Oakland Tribune, Tuesday 17th December 1912 (Page 16)

CHAMPION WRESTLER OF JAPAN LOOKING FOR BOUT

    Is there a wrestler in Oakland or its suburban cities, who wants to make $500 easy (?) money. It looks like a great chance. All one has to do it to throw Kwaiwa, the Champion of Japan, according to the rules of the great Japanese national sport.
    Kwaiwa is now in Oakland and will be here for a week. He is appearing twice a day at the Oakland Orpheum as the big noise of the Mikado's Royal Japanese Athletes. He does a few fancy tricks every performance such as throws five men in six seconds, or six men in five seconds, whatever it is, and the game is getting so monotonous with him that he longs for other worlds to conquer.
    Accordingly the newspapers today are carrying Kwaiwa's challenge, offering five hundred good dollars to any one, Japanese or white, who can throw him. The contest must be according to the Japanese rules of wrestling, and the contest must take place at the Oakland Orpheum performance next Friday evening.
    The manager of the Japanese Athletes, has been looking for someone to stand up to Kwaiwa and there is a rumor that a former champion of Kobe, living near Oakland, is willing to undertake the matter of throwing Kwaiwa.
    It is also intimated that ambitious wrestlers, members ot the local Y. M. C. A. gymnasium, at two different colleges and seven members of the Olympic Athletic Club would like to measure strength and agility with Kwaiwa. It would be great sport, besides there is that five hundred dollars to think about. Anyone looking for excitement along there lines can be accommodated by applying to the manager of the Japanese Athletes at the Oakland Orpheum.

TRADITIONAL JAPANESE SPORT

    Wrestling is the National sport of Japan. It is so old a game that its origin is lost in the traditions of the past. Authentic records for over a thousand years exist, and the old art that preserved in metal and wood carving, in old prints and the like show that wrestling dates back at least two thousand years.
    In the land of Nippon, the game is known as 'Sumo.' Its rules are rigid and yet remarkably elastic in permitting certain holds and actions. The game is regulated by the three great schools of wrestling at Tokio, Kyoto and Osaka. At these schools are located the professors of wrestling, who in the past have been national and sectional champions and whose names are enrolled among the great heroes of the country just as our baseball players, pugilists, jockeys and other have their name in the sporting hall of fame. The recruits to the schools come from every corner of Japan. Every little town hopes to some day produce the national champion, and an ambitious youth who has strength and ability, get ready encouragement from all in his desire. The recruits enter  the schools for preliminary tryouts and once having passed are placed in companies, who give regular exhibitions in pavilions or amphitheaters erected for that purpose.
    Just as the people of Spain attend their bull fights, just as ancient Romans cheers the gladiators, just as the more ancient Greeks placed the laurel crown upon the head of the runners, so they patronize wrestling in Japan.

JUI JITSU  DIFFERENT

    Many people have the idea Jui Jitsu is the same as Japanese wrestling. This is a mistake. Jui Jitsu is the art of self defense against sudden attack. As an art it has existed for six hundred years. Every school boy and girl in Japan knows Jui Jitsu. It is taught in the schools, it is prescribed in the army and the navy, in fact all Japanese know something of the art, and it is a fact that no Japanese thinks his education is complete without knowing how to protect himself from attack. Wrestling on the other hand is an art known to but a few, and the wrestlers are organized into a sort of guild that controls and directs the sport. While Jui Jitsu is practically directed and controlled by the government through its schools and the armed forces.
    The company of sixteen performing at the Orpheum Theater give exhibitions of both wrestling and Jui Jitsu, and any one can easily recognize the difference between the two. This troop comes from the Tokio school, the wrestlers having been given royal sanction to travel and still retain their places within the guild.
    The long hair worn by the wrestlers has been a matter of much curiosity among all who have attended the Orpheum. Many supposes the ten men are a peculiar tribe of Japanese, they have even been called Koreans. The secret of that long hair is this; Back some hundreds of years ago, the wrestlers occupied a peculiar place in the Japanese scale of life and to distinguish them from other people, they were allowed to wear their hair long. Whatever may have been the real reason for the act, the long hair is now distinctive of the Japanese wrestler and only wrestlers of the Sumo can wear the hair in that manner.