Biography
Maeda was born in Funazawa Village, Hirosaki City, Aomori Prefecture, Japan, on November 18, 1878. He attended Kenritsu Itiu high school (currently Hirokou—a Hirosaki school). As a child, he was known as Hideyo. He practiced sumo as a teenager, but lacked the ideal build for the sport. Because of the interest generated by stories about the success of judo at contests between judo and jujutsu that were occurring at the time, he changed to judo from sumo. In 1894, at seventeen years of age, his parents sent him to Tokyo to enroll in Waseda University. He took up Kodokan judo the following year.
Read more about this topic: Mitsuyo Maeda
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“The best part of a writer’s biography is not the record of his adventures but the story of his style.”
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“In how few words, for instance, the Greeks would have told the story of Abelard and Heloise, making but a sentence of our classical dictionary.... We moderns, on the other hand, collect only the raw materials of biography and history, “memoirs to serve for a history,” which is but materials to serve for a mythology.”
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