Yoshihiro Uchida, incomparable judo coach, has died at the age of 104

Yoshihiro Uchida, the longtime San Jose State University coach who helped establish judo as one of the most popular martial arts in America — and who was widely considered the best college judo coach in history — died June 27 at his home in Saratoga, Calif. He was 104.

His daughter Lydia Uchida-Sakai confirmed the death.

Uchida, the son of Japanese immigrants and known by the nickname Yosh, began training judo in the 1940s while studying at San Jose State University.

It was a turning point for the sport, which had been developed in Japan in 1882 as a means of self-defense and was based on a series of throws and holds that used the weight and movement of the opponent against them. Americans had long incorporated elements of judo into other martial arts, and soldiers returning from the Pacific War brought a new interest in martial arts to the country.

Uchida, who had been practicing judo since he was 10, was despairing at the quality of training, especially at the higher levels. Together with a judo coach at the University of California, Berkeley, he established competition standards, including weight classes, and received recognition from the Amateur Athletic Union in 1953.

That same year, the first national amateur championships were held at San Jose State. The first collegiate championships were held in 1962 and Mr. Uchida’s team won.

Judo became an Olympic sport at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Uchida coached the American team, the first of many he would take to the Olympics. His athletes that year included Jim Bregman, who won a bronze medal, and Ben Nighthorse Campbell, a future senator from Colorado.

Uchida was also one of the most successful coaches in all of sports. Under his leadership, the men’s team won 52 national championships in 62 years, and the much newer women’s team won 26. He remained associated with the team until shortly before his death.

In contrast to his success, Uchida often spoke about the difficulties of growing up as a Japanese-American, particularly during World War II, when he was drafted into a segregated unit and the rest of his family was sent to internment camps.

Faced with such experiences, he said, he relied on his judo training, which he described as both a philosophy of life and a sport.

“Sometimes you get pushed around,” he told the New York Times in 2012. “But if you believe in it, you just have to keep going. Maybe you have to figure out how to get there by taking a step back and then coming back again.”

Yoshihiro Uchida was born on April 1, 1920, in Calexico, a California farming town on the border with Mexico, where his parents, Shikazo and Suye (Ito) Uchida, owned a dairy farm after emigrating from Kumamoto, a city in southern Japan.

After the Spanish flu, the Uchidas, including Yosh’s four siblings, moved to Japan, where they believed the risk of disease was lower. They returned to California in 1924 and settled in Garden Grove, southeast of Los Angeles, which was then a rural farming community.

There, his parents grew tomatoes and chili peppers as tenant farmers and had their children load trucks with vegetables after school. They also encouraged them to learn judo as a way to connect with their Japanese heritage.

“The parents all thought that when we came home from school, we would talk to my brothers about football and basketball,” Uchida said in an interview with the Japanese American Museum of San Jose. “And they thought we should speak Japanese.”

After high school, he attended a local community college but soon transferred to San Jose State, where he studied chemical engineering and worked as a judo and wrestling coach.

Soon after World War II began, he was drafted into the Army. He served in an all-Japanese-American unit, where he worked as a medic. The rest of his family was scattered to internment camps – his parents in Arizona, his brothers in Northern California, his sister and her husband in Idaho.

Uchida faced discrimination throughout his childhood, and during the war this discrimination became even worse.

While stationed at Camp Crowder in Arkansas, a white soldier much larger than him taunted Uchida and a group of friends with racial slurs. Uchida confronted him, and one thing led to another. He knocked the white soldier down with a single throw.

In 1943, Uchida married Ayame Mae Hiraki, who was interned in the same camp as his parents. She died in 2018. In addition to his daughter Lydia, he leaves behind another daughter, Aileen Uchida, two grandchildren and a great-granddaughter. A third daughter, Janice Uchida, died before him.

He returned to San Jose State University and graduated with a degree in biology in 1947. He also continued to work as a judo coach, but the position was so poorly paid that he had to find a second job.

Despite his degree and experience as a medical technician in the Army, he again faced anti-Japanese discrimination after the war. Eventually, with the help of San Jose State wrestling coach Sam Della Maggiore, he found a job at a hospital, eventually becoming the director of medical technology at San Jose Hospital.

On the side, Uchida took out a loan to buy a run-down medical lab. He renovated it and within a few years was doing big business with San Jose doctors. Eventually he owned a chain of 40 labs throughout Northern California, which he sold for $30 million in 1989.

With the proceeds, he and a group of investors built a complex of affordable housing and commercial space in San Jose’s Japantown district worth $80 million.

Buildings on San Jose State University’s campus include one that served as a wartime reception center for Japanese-Americans sent to internment camps. It later became home to the school’s judo program—and in 1997, it was renamed Yoshihiro Uchida Hall.