The martial art of Jiu Jitsu can trace its history at least a couple of centuries back to Japan with roots in other grappling-related forms of combat such as judo. The distinctive modern style of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu (BJJ) was actually born in that country in 1915 when a legendary Japanese Jiu Jitsu and Judo master named Esai Maeda met an entrepreneur named Gasto Gracie, a Brazilian of Scottish ethnicity. If you have ever heard of mixed martial arts (MMA) competition or the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC), and you probably have, as it is currently the fastest growing sport in the United States and around the world , then it owes a lot to the historic day nearly 100 years ago when Gasto Gracie met Esai Maeda, who would later be known in Spanish as the honorary “Conte Comte,” meaning “The Count of Combat.”
Maeda was born in 1878 and was one of the best students of the original founder of judo, Jigoro Kano, at the famous Kodokan academy in Japan. In 1904, Maeda traveled to the United States to demonstrate judo techniques to Americans, including the cadets at West Point Military Academy and US President Theodore Roosevelt, who was an avid boxer and martial arts student. . After several years of touring North America, Esai Maeda finally moved south to settle in Brazil. At the time, Brazil had one of the largest Japanese immigrant communities in the world, and Maeda decided to help new Japanese immigrants settle in Brazil and learn to love the country the way he did.
In this job he met and became friends with Gasto Gracie, who had settled in Brazil from Scotland. To thank Gracie for his help, he taught his son Carlos the basic techniques of Japanese Jiu Jitsu. No doubt Carlos Gracie soon began applying his new fighting skills to his brothers Oswaldo, Jorge, Gasto (Jr.) and Helio, as brothers are known to do, thus planting the seeds of the celebrated Brazilian Jiu Jitsu style. By 1925, the four brothers had mastered the principles of Japanese jiu jitsu and incorporated their own ideas enough to open their first school, and Brazilian jiu jitsu began to be shared with the rest of South America.
There is a direct connection between the style of Brazilian jiu jitsu first taught by these four senior Gracie family patriarchs and the birth of the UFC fighting championships in the early 1990s, when a scion named Royce Gracie challenged to fight martial artists of any style. Until the rest of the world really took notice of how staggeringly effective Brazilian jiu jitsu is in real life and learned to emulate it, martial artists of all stripes would eventually find themselves on the ground in UFC bouts, usually not knowing how to prevent it from happening. Gracie chokes or hits them with submission holds. In the 21st century, many fighting styles and combat systems have learned to incorporate BJJ grappling techniques to operate on the ground.
