MITSUYO MAEDA

Mitsuyo Maeda is the technical ancestor of every Brazilian Jiu Jitsu practitioner alive today. Born in Aomori Prefecture in 1878, he entered Jigoro Kano's Kodokan school of judo as a young man and quickly became one of its most accomplished randori practitioners. When the Kodokan began dispatching senior students abroad to demonstrate the new art, Maeda was among the first sent, leaving Japan in 1904 and embarking on a thirteen-year tour of the United States, Cuba, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Spain, and finally Brazil.

His prize-fighting record across this period is legendary if difficult to verify. Maeda fought in mixed-rules matches against boxers, wrestlers, and challengers of every kind, often against men fifty to one hundred pounds heavier than himself, and reportedly went unbeaten in over 1,000 contests. The figure is almost certainly inflated by contemporary promotion, but the genuine number is still remarkable enough to have established him as one of the most successful combat athletes of the early twentieth century. The Brazilian press dubbed him Conde Koma — Count Combat — and the nickname stuck.

Maeda settled in Belém around 1917, befriended Brazilian politician Gastão Gracie, and through that connection began teaching Gastão's son Carlos Gracie around 1920. The techniques he transmitted were the Kodokan judo of his era, including the newaza ground-grappling syllabus that the Kodokan had recently been emphasizing. Within the next two decades, Carlos and his brothers (most notably Helio) would reorganize and refine these techniques into what became known as Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, though modern scholarship credits the parallel Luiz França / Oswaldo Fadda lineage with developing similar techniques independently from the same Maeda root. Maeda himself died in 1941, never having seen the global reach his teaching would eventually achieve.