I was curious about the black belt story in the opening paragraph; turns out it's just an urban legend :(
- http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/07/history-colo... - https://traditional-dojo.com/blog/88092/The-true-and-not-so-...
- http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2015/07/history-colo... - https://traditional-dojo.com/blog/88092/The-true-and-not-so-...
Kano was all about modernizing what he saw as outdated and ineffective training techniques. He thought that by making jujitsu a sport he could save it from irrelevance, in an age when people where more likely to learn tennis than martial arts. He was very successful, he created Judo and some of his earlier students went on to develop BJJ.
This is interesting, as a kyu go player I was aware of the relation to color belts in Judo, but I didn’t know it was the go ranks that inspired the judo ranks. I kind of always assumed it was the other way around.