Chapter 1

1. A Feeling of Doom

A Dutch Judoka Defeats a Japanese at His Own Game

The Dutch Giant

It was Friday, October 23, 1964, the penultimate day of competition.

The Nippon Budokan was charged with excitement. Paul Maruyama of the United States judo team watched from the side as two giants of judo stepped up on the tatami-matted platform to face off in the finals of the Open Weight Division: Anton Geesink of Holland and Akio Kaminaga of Japan.

Judo was debuting at the Olympics, the only event native to Japan, and the Japanese had already taken gold in the first three weight classes over the previous three days. Maruyama understood that this was no ordinary match, that to sweep the judo championships in all four weight classes would set off celebrations across Japan and bring back feelings of pride that had been crushed at the end of World War II, a mere nineteen years prior.

“It was definitely an electric atmosphere,” said Maruyama. “The Budokan was packed. The Crown Prince and Princess were present. But there was also a sense of resignation in the air. The spectators could see for themselves: Geesink was two meters tall and weighed 120 kilos, this big foreign guy, while Kaminaga was 1.8 meters tall and only 102 kilos.”

In fact, Geesink had already shocked the judo world in 1961 by becoming the first non-Japanese to win the World Championships, defeating the Japanese champion Koji Sone. So while the Japanese in the Budokan were hoping Kaminaga would exceed expectations, hope was all they had.

Japanese novelist Tsuneo Tomita was in the Budokan that day. He saw Geesink and Kaminaga go up against one another in a preliminary round and felt that Kaminaga had lost before the match had even begun. “Geesink stood tall,” he wrote, “raising both hands high in the air, readying himself for the battle, total confidence in his expression. On the other hand, Kaminaga’s face was pale, and his entire body rigid. This does not look good, I thought with a gulp.”2

Geesink then handled Kaminaga quite easily in that preliminary match.

What could be done? If Kaminaga was to face Geesink again in the medal round, a likely scenario, could he find a weakness in Geesink’s formidable technique? Maruyama’s teammate, exchange student Ben Nighthorse Campbell, was also a member of Kaminaga’s team at Meiji University, a judo powerhouse in Japan at the time. According to Campbell, they gathered together behind locked doors to come up with ways to take Geesink down. Kaminaga then engaged in practice bouts with fellow Meiji judoka, who mimicked Geesink’s style and technique, looking for that nugget of insight that would give Kaminaga a fighting chance.

During the course of the day’s tournament, both men progressed through qualifying matches. Kaminaga won his bouts, but Geesink dominated in his. Tomita described Geesink’s matches as akin to a “sole black belt tossing around a bunch of white belt novices.”

Judo purists in Japan at the time believed that height and weight were less important than balance, technique, and attitude, which is why judo competitions in Japan at that time never segregated judoka into weight classes. But weight and size can make a significant difference if all other factors are equal. “In those days there was still an attitude that skill could prevail over size and weight,” said Campbell, who would go on to become a two-term US Senator for Colorado. “Over time judo has changed. Size matters.”

The Japanese saw themselves as smaller and weaker when compared to the West. They saw the face-off between Geesink and Kaminaga as a reminder of the Pacific War, when the bigger, stronger Americans with their bigger, stronger military weaponry ended the war with authority.

And the Japanese public still remembered Douglas MacArthur, the conquering American general who ruled over Japan from 1945 to 1951. Often seen with sunglasses and a pipe, the tall man was a towering presence who commanded respect and fear even as he earned genuine gratitude for the benevolent aspects of his tenure.

As the head of the Allied Powers in Japan, MacArthur got badly needed food and medicine to people across the country from the start. He leveled the local playing field with his economic policies and actions, in particular by purchasing land (by fiat) from the small number of large landowners and re-selling them to the tenant farmers who worked the land. And he engineered a peaceful transition from foreign rule to Japanese government.

But quite suddenly, on April 11, 1951, President Harry Truman ordered MacArthur home, ending his command of the United Nations forces in Korea, including his command over occupied Japan. Nearly a month later, at the end of a series of Congressional hearings, and after many complimentary words about the Japanese and their resilience, he made an unexpected comment that struck a nerve in the Japanese psyche.

According to historian John Dower, in his book, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II, MacArthur compared Germany to Japan, arguing that Germany had no excuse for being the aggressor in Europe, but that Japan was a different case and that we needed to give the Japanese the benefit of the doubt despite their actions in World War II. He went on to say:

If the Anglo-Saxon was, say, forty-five years of age in his development, in the sciences, the arts, divinity, culture, the Germans were quite as mature. The Japanese, however, in spite of their antiquity measured by time, were in a very tuitionary condition. Measured by the standards of modern civilization, [Japan] would be like a boy of twelve as compared with [the Anglo-Saxon] development of forty-five years.3

At the time, that comment was a bracing slap that no doubt added motivation to Japanese efforts at recovery. By 1964 that recovery had progressed so far that Japan was able to put on an Olympiad unparalleled for its efficiency, hospitality, and technological precision, laying its claim to equal stature in the international community with the Western powers. But as the Japanese watched Geesink get ready to grapple with Kaminaga in front of the defeated emperor’s eldest son, some may have recalled MacArthur’s remark, or yielded to the foreboding that the larger Westerner would inevitably prove superior.

The referee motioned for the commencement of the match. Maruyama saw the intimidation start early. “Geesink was a big guy, but when he raised his arms high, he’d look huge. I think he did it so that his sleeves would slide down his arms and provide less area for his opponent to grab. But I think his opponents thought that it just made this big guy look bigger.”

“Of course, you can’t compare the ravages of war to the outcome of a judo match,” he went on to say, “but to many looking on there had to have been echoes of that awful, empty feeling that pervaded the country after its defeat in 1945.”

For at the end of the war, only nineteen years prior, Japanese were indeed in desperate straits, both in Japan as well as its former colonies across the Sea of Japan.

Paul Maruyama knows exactly how desperate those times were. He was there.

“Where’s Paul?”

“I was five years old, and I was on a train in Manchuria with my three brothers and my parents,” Maruyama recalled. “With a few other kids on the train, we paraded up and down the aisles without a care in the world. There were a lot of bigger men sitting in the train car with us, and they would pick us up, and we would play with their mustaches and touch their weapons. They were Soviet soldiers, and I’m sure my parents were very nervous. But we just played and played.”

The Maruyamas were on the run, seeking a safe haven in a city in China called Dalian. It was autumn, 1945. Japan had already surrendered to the US and the allied powers on August 15, 1945, and the Soviet Union had hastily declared war on Japan and overrun the imperial empire in Manchuria. Soviet soldiers were routinely ousting Japanese from their homes, taking possessions from them on the streets, and forcibly putting them to work to break down the Japanese industrial infrastructure so that machinery and scrap metal could be sent back to the Soviet Union.

Even worse, Japanese women were harassed or raped, while Japanese men were sent to work camps in Siberia. The estimated 1.7 million Japanese pioneers, bureaucrats, and civilians (not including the thousands of Japanese Imperial soldiers and their dependents) who moved to Manchuria in the 1930s and 1940s to start new lives were left to fend for their very lives when the Pacific War ended.

Paul Maruyama’s father, Kunio Maruyama, moved to Manchuria as it was a place of opportunity for adventurous Japanese. And as it would turn out, he would go on to play a role of epic proportions in repatriating this population, as his son Paul would describe in his book, Escape from Manchuria.4 After the war, millions of Japanese soldiers and...