Japan's Haruka Kaju is a phenomenon. She burst onto the world judo scene in December 2024, a virtual unknown at the time, to win the -63kg gold medal at the Tokyo Grand Slam. After that, she went on to win the 2025 Paris Grand Slam.
Based on her good performance in two of the hardest competitions in the world in Tokyo and Paris, she was selected to represent Japan in the 2025 Asian Championships. She won that as well. And then, came the big one: the 2025 World Championships. She won that too, making it look easy in the process.
As a warm up for the 2025 Tokyo Grand Slam, she competed in the 2025 Guadalajara Grand Prix and won that handily. Not surprisingly, she won the Tokyo Grand Slam, ending her first year in international competition without a single defeat.
But perhaps what is more remarkable is the way she won all most of her matches. If you randomly selected matches from any of her competitions, you’d probably see her do the “Kaju Roll”, a variation of the popular Japanese turnover commonly referred to as the “Sushi Roll” in the USA. Watch two examples of the Kaju Roll from the 2025 Tokyo Grand Slam, in the video above.
It seems that’s all she does. But that’s not true. She is capable of other newaza and has won matches with a strangle and an armlock before. See her doing these techniques in the video above.
It’s also not true that she is only a newaza player, although it is true she is a newaza specialist. But she does have a wide range of throwing techniques. In the past year, she has scored with tomoe-nage, drop kata-guruma, seoi-otoshi, kouchi-gari and kosoto-gari.
One-trick pony? Absolutely not. She's a great champion with an unbeatable record throughout 2025.
