Kickass Women in History: Rusty Kanokogi

This edition of Kickass Women in History is by Pam G. PamG’s most interesting era was middle age when she returned to school to earn a BA in English, spent a decade practicing judo with family and friends, and subsequently converted to devout Band Boosterism when her daughter embraced the cult of Marching Band. Ms G is currently spending her twilight years wrangling teenagers in her alma mater’s library media center by day and her free (stolen) time reading for entertainment and enlightenment by night.

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Back when Kickass Women in History debuted on SB-TB, my first response was “I know one of those: Rusty Kanokogi!” At the time, my concept of history seemed a little too recent and easily verifiable information was scarcer. However, I was checking out a new collective biography of amazing women for my Library recently when I discovered that one of the subjects was Rusty Kanokogi. A brief dip into the sample yielded a short but meaty essay on Rusty, and further exploration yielded a plethora of source material, including Get Up & Fight, a memoir co-authored with Rusty’s daughter, Dr Jean Kanokogi. I reached out to Sarah to suggest Rusty as a topic for Kickass Women, and here we are.

So why is Rusty Kanokogi a great subject for Kickass Women? Well, she was one of my personal heroes back in the 80s and 90s. My family became involved in judo back then, and she was one of the high ranking senseis out of New York.

Let me digress a moment, though. My family got into judo when first one, then both of my daughters began judo classes. My husband soon followed, and then, weirdly, me. Now me–I am the personification of anti-athleticism, but there was something about judo that just got to me despite the fact that I was fat and forty-(cough). There’s a logical, intellectual component to the training as well as a communal ethos that our particular dojo strongly emphasized. I ate that shit up.

My family spent a decade learning, teaching, coaching kids, traveling to tournaments, and acquiring adjacent skills, e.g. refereeing. Our club developed ties with the judo community in New York and New England, and I first encountered Rusty as a referee and as a coach. Rusty was a legend in the community as well as a commanding presence and an incredible role model for me as a judoka, as a referee, and as a woman. Furthermore, I couldn’t have found a better example for my daughters if I’d built her myself. I mention all this to clarify my particular biases and limitations. See also: starry-eyed fangirl. OK, end digression.

Rena (Rusty) Glickman was born in 1935 and grew up in a culture defined by the Great Depression and World War II. She acquired her nickname as a kid, presumably named after a dog, though I daresay the red hair was also a factor. Her family situation was difficult, and hers was a free range childhood on the Boardwalk of Coney Island. She started doing various jobs for pay at age 7. By her teens, she was leading a Brooklyn girl gang whose activities included the outing of creepers lurking under the Boardwalk for the upskirt views. It’s fascinating how her early years foreshadow some of the major themes of her activist adulthood.

At twenty, Rusty encountered judo for the first time when a friend demonstrated a technique he’d learned in his dojo. Rusty was immediately intrigued and managed to convince the sensei to allow her to work out in the all male class. As a tall, broad shouldered woman with no back up in her character, she embraced the discipline of Judo, later telling interviewers that it “calmed” her. When I say that there’s no back up in her character, I mean that she couldn’t be intimidated, or she stood fast for what she believed in. I have to say, from my own experience, that Rusty must have had more going for her than size and attitude. Even hard work and tenacity wouldn’t fully account for her success. As a woman, she had to have had wicked natural ability to convince the instructor to allow her to train.

The story that first made Rusty hero material for me is the story of how, frustrated by the lack of competition opportunities available for women in judo, she chopped off her hair, wrapped her breasts, donned a gi, and entered a YMCA judo championship in Utica, NY. That was in 1959. Women were not specifically banned from competing in the tournament, because you don’t bother to ban the unthinkable. Rusty apparently wiped the mat in her division, beating the state champion, and was awarded the gold medal. An official asked her after the fact whether she was a woman, she answered honestly, and her medal was taken away. However, while you can take back a medal, you can never take back the win. (In fact, that medal was reinstated a few months before her death.)

