-gatame, cycled through kesa-gatame, sankaku-jime and do-jime, and finally applied gyaku-ude-garami, the reverse arm entanglement. He broke the arm. Gracie would not submit. He broke it a second time, and was preparing a third rotation when Gracie's corner surrendered on his behalf. Kimura, impressed by Gracie's refusal to quit, is reported to have awarded him sixth dan.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu named the lock after the man who used it. Today, in every gym on earth, "kimura" is a common noun.

Professional Wrestling and Rikidozan

Kimura's turn to professional wrestling followed his wife's tuberculosis diagnosis; while employed as a police instructor, he appears to have needed the money for her treatment. In the early 1950s he founded the Kokusai Pro Wrestling Association, and he was drawn into Rikidozan's Japan Pro Wrestling Association, where the 1954 matches against the Canadian Sharpe Brothers are credited with igniting Japan's professional wrestling boom. He later formed the International Pro Wrestling Force in Kumamoto, the first Japanese promotion to bring Mexican lucha libre wrestlers to the country.

On 22 December 1954 he met Rikidozan for the Japanese Heavyweight Championship. The bout was choreographed to end in a draw and set up rematches. Rikidozan departed from the script: instead of taking Kimura's planned karate chop to the chest, he struck Kimura full force in the neck. Kimura went down unconscious and Rikidozan won by knockout. There was no rematch.

In 1959 Kimura returned to Brazil to face Waldemar Santana, a jiu-jitsu and capoeira man managed by Carlson Gracie, some forty pounds heavier and twenty-five years his junior in stamina if not in age. The first bout, on 1 July at the Maracanãzinho, went four ten-minute rounds in judogi; the press described Kimura winning at will. The second, on 12 July under vale tudo rules, was a bloody draw — Kimura fighting ill, according to his autobiography, headbutting, striking from the bottom, breaking Santana's nose, and finishing exhausted. He was forty-one.

Why Masahiko Is Called a Genius

The claim for Kimura rests on physical craft, not on intellect, and it is important to say so plainly. He wrote no theory, founded no school of thought, and left behind no body of ideas. He was not a thinker in any conventional sense. Nothing in the record suggests otherwise, and dressing him in a scholar's clothes would misrepresent what he actually was.

What he had was something narrower and, in its own domain, close to unrepeatable. First, a capacity for volume of work that borders on the pathological: nine hours a day, a thousand push-ups, throws practised against trees. Second — and this is the part that is genuinely uncommon — a kind of kinaesthetic problem-solving that operated at fight speed. The Gracie match is the proof. He entered a contest under rules that deleted the entire scoring apparatus of his sport, against a specialist in a system built specifically to neutralise judo on the ground, and he solved it live: use the throws not to win but to damage, take the pin, then work through a sequence of holds until the arm was available. That is improvisation inside a physical grammar so thoroughly internalised that it functions as intuition.

The honest counter-case: his greatest fame comes from beating a much smaller man, and his career's later chapters were professional wrestling, a worked business, plus one genuine loss by knockout when a colleague broke the script. His judo dominance came in an era before international competition, so the field he beat was national. And "genius" applied to a body is always a stretched usage — it names a rarity, not a mind.

Legacy

Kimura died in Tokyo on 18 April 1993, aged seventy-five, of lung cancer. He trained Olympic medallists and All-Japan champions, and he was arguably the first serious cross-trainer in modern combat sport, mixing judo, karate and wrestling decades before anyone called that a discipline. But his real monument is linguistic. Every day, in gyms on six continents, somebody applies a shoulder lock and calls it by his name — a Japanese judoka's surname permanently attached to a technique by the Brazilians he beat with it.

Achievements

• Discipline: judo