How I Discovered Jujitsu

When I was a kid growing up in St. Louis, the only martial art that I had heard about was Karate.  Taekwondo was considered Korean Karate.  I did not know about any of the grappling arts at that point.

However, KPLR Channel 11 ran a series of films on Saturdays for a month featuring Mr. Moto, played by Peter Lorre.  Mr. Moto was an American secret agent, who was a Jujitsu expert.  He did all kinds of neat little moves, where he would launch a big guy through the air.  I found a very small blurb about it in my grandfather’s encyclopedia set.

The next time that we went to the library I searched the collection and found one book on Jujitsu.  The martial arts collection was about five books in the early 1980s.  Today, my personal library of martial arts books is twenty times plus that amount.  It really only wet my apettite for learning the art but we did not have any Jujitsu schools located nearby.

japanese-jujitsu-agricultural-school

Jujitsu Practice at a Japanese Agricultural School in 1922

As I started college, I started Shotokan Karate and then moved to Taekwondo with my nephew but I never gave up on wanting to learn a grappling martial art.  While I was initially interested in Japanese Jujitsu after Royce Gracie won the first couple Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) tournaments, I wanted to learn Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

I compromised and started Judo in June 2005.  I started Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu in April 2009.

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