A few of her subsequent accomplishments include training at the Kodokan in Japan (the first woman permitted to train with the men after she “pulverized” the women), organizing and sponsoring the first Women’s World Judo Championship in New York (by mortgaging her house among other things), successfully advocating for Women’s Judo to be an Olympic Sport, coaching the first USA Women’s Olympic Judo Team in Seoul in 1988 (where her student, Margie Castro-Gomez, placed), involvement with the Women’s Sports Foundation, and activism in support of Title IX.

By the way, when I say “advocating” I mean teaming with the ACLU to threaten lawsuits against US Judo organizations and the IOC for discrimination. Needless to say, she paid for her refusal to stand down many times over–whether it was losing her role as coach of the women’s national team after the 1980 Olympics or having male colleagues call her a “pain in the ass” or “too political.” The latter was actually said to me by a fellow ref when I was squeeing a bit about Rusty.

Her judo career was multi-faceted; she was a respected teacher and coach, an accomplished referee, an organizer and an advocate for judo, for women, and for diversity. The Rusty I knew was also down-to-earth, funny, tough, and kind.

One reason that I think that Rusty’s story is an excellent fit for SB-TB is that she met her husband through judo as well. She was training at the Kodokan in Japan when she met Ryohei Kanokogi, a high ranking judoka. Let Me Be Frank describes her ah-ha moment:

At one point, hot-tempered Rusty broke her hand fighting with a woman in a barroom bathroom for making a disparaging remark about the Japanese. It was then that she knew she had found her true love, because instead of scolding her, her future husband advised, ‘When you punch head, always wrap handkerchief around hand.’ They were married in 1964 by a Buddhist priest in New York City.

The epilogue includes two kids, a shared passion for judo, and a 45 year marriage.

Before Rusty died in 2009, she extracted three promises from her daughter Jean: to care for her father; to earn her doctorate; and finally, to make sure that Rusty’s story was told. Jean describes the first two promises as the easy ones, but she rose to the occasion and fulfilled all three, publishing her mom’s memoir, Get Up & Fight, in 2021. And telling the story is important. The Sports Illustrated feature that came out in 1986 and focused on her fight for Women’s Judo as an Olympic sport, quoted Rusty on the subject of her public persona:

“I’ve buried the feminine side so deep, I probably don’t know how to reach it anymore. I buried it because it wasn’t relevant to the cause. Now people expect me to be strong, to be a machine. I’ve built this image up so well, people think they can say anything and it won’t hurt me. That’s hard to take, but it’s safer to be the machine. You can only 100 percent trust yourself. . . . But women have to know that they don’t have to be like me to go into judo anymore. Believe it or not, now they can be normal.”

I read that and thought: “You did this so we don’t have to.” Thank you, Sensei.

Works Consulted

Aloia, Antonio. “Interview with Judoka and Author Jean Kanokogi: Get Up and Fight and Rena ‘Rusty’ Kanokogi” Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. (blog), 21 April 2021.

Dawson, Tracy. Let’s Be Frank: A Book about Women Who Dressed like Men to Do Shit They Weren’t Supposed to Do. Harper Design, 2022.

Kanokogi, Jean, and Rusty Kanokogi. Get Up and Fight: The Memoir of Rusty Kanokogi, the Mother of Women’s Judo. Project Rusty, 2021.

“Rena Kanokogi Turns Disappointment into Gold.” USAdojo, (online) 21 November 2009.

Robinson, Joshua. “Rusty Kanokogi, Fiery Advocate for Women’s Judo, Dies at 74.” New York Times, 22 November 2009.

“Rumbling with Rusty: How Rusty Kanokogi Became the Queen of Judo.” Sports Illustrated (online), 24 March 1986.

“Rusty Kanokogi, Judo Champion.” Timesonline, 2 January 2010.

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Do you know of a Kickass Woman in History? Want to write about someone who inspired you? Email Sarah and tell her all about it!