Hamilton judo legend and occasional mail carrier recalls representing Canada — in wrestling — at 1976 Olympics

Hamilton's Mitchell Akira Kawasaki recalls that in 1976, when he won his first fight in Greco-Roman wrestling at the Montreal Olympics, he saw this newspaper headline: "Kawasaki lets the good times roll."

Kawasaki had just started learning the Greco-Roman style of wrestling the year before the Summer Games and managed to place sixth in Montreal. 

Now, at 74, things are still rolling for Kawasaki.

He's president of the Canadian Japanese Cultural Centre – Hamilton, coaches judo five days a week, travels internationally to judge the sport, is president of the Canadian Japanese Cultural Centre Hamilton and delivers mail for Canada Post on an on-call basis.

"I figure stay busy, keep your mind active and you might keep your faculties longer," says Kawasaki, who also still runs the renowned Kawasaki Rendokan Judo Academy, which he took over when his father Harry died in 1970.

He has a good source of longevity inspiration — his mother is 99, he noted proudly in a recent interview with CBC Hamilton.

Kawasaki's parents came to Ontario from British Columbia after being interned during the Second World War. They were forced to live in tents in a prison camp and eventually told they could choose to move east or "go back" to Japan, despite being born in Canada.

"Anyone who was of Japanese-Canadian descent couldn't get work" back then, even in Toronto, he said.

"They heard that in Hamilton some people were allowing Japanese Canadians to work, so my dad got a job here as an auto mechanic and car-body man. He started a judo club here in 1955 or 1956."

Kawasaki was a young kid when that happened, and he took up the martial art right away.

"My vision was to represent Canada at the Olympics," he said. 

He was already an accomplished fighter when he went to Lakehead University, where he was a collegiate athlete in both judo — a club he started at the northern Ontario school — and freestyle wrestling, a sport in which he found plenty of applications for his judo training and quickly excelled. He had success in judo outside of the university circuit as well, winning the Canadian championship in 1971 and 1973, but not in 1972, when a win would have taken him to the Olympics in Munich.

"That kind of devastated me," he said. "I got very discouraged with judo, but it was my passion."

He continued to excel in wrestling and by 1975, Kawasaki was a Canadian champion in freestyle wrestling and had placed third at the Pan-Am Games. He was Canada's presumed representative for the Montreal Olympics the following year, but tore his anterior-cruciate ligament in his knee. Kawasaki said he was Canada's first arthroscopic ACL surgery recipient and received a new ligament made out of Gore-Tex — "it was experimental" — and was told his recovery would take a year.