The most famous episode in the Kodokan–Totsuka struggle is the alleged Metropolitan Police martial-arts tournament held at Yayoi Shrine in Shiba Park, traditionally dated either 1886 or 1888. The Kodokan team supposedly included future leaders such as Shiro Saigo, Yoshitsugu Yamashita, Tsunejiro Tomita, and Sakujiro Yokoyama—the later “Four Guardians of Kodokan”—while Totsuka was represented by its own four leading fighters: Taro Terushima, Entaro Kochi, Teisuke Nishimura, and Shintaro Katayama. Accounts describe an openly hostile atmosphere, with Totsuka practitioners mocking the younger Kodokan fighters as “shosai,” or students, and contrasting their university backgrounds with traditional martial training. The Kodokan allegedly won the overwhelming majority of roughly fifteen bouts, with only a few draws and perhaps two losses. The victories supposedly convinced Tokyo police chief Michitsune Mishima that Kano’s method was superior for non-lethal arrest work, leading the police to recruit Kodokan instructors and helping judo displace older jujutsu schools. Yet no clear contemporary register survives. Even the date, number of tournaments, rules, and bout results vary sharply among Kano’s memoirs, family chronicles, later historians, and participant recollections. Some critics have called the story propaganda created to explain judo’s spectacular rise, while historians such as Sanzo Maruyama argue that the expansion of judo is difficult to understand without some real victories over jujutsu. The rivalry is therefore historically important but partly preserved as martial-arts folklore rather than a fully documented sporting record.
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