Why symbolic death?
We don’t actually kill people in judo any more, but originally judo, or rather its predecessor jujutsu, was used by samurai warriors as a means to kill or maim their enemies on the battlefield. Judo is directly derived from the techniques used by the samurai. The literal meaning of judo is ‘the way of softness’. The kanji character for ‘ju’ is taken from a Chinese military saying that ‘softness defeats hardness’. Exactly where these techniques came from is now lost in the mists of time. Jujutsu and sumo seem both to come from the same source stretching back to prehistoric times. In fact there are various accounts of where the concept of “ju” (yielding) in jujutsu, or yawara as it was also known, came from. Here’s one famous account, given by the school named Yoshinryu: There once lived in Nagasaki a physician named Akiyama, who went to China to study medicine. There he learned an art called hakuda which consisted of kicking and striking, differing, we may note, from jujutsu, which is m
