Why Maeda called himself “Count”

Mitsuyo Maeda — born in Hirosaki in 1878, died in Belém in 1941 — is, paradoxically, the best documented figure in the whole history of Brazilian jiu-jitsu. Not because BJJ cared: because his life is tracked by the Kōdōkan archives, by the press of four continents and by the National Diet Library of Japan.

The name

Spain, 1908. Maeda runs into an impostor going around passing himself off as the Japanese judo champion, and decides he needs a stage name of his own. He thinks of “Komaru Maeda”, a play on *komaru*, which in Japanese means “to be in trouble” — a direct reference to how short of money he was in those years.

Then he shortens it to “Koma” and puts the Spanish “Conde” in front. The result is “Conde Koma”, which sounds noble and means roughly “the penniless count”. It is a joke about himself, and it worked so well that a century later people take it for a title.

The other job

The part that gets told least is that Maeda was not only a fighter. The Japanese documentation on emigration records him as a guide for survey teams, then on the staff of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, then as an auditor and manager of colonisation companies: he recruited Japanese settlers for Brazil and assisted them when the schemes went wrong.

Judo was, in large part, his calling card for that work. It takes nothing away from the fighter — it helps explain why he was always travelling.

Judo or jiu-jitsu?

Maeda was a Kōdōkan judoka, admitted at seventeen in 1895. What he taught was judo. But outside Japan, at the time, judo was routinely called “jiu-jitsu”, and in Brazil the discipline was also presented as “Kano-ryu jiu-jutsu”.

There is no betrayal and no misunderstanding to expose: there is a word that changed meaning. The distinction between judo and jiu-jitsu that looks obvious to us today did not exist as a clear boundary in 1915.

What does not hold up in the legend

• “Over a thousand matches, never beaten”. Most of them were arranged exhibitions. The title of “jiu-jitsu world champion” did not exist: Maeda and Satake built it for themselves in Cuba with fixed matches, and both of them admitted it.
• The name “Esai Maeda”, which appears in a fair number of BJJ books, is a bibliographic ghost. At birth he was Hideyo, then Mitsuyo.
• He never went to Russia, did not train the Russian police, did not meet Theodore Roosevelt and did not know aikidō — which was born after he left Japan.

What we do not know

• Whether he was a spy, as he was accused of being in Cuba. Those who have studied the sources conclude: possibly yes, probably no.
• The exact role of Gastão Gracie in bringing him to Belém. It is told everywhere, documented nowhere.

The finest fact remains: the man everything here descends from introduced himself to the public with an invented title of nobility which, translated, admitted he was broke.