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Takeshita made five trips to the United States between the Teddy Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt administrations. During a summer radio broadcast from San Francisco in 1935, six years before the attack on Pearl Harbor, he proclaimed, “No Japanese warship has ever crossed the Pacific except on a mission of peace. No Japanese soldier has ever come to these shores except on a similar mission.” Yet the retired admiral, who received a Distinguished Service Medal from the United States for his actions in the Japanese Imperial Navy during World War I, played a significant role in militarizing Japanese youth and sports in the ramp-up to war in the Pacific.

Joseph Svinth, for the Journal of Combative Sport, noted, “The fascistization of Japanese sport was among [Takeshita’s] duties in these positions, and during the late 1930s Takeshita was responsible for organizing regular foreign exchanges with Germany’s Hitler Youth.”

Takeshita’s considerable influence and fondness for sumo helped it grow into a national sport, but even he fell short in shielding the country’s indigenous wrestling style from the impact of war. As the empire churned in the years leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japanese life was essentially co-opted by the military. School-aged children were prescribed a physical education curriculum that translated directly to war fighting. Sporting arts were derided as unnecessary, and budō—the martial ways, specifically the Japanese martial arts spirit—was consigned to hand-to-hand fighting. The central authority for Japanese martial arts, the Dai Nippon Butoku Kai, was controlled by the Imperial Army, which promoted boxing because of the belief it engendered the right kind of spirit, while downplaying Kanō Jigorō’s Kodokan judo, which was thought to be too sporting. Kendo and sumo were simply impractical. Boxers such as Tsuneo “Piston” Horiguchi remained busy competing, and, like some sumotori, participated in war bond drives. Athletes in the East and West were useful for this sort of thing, as manipulating sports into effective propagandist tools was hardly new.