Maximum efficiency, mutual welfare, and what jiu-jitsu kept

Judo has two principles that its founder put in writing. The Kodokan prints them on its English pages in romanised Japanese, Seiryoku-Zenyo and Jita-Kyoei, and translates each more than one way. The first is "maximum efficient use of energy" on its history page, "Maximum Efficient Use of Mind and Body" on its page about the purpose of judo, and "maximum efficiency" for short. The second is "mutual prosperity for self and others" on one page and "Mutual welfare and benefit" on another.

The dates matter. The International Judo Federation dates the creation of judo to May 1882. Its own article on the second principle says the two "weren't officially enacted until 1922 when the Kodokan Cultural Society was founded", and adds that they had been at the heart of Kano's thinking from the start. The passages the Kodokan excerpts from Kano under each heading are dated 1922, 1925 and 1936. The pair of mottoes is a statement from the last third of his life, forty years after judo was named.

Brazilian jiu-jitsu descends from Kodokan judo by the route the Journal's piece on Maeda describes. This article asks what it has of either principle. One survives as a saying, in an altered form. The other survives as custom, and the sport's federation does not state it in the documents read for this piece. Where a step in that argument is ours, it is marked.

The older idea was yielding. The paper that the Rev. T. Lindsay and J. Kano read to the Asiatic Society of Japan in April 1888 gives the main principle of the old art as "not to match strength with strength, but to gain victory by yielding to strength", and describes the new school's judo as "an investigation of the laws by which one may gain by yielding".

In 1932 Kano gave a lecture at the University of Southern California, which the Kodokan publishes in English under his name. He begins with the same idea and puts numbers on it. A man with ten units of strength pushes a man with seven. If the weaker man resists, he is pushed over. If he gives way and keeps his balance, the pusher leans forward and for a moment is worth perhaps three units "because of his awkward position", and the seven can beat him with half of what they have. Kano then adds a sentence that the usual retelling drops. Even a stronger man does better to give way first, "because by so doing I should have greatly economised my energy."

Then he says yielding is not enough. Judo also hits, kicks and chokes, which are direct attacks. Someone held by the wrist cannot get free without using strength against the grip. "Is there any principle which really covers the whole field?" he asks, and answers that there is: "the maximum-efficient use of mind and body". The Kodokan's history page tells it the same way: Kano transformed the traditional principle of "defeating strength through flexibility" into the new one.

So the first principle is not a promise that the small beat the large. It is a rule against waste, and in Kano's own example it binds the stronger person as well.

It would be easy to read the second principle as an ethical addition to a fighting method. Kano argues for it differently. In the 1932 lecture, efficiency applied to social life "demands, first of all, order and harmony among its members, and this can only be attained through mutual aid and concession, leading to mutual welfare and benefit." The 1925 essay the Kodokan excerpts makes the case with three travellers who want the mountains, the sea and a rest. If they wish to travel together they have to choose a common destination. It rejects selfishness, which it says ends in self-destruction, and it also rejects sacrificing oneself for no purpose.

The lecture shows what this looks like in practice. In free practice the two people "may use whatever methods they like provided they do not hurt each other", and the learner is taught "to employ only as much of his force as is absolutely required for the purpose in question". Both instructions are the first principle and the second at once.

The International Judo Federation's article gives the mat version plainly. An attacker throws without attention to a less experienced partner, who is hurt, and the attacker soon "won't find anyone to work with him" and stops improving. That is the federation's illustration, not Kano's text, and it shows how the reasoning runs: a training partner is the one resource the method cannot do without.

Every jiu-jitsu room has some version of the line that technique beats strength. This article attributes it to nobody. In print, Gracie Barra's home page calls Brazilian jiu-jitsu "a martial art rooted in leverage, technique, and strategy over brute strength". The UFC's introduction to mixed martial arts says the skills taught in Rio "were later modified to use less strength and to be more effective against larger opponents". That sentence carries a history the Maeda piece gives reasons to handle carefully, and it is cited here only for its wording.

Our reading is that these lines are nearer to 1888 than to 1932. They describe the smaller person against the larger one, which is the case of seven units against ten. Kano's later principle dropped the comparison. It does not mention who is stronger, it covers the direct attack as well as the yielding one, and it asks the strong to economise too. A room can repeat the saying while its strongest member wins on strength, and nothing in the saying objects. The principle would.

The timing may explain some of this, and the inference is ours. Cairus has Maeda and Tomita arriving in New York in 1904; the National Diet Library column prints 1907 for the same trip and says Maeda never set foot in Japan again. Either year is well before 1922. The man whose club passed judo into Brazil had left before the two principles were formally set side by side, so there was no two-part motto to carry. The efficiency idea was already in circulation: Cairus describes the Japanese method of those years as "combining maximum efficiency with minimum use of energy". No document read here records what Maeda said about principle to anyone in Belem.

For this piece we read the International Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Federation's home page, its rules page, the Rule Book in version 6.1, the General System of Graduation dated June 2026 and the page that introduces it, and its Safe Sport page. The rule book and the graduation document were searched as text. The words efficiency, leverage, strength, philosophy, mutual and welfare do not occur in either. We found no page that states principles of the art.

What the documents contain is regulation. The rule book makes it a disciplinary matter when an athlete shows "offensive or disrespectful behavior towards an opponent or the public", and lists among its fouls "Gestures or exercises meant to suggest physical superiority". It tabulates the holds prohibited in each division, and it gives referees of under-12 matches the duty of standing behind a child who is lifted off the ground. The graduation page says the system exists to "unify and standardize the teachings, practice, and competition of modern Jiu-Jitsu". The Safe Sport page describes an outside training course as part of an effort "to make the well-being of the athlete the centerpiece of sport programs".

Several of those rules protect an opponent. None says why an opponent is owed protection, and a rule book is not obliged to. The nearest written relative of mutual welfare read for this piece comes from an association of schools: Gracie Barra's page about itself lists "Brotherhood | Integrity | Development" and says that "true strength lies in how we support others". The search has limits. It covers public English pages on one day, and the courses on the federation's learning site were not read.

What follows is this site's argument. In judo the second principle has an author, a date and an institution that still publishes it. In jiu-jitsu it has none of the three, and it is practised anyway. A tap is honoured when it is given. A partner is allowed to finish a movement so that both people learn it. Nobody learned those habits from the federation documents read here, which do not contain them. They were learned from a room.

Kano's derivation explains how a custom can last without a text. If mutual welfare follows from efficiency, then any group that trains hard for long enough will arrive at it, because the careless partner in the federation's example runs out of people to train with. The custom does not need a motto on the wall to keep working.

The cost is that there is nothing to point to. A judo student can be shown the sentence and its date. A jiu-jitsu student gets whatever version the room happens to hold, and a room that teaches the first principle and leaves out the second is contradicted by no document read here. Kano claimed the second follows from the first. Jiu-jitsu, which kept the first as a saying and never wrote the second down, has been testing that claim for about a century.