Kano opened judo’s first dojo in a Tokyo temple in 1882
In February 1882 Jigoro Kano started teaching at Eisho-ji temple in Tokyo’s Shitaya ward, turning adapted jujutsu into judo—a dō, or way, not merely jutsu techniques. Principles of maximum efficiency and mutual welfare steered the art from battlefield grappling toward educational budō.
The twelve-tatami room first hosted residents Tomita Tsunejirō and Shiro Saigo; Kitō-ryū teacher Iikubo coached three days weekly. Kano kept seiryoku zen’yō—best use of energy—and jita kyōei—shared flourishing—at the centre, illustrating softness controlling hardness by yielding to redirect force. He argued the old jujutsu name sounded like a bag of tricks the public had abandoned, so the path character signalled moral and physical education.
Randori practice and contest rules grew under that philosophy. Kano spoke in 1927 about restoring striking to the ruleset, yet the change never stuck. From a temple annex measuring about 214 square feet, the Kodokan model spread into Olympic sport while still citing those two maxims.
Kanō Jigorō, born in 1860, studied English, calligraphy and the Confucian classics from the age of seven. Jujutsu had fallen out of fashion in a westernising Japan, and in 1877, as a University of Tokyo student, he found that many teachers had turned to running osteopathy clinics; he trained under Fukuda in Tenjin Shin'yō-ryū and received that dojo's scrolls on Fukuda's death in 1880. Judo's techniques fall into throws, grappling and strikes, the last allowed only in kata, and competitive joint locks are limited to the elbow. Throws divide into standing tachi-waza and sacrifice sutemi-waza, practitioners drill break-falls called ukemi, the thrower is tori and the receiver uke, and judo entered the Olympics in 1964 and the Paralympics in 1988.
Source: Judo
