Judo is a Japanese sport, and also a way of defending yourself, in which you use balance and timing to throw the other person to the ground, pin them, or hold them so they cannot move. You wear a loose white (or sometimes blue) jacket and trousers, a belt whose colour shows your grade, and you practise on soft mats. It is an Olympic sport. The idea, in simple terms, is not to meet force with more force, but to use the other person’s movement against them — that is why the name is “the soft way.” Though actually, “soft” here does not mean gentle or weak; a throw can be hard. Judo is not boxing and not karate: you do not win by punching. It is also not the same as jujitsu, an older fighting art that judo grew out of. In English we say judo with no article when we mean the sport (“She does judo”), like tennis.