Conversation

Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Two days ago, in the 60kg men’s category for Judo, Naohisa Takato fought Yang Yung-wei in the finals and won Japan’s first gold of the Tokyo Olympics. He won with zero scores. Yang simply had more penalties than he did. My old coach was disappointed. But I wasn’t.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
The Japanese attitude to Judo is that you want to win by ippon — the highest score possible. It is less ‘honourable’ to win ‘technically’, that is, to win by making your opponent commit more errors than you over the course of the match. My old Sensei was trained in Japan.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
So of course he thought it was a terrible match; Takato didn’t win decisively. But the commentators, and my current coach, and perhaps even Kosei Inoue, Japan’s head coach, pretty much didn’t care. Modern Judo has a technical component to it. It’s just how the game is played.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Of course, with experience, I think Takato played a smart game. (And to be fair I’m sure my old coach knows this as well). For the majority of the final, he denied his opponent a usable grip. He effectively cut Yang’s technique set down to 0.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
Anyway why am I talking about this? For the majority of my teenage (competitive) years, I believed what my old coach did: that I had to win by points. That it was the ‘right’ thing to do. An entire technical, strategic component of the game was locked away from me.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
If you have 30 seconds on the clock and your opponent is down by two penalties (a third means an instant loss); wouldn’t it make sense to push him to commit that third error? Shouldn’t this be something you train for? Top players do. I did not. Ugh.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
The lesson I took from this was that I wasn’t playing the ACTUAL game of Judo. I was playing a harder game, with a more restrictive rule set. I would make excuses for myself, and say things like ‘this is how Judo is supposed to be.’ I wanted to win the ‘right’ way.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
But this is silly. You don’t want to place restrictions on yourself for no reason at all. There’s an old Buffett quote that goes ‘I don’t look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.’ I think about this a lot.
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Cedric Chin
@ejames_c
In Judo, as in life, you want to play the ACTUAL game. Not some made up game where things are harder than they need to be. (Within ethical constraints, of course.)
@lesley_pizza
has a good way of thinking about this: she calls it ‘are you playing with the REAL rules?’
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