Kyūtarō Kanda

was a Japanese judoka.

Biography Kanda initiated his judo training with Minematsu Watanabe in the Kodokan dojo in Aramachi, Fukushima, later moving to the local branch of the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai. After moving to Tokyo, he also started to train Yoshin-ryu jujutsu under Kinsaku Yamamoto, a former apprentice to Hikosuke Totsuka. Kanda became interested in re-joining the Kodokan at the same time, but he was barred from joining due to Yamamoto disapproving of their training methods, despite the fact that his own son Noboru Yamamoto was at the Kodokan at the time. To compensate it, Kanda instead joined the dojo of 2nd dan judoka Tami Minegawa. Due to his tenure in jujutsu schools that allowed matches to start from the ground, he was a master of newaza, where he was an early proponent of kuzure kami shiho gatame, and favored more complex moves of his invention, including an original pin baptized as and a combination of waki gatame and chokehold named .

However, he was much more known by his unorthodox tachi waza, which he was forced to develop in order to keep pace with the Kodokan experts. He was initially a specialist of tomoe nage and kata guruma, but decided to focus solely on the latter due to it being a rare technique few judoka knew how to counter. He perfected it with Jigoro Kano himself and Mifune, the Kodokan's best connoisseurs of the move, and after three years he was an expert himself.

Hoping to avenge his defeat, Kanda applied for the 1931 championship, but he found out Sudo had opted out of the tournament. Kanda remained, however, and went to win the championship after beating Bunzo Nakanishi by kata gatame, Takeshi Aoki by kuzure kami shiho gatame and Sadakichi Takahashi by kata guruma.