Hello everyone. Thank you for reading this article. I’m Shogo, the manager of this website and the interpreter/instructor at Yushikan Kyoto’s Samurai Training Activity. Happy New Year from Japan! We hope you enjoyed your holidays and are excited that a brand new year is starting. I thought this would be a good opportunity to look back at what we achieved in 2023 and talk about our plans for 2024.
Achievements of 2023:
- The beginning of the “Samurai Training with the Modern-day Musashi
- Receiving 350 reviews on Airbnb
- Osayo and Shogo jumping Dan ranks to 4th Dan and 3rd Dan
First of all, 2023 was the year that our “Samurai Training with the Modern-day Musashi” started. We started taking reservations in November 2022 but hardly got any guests then. It was not until March 2023 that we finally started to have full bookings and dozens of people visiting our dojo. In the end, we achieved more than 350 reviews on Airbnb. Many people participated in our activity, saying they came because they saw the great reviews. We really appreciate those of you who came and left us heartwarming comments. We also started using TripAdvisor as a booking platform in 2023, and now it has about 23 reviews.
Next, Osayo (the assistant of the Samurai Training activity) and I both jumped a Dan rank at the annual Dan Promotion Exam. Osayo applied for the 3rd Dan, and I applied for the 2nd Dan. But she achieved the 4th, and I achieved the 3rd. Someone signing up for the 2nd Dan and jumping a Dan Rank is the first time in our Ryuha’s history. Ten judges will grade the participants with a maximum of 30 points, but if all the judges give you more than 25 points, you can jump a Dan rank.
Goals of 2024:
- 700 reviews on Airbnb and 300 reviews on TripAdvisor
- 300 members on our online lessons
We hope to achieve 700 reviews on Airbnb and 300 reviews on TripAdvisor and have 1,000 5☆ reviews in total during 2024 for our Samurai Training activity. We want to become Japan’s most well-known katana training activity because we want more people to have an authentic experience. Sadly, many activities are done by people who are undertrained or don’t have any experience with mat cutting. I’ve actually gone to some activities where they had their katana all shoved in an umbrella stand without the scabbard, and the instructor accidentally cut the floor during the demonstration. These are absolutely unacceptable, and we must stop the people who don’t have the right to teach to start these kinds of activities for money.
The biggest challenge of 2024 is absolutely going to be the online lessons. We will start our online lessons for the Yushin Ryu Iai techniques on January 12th. We will have classes two times a week on Friday and Sunday nights in Japan time. We hope we can have more than 300 students within a year. We’ve already had many people interested in the online courses who came to our Samurai Training activity. I hope this will be a good way for us to stay connected. Anyhow, 2024 will be another amazing year for us, and it will be you too. We wish you the best.
If you want to participate in our activities, please book through our Airbnb or TripAdvisor pages. We look forward to meeting you all.
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