Hi, this is Shady and today I'm gonna be discussing the history of the grading system found in both judo and jitsu so if you are a practitioner of judo or vjj you would know that passing from belt to belt is not an easy task and it represents a lot of hard work and a lot of dedication and a lot of hours spent on the mats but let's talk about how this system came to be and discuss the general narratives and also the evidence found and see if these claims and narrative hold up to these evidence and also discuss the history of both Japan and Brazil when it comes to founding a grading system so jigoro kanoh founded his school of juditsu called the kodokan back in 1882 and back then there was the q and dan system but there was no differentiation between the two so everyone just wore a white belt so one great example is this juditsu demonstration you are watching circa 1912 by both juditsu masters tobari and taro Miyake who both went to the west spreading juditsu and teaching and yet here they are wearing a white belt so kanoh needed a way to distinguish between the beginners and the advanced and so he came up with a black belt and a white belt so for example you still see this system today in ikiido you wear a white belt up until you are a black belt i have a similar experience however the q grade even got more distinguished and more separated for example the q grade in japan is not something just special to martial arts however there are q grades for something like logical board games for example and so they decided to separate the q grade or the colored belts in today's terminology into six q rokyo gokyo yonkyo sankyo nikio and ikiyo which means six up until to first grade so this was a way to distinguish between the beginners and also the advanced and so kanoh system was based on having these students interested in keeping training judo and he realized that creating this q is a great way to put a clear system in front of them and also to track their progression and make them put targets in front of them in order to achieve them rather than just calling q and dan pun fact the first dan grade in the kodokan or the first judoka to ever earn his black belt what none other than tsunejiro tomita he was one of the four guardians of the kodokan the first disciple of jiguro kanoh and he is the one that took with him to the west young mitzuyo maeda in order to create these presentations make a living and also took up the challenges of football players and american wrestlers so this particular system kanoh was introducing the first dan and then second dan and third dan and then and thus the syllable was created from six q to dan level so let's talk about the history of the colored belt so the general narrative goes as follows so first when mikun's kakaoishi a sevens dan kodokan black belt traveled to europe specifically in london and france he started teaching in paris around 1935 and he realized that westerners needed to see things for themselves and had different ideas of progress and thus the q i'm sorry the colored system was eventually created from white yellow orange green blue purple brown and then the black belt which symbolizes the dan grade so eventually a lot of the people dropped the purple grading you can still see it in judo schools like in brisil for example but the reason why it was dropped by a lot of federations and associations in europe is because when you see a worn out belt i'm sure you've had this experience before in jiu jitsu particularly you see someone wearing a worn out belt and you are confused whether it is purple or blue and thus it created a lot of confusion and so eventually they had to drop it so the general narrative as i've mentioned it shows that it was kawashi who came up with the system in france around the 1930s and 40s after he started teaching there so however the evidence suggest otherwise for example in london and di budokwai that was formed in 1918 colored belts were started to be used to distinguish queue levels as early as 1922 and there's also a club in Seattle Nisei judo club that's also started using colored belts and the late 1920s so far earlier than the 1930s like mikunské kawashi now let's go to bjj how things started so the bjj ranking system it is a bit different but there's no specific strategy or a specific hierarchy or rank a lot of federations use different ranking systems but the general ranking goes as follows you have for the children the gray i'm sorry white gray yellow orange and then green and for the adults you have the white blue purple brown and then black and for the black belts you have a bar on it that symbolizes whether you are a trainee or you are the professor a professor would have usually a red or a blue bar and the students who are black belts or have a white bar on their black belts so you also have the stripes on the bar to signify your progression in this particular belt colored and done grade or black belt grade so in bjj this particular system was officially adopted by high level practitioners such as hiyogrecy kolo's graci and osuado fada and been adopted by the jitsu federation of guanabara around the year of 1967 and like i said these high level practitioners supported it so the black belt the graci's introduced the black belt with the bars around the 1960s and like i said each federation differs for example you have federation that offer adults green belts before they offer them their blue belt however there is an interesting story hiyogrecy towards the end of his life he wore a blue belt even though he was the highest ranked belt or a red belt and a lot of people came up with speculations and differ different theories such as hiyogrecy's favorite color was just blue and thus he wore the blue belt as simply as a fashion statement and simply because he mastered the art and he doesn't need a belt or something to show who he was and so he wore his favorite color blue however his son hoist in a gnp tv interview he clarifies this whole thing and he says that initially when he was training under the japanese he only wore white and then a dark navy blue belt and because a lot of these federation and clubs has straight away from the graci jitsu teachings like self-defense because he hoist states that graci jitsu is a self-defense system not a sports or something like competition in order to gain medals so he clarifies that he saw people getting black belts being interested in sports etc so he or graci he wanted none of that and went back to the initial white and blue and he wore his blue belt and now hoist graci himself wants to wear a blue belt as well to honor his father and he stated that it was only his father that promoted him in the past but after his passing he doesn't want anyone else to promote him and thus returning to his navy blue belt so this is particularly the system it is very interesting there's a lot of claims there is a lot of general narratives but evidence suggests otherwise and also in bjj they have their own story when it comes to the belt grading system because the expression of the belt is simply different from if you are a kodokanji doka you have the colored belts from white to black and also you have the white and red and then the red belt however in bjj you have the bars with the stripes and then you have after the black belt you have a black and red belt and then the red belt so it has a different history and a different expression i hope you enjoyed this little brief presentation about this history of the belts and the ranking in both judo and bjj this was chadi and thank you for listening