This is just a short blog post to announce that I was very fortunate to be a guest on Dave Roman’s Judo Chop Suey Podcast. I have been listening to it since the very beginning and I have always enjoyed his insights into judo since I am not very familiar with what is happening in judo outside of Japan.
In this episode, we discuss the match that will take place between Joshiro Maruyama and Hifumi Abe on Dec. 13. I did my best to do some match analysis and give my predictions about the outcome of the match.
This was my first time being on a podcast and I realized after listening, I made a few factual mistakes. It’s really hard to think on the spot, so please forgive me!
- Akira Sone is not training in Tokyo, but rather Fukuoka, where her high school is located.
- Maruyama and Abe have met outside of a finals round on 2 occasions, once in a quarterfinals match in 2015 and once in a semi-finals match at the World Championships in 2019.
- I want to also clarify that many of the top police officers are indeed training, though under more restricted conditions than normal. At the moment, many police departments have opted to cease normal practice protocol until March 31, 2021, with the exception being top athletes with national and international competitions coming up. My interview may have given the impression that the police teams are not practicing at all.
Anyways, hope you enjoy the interview and be sure to subscribe to the podcast. Dave Roman has just hit his 4-year mark on the Judo Chop Suey Podcast, so congratulations to him! It was a pleasure being allowed an opportunity to join his podcast and hopefully we can do it again.
As you may have noticed, I am trying to increase my output with this blog and I am really thankful to all who have continued to follow me after more than 2 years of going silent.
It was great having you on. Thanks for sharing!
Thanks for having me! Really appreciate it and it was lots of fun. Hope we can do it again sometime!
Great podcast!
It was so interesting to hear your take on this upcoming match. I am even more hyped for it now than I already was.
Also I am a big admirer of this website. We haven’t been able to do judo in the UK since march with the pandemic, so I have been scouring the internet for any Judo related resources I hadn’t seen before, and as soon as I stumbled on your blog I immediately read all of it. I had never really thought about the Japanese domestic judo scene (probably because the UK domestic scene isn’t all that interesting, so I have only really followed international events before), but now I want to know everything about it. So a huge thanks from me for making the wait until we can do judo again slightly more bearable.
Thank you for the kind comments! I really appreciate it. Yeah, one of the silver linings of this pandemic is that a lot of new judo resources have popped up in the past few months. Who do you think will win the match?
I really agree a lot with what you said on the podcast. My heart says Maruyama but my head says Abe.
I want Maruyama to win because he is so good, and it will be sad if he never gets to fight in the olympics, but I can imagine Abe just running through him in this match. Hopefully not though and it will be a good competitive showing for both of them.
Yeah, unfortunately, I think that will be the outcome as well. Please check back in from time to time. I’ll try to make a post after the match and also do a preview for the All Japan Open Weight Championships on Dec. 26 and 27.