• Italian

This is a story I learned when I was a child startin’ to play judo; it is about the creation of the ju-jitsu. But it is more than that.

It happen that, one day, during a heavy snowfall, Shireobei Akiyama observed that the weight of the snow had broken the branches of the most robust trees and that they had been left bare. His eyes then fell on a tree that had remained intact. It was a willow tree with flexible branches. Every time the snow threatened to break them, these branches flexed, letting the snow fall and returning to their original position.