After a century of valuing education, generosity and health, head coach Yoshihiro Uchida for San José State’s judo team dies at 104, leaving behind many loved ones and full hearts.
“He makes people have such good character and carry themselves with such drive and he makes good people,” said Akiko Balitactac, former SJSU judo team manager.
Balitactac said she grew up recognizing him as a well-known figure in the community after playing a major role in bringing judo to the Tokyo 1964 Olympics.
Jan Masuda Cougill, Uchida’s assistant for two decades, said Uchida was born in Calexico, California on April 1, 1920 and grew up in Orange County with his Japanese immigrant parents and siblings.
Uchida’s oldest living daughter, Aileen Reiko Uchida said her father started practicing judo when he was 10-years-old.
Aileen Reiko Uchida said Yoshihiro Uchida’s grandparents encouraged him to start learning more about Japanese culture by enrolling him and his siblings into Japanese school where they learned judo.
Judo is a dynamic combat sport that involves techniques that allow competitors to lift and throw opponents on to a mat, according to a webpage from USA Judo.
“I guess (my great grandparents) saw that (my dad and uncles) were learning too much English, becoming too American,” she said. “So they wanted them to understand their culture.”
Aileen Reiko Uchida said her father felt bad for his sister and mother because they would clean his judogis, also known as a gis, every week.
She said Uchida later attended university at SJSU and first wanted to be an engineer, but university counselors told him no one would hire someone of Japanese descent.
On February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt issued an executive order requiring over 125,000 people of Japanese ancestry to move into internment camps, according to The National WWII Museum.
Aileen Reiko Uchida said her father was unable to get a job until he impressed a wrestling coach at San José High School by flipping one of his best wrestlers.
By 1940, the university promoted him to become a student instructor for the police academy at San José State.
His former assistant, Jan Masuda Cougill said one of Uchida’s famous stories is when he threw one of his first students to the ground at the academy.
“Yosh told all the guys, ‘Come at me.’ And so the guys came towards him, and (Uchida) grabbed him and threw him,” Cougill said. “(Uchida) just said, ‘And that is judo.’ ”
In 1942, Uchida was drafted to join the U.S. military, where he learned how to be a laboratory technician in the medical field.
Cougill said at the same time his family was processed by the U.S. government in Orange County and sent to live in an internment camp in Poston, Arizona.
Aileen Reiko Uchida said after he completed his service in 1946 he went back to SJSU to earn a degree in biological sciences.
She said Uchida managed to find a job lab technician at O’ Connor Hospital through Sam Della Maggiore, who at the time was SJSU’s wrestling coach.
“We grew up in the lab, all of us pretty much doing whatever little things we could do as it grew,” Aileen said.
She said she grew up watching her father work three jobs; lab, coaching the judo team and networking within their community, San José Japantown.
When he was not at home, Aileen Uchida said her father would invite different members of the judo community to eat and stay at their home in Japantown.
“We had students that my dad would bring home,” she said. “My grandmother would throw extra vegetables into it. We used to call it okazu.”
In order to bring judo to the Olympics, Aileen Uchida said her father spent a lot of time trying to form the right connections within the judo community.
Specifically her father along with Dr. Henry Stone, former athletic director from UC Berkeley, created the four class weight system for judo.
Aileen Reiko Uchida said both men together, along with other judo community members, convinced Japan and a number of other countries in Asia to adopt a weight class system.
Daniel Kikuchi, one of Uchida’s previous students, said before the 50s and 60s the sport did not have a weight class system.
“They had no weight class they had, and so the concern was for the safety of a competitor,” Kikuchi said.
He said safety was concern because having different competitors of different weight compete against one another could lead to a higher risk for injury.
“It took a lot of politics and lot of meetings,” Kikuchi said. “He's kind of known as kind of one of the godfathers (for) United States judo.”
He said Uchida always believed that the three most important things in life was education, judo and a social life.
“He (said), ‘And no one is takes precedents over the other. All three are equal,’ ” Kikuchi said.
Aileen Reiko Uchida said he taught both his children and his students to prioritize education above all else so they could give back to the community.
“The thing that he taught us was that to overcome racism and to (overcome) any adversity in life,” she said. “The most important thing was to get a good education and to be proficient in whatever you do because that’s how you fight back.”
