Seattle Dojo
Judo club
The Seattle Dojo is located at 1510 S. Washington in the Squire Park neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. It is the oldest judo dojo in the continental United States, having been founded sometime before 1907 in what is today the International District.
Establishment of the Seattle Dojo
On October 17, 1903, a Kodokan leader named Yoshitsugu Yamashita gave demonstrations of judo at the Seattle Theatre. Witnesses included prominent local businessmen and journalists. This success inspired Seattle's Japanese immigrant community to organize its own judo dojo. The pioneer of the Seattle Dojo, previously misidentified as another Japanese immigrant, 25-year-old Iitaru Kano who arrived in Seattle in 1903, was in reality Itaro Kono, a Kodokan 2-Dan judo black belt who arrived in Seattle, also at the age of 25, on November 29, 1905, as a declared "Judo Teacher" aboard the Japanese cargo steamship Iyo-Maru. He remained in Seattle until at least September 18, 1909, when he participated in a judo demonstration for the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition. During the 1910s, Kono also started judo clubs in Spokane and Chicago. Later, Itaro Kono joined the Royal Mikado Troupe, a traveling performance act with the Barnum & Bailey Circus that demonstrated Japanese martial arts to American audiences across the country. Kono died of cancer in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, the present-day home of the Little League World Series, on August 29, 1914, at the age of 34.
“Seattle Dojo” enters the record as judo club. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Seattle, Dojo and Judo can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 2, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7442094. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1510, 1907, 1903 and 1905.
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This entry incorporates text from “Seattle Dojo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.