Mrs. Judo: Be Strong, Be Gentle, Be Beautiful

Directed by Yuriko Gamo Romer. 2012. U.S./Japan. 58 minutes.

Study areas: Asian American, U.S./Japan, Judo, Women's Liberation Movement.

As the title suggests, the film Mrs. Judo is as much about marriage as it is about judo.  The film centers on Keiko Fukuda, a Japanese woman in her 90s, who holds a plethora of accomplishments in the sport.  She is the world's highest ranking female in judo, and the last living disciple of Jigōrō Kanō, the founder of the sport.  Despite her age, she still practices and teaches, and we see her carefully leaving a wheelchair to do crunches with other students.  As she says repeatedly, judo is her life, the activity she cares the most about, and she has sacrificed much to make it possible.  The film demonstrates the depth of her commitment but also suggests the effects of it, including her sadness over the normative lifecourse that became unavailable to her.  Ultimately, despite her impressive accomplishments and the filmmaker's delicate storytelling, the film left me sad because it so powerfully represents her sadness over foreclosed options.

Ms. Fukuda's relationship to judo began before her birth: her grandfather taught jiu-jitsu to Jigōrō Kanō, who would go on to create judo in the 1880s.  When Mr. Kanō later visited the Fukuda family, he invited the young Keiko to try judo, and she never looked back.  She says she was particularly captivated by the aggression, or at least the aggressive moves, possible within judo practice.  Throwing, flipping, or tripping one's opponent are all central to the sport, and techniques were taught to women as well as men.  As Ms. Fukuda and other students explain, girls trained alongside the boys.  Judo includes sparing or free practice (randori), as well as choreographed movements (kata, "forms") that are practiced with a partner but not part of sparing. When men's judo was first included in the Olympics in Tokyo in 1964, Ms. Fukuda was chosen to demonstrate ju-no-kata even though women's judo wasn't added until 1992.  Pictures of the demonstration show her upside down but perfectly straight, appearing to balance on her partner's shoulder.  Needless to say, being invited to demonstrate the sport on a world stage, and at a key moment in Japan's postwar rebuilding, represents her prodigious talent.

Ms. Fukuda ended up in the United States through accident as much as planning.  After the war ended, a judo organization in Oakland, California invited her to come teach, which she did before returning to teach in Japan for another ten years.  In the mid-1960s, an Oakland dōjo invited her to return, and she found herself back in the United States, teaching judo.  In her politic phrasing, it's hard to tell if limited opportunities in Japan might have driven her to look for teaching jobs elsewhere; she says she asked the people in Oakland if perhaps she was too old to teach, something I can imagine she might have felt in Japan.  There, especially in the 1960s, social expectations would have suggested that women need to marry and have children, so Ms. Fukuda's worries about being "too old" might very well have been relative to these cultural standards.  The Americans, though, didn't seem to care about how old she was, and she returned to the US in the midst of the expanding women's lib movement.  The social changes taking place there meant there were suddenly new calls to hire women into police and firefighting forces, and one of Ms. Fukuda's friends helped arrange her to be a teacher for female recruits.  Eventually, she decided she would rather stay in the United States -- the film doesn't delve into reasons or details -- and she was granted citizenship.

Marriage represents the most obvious instance of the normative path not taken in Ms. Fukuda's story.  When she was younger, Mr. Kanō promised to find her a husband, and after he died, she narrates, his daughter generously took over that responsibility.  Although Ms. Fukuda tears up taking about this topic, she never married, and the viewer never gets a clear sense of a reason.  Two other, much younger Japanese women who practice judo, suggest that the sacrifices necessary to get good at a sport leave little opportunity for a conventional marriage, but Ms. Fukuda herself never explains what happened.  I was left wondering if there were potential marriages she had to turn down, men who rejected her, or something even more complicated.  At every point when she talks about marriage in even the most general terms, Ms. Fukuda begins to cry, which led me to believe she was lamenting what she had to give up in order to follow her dream.  She ends up living with a female friend in San Francisco. While I was wondered about the nature of their relationship, the film represents them as only friends. 

Ms. Fukuda is in her 90s in the film, and although she still teaches and practices judo, she's not as active as she once was.  Perhaps this bodily shift accounts for her sadness: she had sacrificed the opportunity to be married or have children for judo, and now her aging is putting judo increasingly out of reach, too.  Part of the film's narrative arc follows attempts to get Ms. Fukuda formal recognition for her accomplishments from the Kōdōkan, judo's governing body.  She held the highest rank available to women -- 5th degree black belt -- for more than 30 years, while men she had taught graduated to higher rankings.  Finally, only in her ninth decade, is the ranking system revised and Ms. Fukuda promoted.

Mrs. Judo is a delicate film that clearly aspires to reflect the combination of power and gentleness idealized in judo practice.  It gestures toward deeply misogynistic policies, restrictive social norms, and their aftereffects on one woman's life but never directly engages them.  As a representation of her accomplishments, it strikes me as an unusually realistic portrait of the contradictions and pain that come with deep commitments.

Keiko Fukuda is an engaging protagonist whose steadfast dedication and sense of humor are palpable, and just about anybody would be interested in her story. The film would work best for middle and high school aged students, especially students in sociology and gender studies classes. Fukuda’s ability to stay active as she ages would lead to good discussions about gerontology in sports. Excerpts would also work well in a physical education class to accompany an exhibition on Judo, for example.

Allison Alexy is a cultural anthropologist focused on contemporary Japan. She is an assistant professor in the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures at the University of Michigan.  She holds a BA from the University of Chicago and PhD from Yale University, both in anthropology. Her research explores intimacy, family norms, and law in contemporary Japan.  She is finishing a book exploring these topics, Divorce and the Romance of Independence in Contemporary Japan, and has completed research about international child custody disputes and abductions involving Japanese citizens.  Her research has been supported by Fulbright IIE fellowship, the Japan Foundation, and an Abe Fellowship administered by the Social Science Research Council.

 

For more information visit the Mrs. Judo website.

Last Updated: September 22, 2015