There’s something about Takami Okuda that refuses to fade, even though barely anyone talks about him now. In a world obsessed with self-promotion, algorithms, and “how many followers?”, Okuda’s story is a quiet, calloused fist against the noise. A man who didn’t chase cameras or build his brand — he just trained. And trained hard.
When I was around one years old, Takami Okuda won Mr. Japan, back in 1977. He was already a beast of a man by then, forged not in some gleaming Tokyo gym, but in his own backyard. According to a Plague of Strength post — one of the few decent sources still talking about him — Okuda trained with nothing but a barbell, a bench, and 150 kilos of plates. No squat rack. No preacher curl. No excuses.
He stood 5’5” or less, competing in the short class, and yet had arms so thick they still get talked about by old-school ironheads. Between 1975 and 1981, he may well have had the most muscular arms of any Japanese bodybuilder, period. It wasn’t glamour muscle either. It was the sort of size that looked earned — grown from volume, strain, and years of blood-thick work.
There’s very little information on Takami Okuda outside a handful of newspaper clippings from the late 1970s and early ’80s. A few photos. Some speculation. What we do know mostly comes from Plague of Strength, which reports that he cheat-curled 120kg in front of witnesses, and would clean the bar to his chest to squat because he didn’t have a rack. His training, it seems, was built around sheer will and repetition. No fancy periodisation, no hypertrophy microcycles. Just tons of volume, a few movements, and a whole lot of biking, running, and bodyweight squats to round it off.
What makes Okuda’s story so compelling — at least to me — isn’t that he won competitions. It’s that he did it with so little. In contrast to his peers, many of whom followed the then-standard six-day split (mass phase, definition phase, posing drills), Okuda just got on with it. No one ever handed him the so-called blueprint. He was too busy lifting.
He reminds me of a certain archetype that’s nearly extinct in today’s fitness culture — the quiet grinder. The man who doesn’t care what app you’re using or which stimulant is trending this month. The one who builds strength in silence, doesn’t post about his macros, and has no interest in selling you a plan.
The irony, of course, is that even though he was big and strong enough to win Mr. Japan, Japanese bodybuilding judges still criticised him. Said he lacked definition. Not “firm” enough. That his thighs and abs were underdeveloped. You look at the photos now and wonder what they were even talking about. He looks like he could walk onto a battlefield and not flinch. It’s as if his body didn’t get the memo that he was meant to be posing — it looked like it wanted to move.
And that’s part of what makes his story matter, even now. Today, fitness is often reduced to a performance: show off your lifts, your before-and-after, your resting heart rate. Everything’s about packaging. But Okuda’s physique came from function. It came from repetition and necessity. He did what he could, with what he had, and the result was something raw, dense, and useful. Not perfect, not symmetrical — but powerful in a way that can’t be faked.
I don’t admire Okuda because he’s short. I admire him because he made no excuses. If he didn’t have a squat rack, he cleaned the damn weight. If he didn’t have the latest machine, he did another set of curls. He didn’t wait for ideal conditions. He trained. Hard. Relentlessly. Without anyone watching. And that’s rare — especially now.
It’s tempting to romanticise stories like his, but I don’t think this is nostalgia. I think it’s a reminder. A man like Okuda shows us that discipline is enough, and that success doesn’t require all the fluff. It requires consistency, grit, and a refusal to compromise — even when the system says you’re not polished enough, not photogenic enough, not marketable.
There’s no public record of what Okuda’s doing now. No YouTube channel. No TikTok. No coaching website. He may have faded into a quiet, well-earned obscurity. But I like to think he’s still training — still curling something heavy, still squatting from the floor, still not talking much about it. Maybe that’s just wishful thinking. Or maybe that’s what makes his story so potent. You don’t need to know what happens at the end. What matters is how he showed up when it counted.
And that’s why he’s a man after my own heart.
Sources & References
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Plague of Strength (Instagram/Facebook/Blog): primary account documenting Takami Okuda’s training style, competition history, and minimalist approach.
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Japanese bodybuilding history (1975–1981): inferred competition context.
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Personal interpretation and commentary: based on verified facts and typical practices of the era.
