Hamilton judo legend and occasional mail carrier recalls representing Canada — in wrestling — at 1976 Olympics

Hamilton’s Mitchell Akira Kawasaki recalls that in 1976, when he won his first fight in Greco-Roman wrestling at the Montreal Olympics, he saw this newspaper headline: “Kawasaki lets the good times roll.”

Kawasaki had just started learning the Greco-Roman style of wrestling the year before the Summer Games and managed to place sixth in Montreal. 

Now, at 74, things are still rolling for Kawasaki.

He’s president of the Canadian Japanese Cultural Centre – Hamilton, coaches judo five days a week, travels internationally to judge the sport, is president of the Canadian Japanese Cultural Centre Hamilton and delivers mail for Canada Post on an on-call basis.

“I figure stay busy, keep your mind active and you might keep your faculties longer,” says Kawasaki, who also still runs the renowned Kawasaki Rendokan Judo Academy, which he took over when his father Harry died in 1970.

He has a good source of longevity inspiration — his mother is 99, he noted proudly in a recent interview with CBC Hamilton.

‘My vision was to represent Canada’

Kawasaki’s parents came to Ontario from British Columbia after being interned during the Second World War. They were forced to live in tents in a prison camp and eventually told they could choose to move east or “go back” to Japan, despite being born in Canada.

“Anyone who was of Japanese-Canadian descent couldn’t get work” back then, even in Toronto, he said.

“They heard that in Hamilton some people were allowing Japanese Canadians to work, so my dad got a job here as an auto mechanic and car-body man. He started a judo club here in 1955 or 1956.”

Kawasaki was a young kid when that happened, and he took up the martial art right away.

“My vision was to represent Canada at the Olympics,” he said. 

He was already an accomplished fighter when he went to Lakehead University, where he was a collegiate athlete in both judo — a club he started at the northern Ontario school — and freestyle wrestling, a sport in which he found plenty of applications for his judo training and quickly excelled. He had success in judo outside of the university circuit as well, winning the Canadian championship in 1971 and 1973, but not in 1972, when a win would have taken him to the Olympics in Munich.

“That kind of devastated me,” he said. “I got very discouraged with judo, but it was my passion.”

He continued to excel in wrestling and by 1975, Kawasaki was a Canadian champion in freestyle wrestling and had placed third at the Pan-Am Games. He was Canada’s presumed representative for the Montreal Olympics the following year, but tore his anterior-cruciate ligament in his knee. Kawasaki said he was Canada’s first arthroscopic ACL surgery recipient and received a new ligament made out of Gore-Tex — “it was experimental” — and was told his recovery would take a year.

“I was sitting there, dejected, out two to three weeks after my surgery, and I got a call from Montreal,” he said. “It was Canada’s Greco-Roman wrestling coach.”

Since Greco-Roman wrestlers can only attack from the waist up, it seemed it just might work for an eager wrestler coming off knee surgery. Kawasaki moved to Montreal to train and the rest was history.

Kawasaki trained over 50 Canadian champions

Today, Kawasaki has trained more than 50 Canadian judo champions and over 150 black-belts, attending countless competitions over decades as an athlete, coach and judge. 

But back in 1976, despite being a seasoned athlete, competing at the Olympics was overwhelming for him. He advises anyone heading to Paris for the 2024 Summer Games to “focus on the moment,” both in soaking in the experience and focusing on their immediate goals.

“You can’t think too far ahead,” he said. “Your first match is what you focus on. Attack their weaknesses, stay away from their strengths — that’s your strategy. If you think of defending and running as opposed to attacking, or if you are afraid to lose, you will lose.”

Kawasaki said part of his strategy to keep a cool head amid Olympics pressure was a daily jog with his neighbour in the athletes’ village — boxer Sugar Ray Leonard. 

“We would get up in the morning and run together. He was a great guy,” Kawasaki said about Leonard, who ended up winning several world titles in different weight classes.

‘I still consider him my coach’

“Kawasaki-Sensei” did end up at the Olympics judo competition, in 2000 at the Sydney Games as coach for Kimberly Ribble-Orr.

“I wouldn’t have made it without Mitch for sure,” she told CBC Hamilton. “He fought for me on the mat and off the mat.”

She said his dojo is a hub for top-level fighters, many of whom he trained himself or fought with. It would not be unusual for other countries’ Olympic judo teams to come train at Kawasaki Rendocan, which operates out of the Japanese cultural centre — Ribble-Orr recalls training with members of the Cuban and Japanese teams over the years.

“Any time you go into his club, there’s world champions, Olympians… He has raised champions from the beginning,” said Ribble-Orr, who now lives in Port Colborne, Ont. “I still consider him my coach.”

She described her coach as someone who is passionate, despite rarely showing emotion, and dedicated to judo “to a fault at times.” 

“I still go into Hamilton and coach students at the club and they’re like, ‘Sensei is never happy. You can’t make him happy,’ but you can if you train hard,” she said. “If you put in the effort, he’s going to be right beside you the whole time.”