The last time Threadgill sensei was out, our club took the opportunity to put an interest story in our community newspaper. The local paper known as the Hamilton Press sent a series of questions via email for sensei to answer then booked a time for a photo shoot down at the dojo.
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Chris McMahon and Threadgill Sensei. |
You can look at the digital version of the article here.
It is a very light article but gets the point across. We are a Samurai-era historical preservation society in need of more members to preserve the teachings and techniques of Takamura-ha Shindo Yoshin Ryu.
It is an obscure pastime that only a few people are interested in. This makes holding members difficult with a city of about 200,000 people. Martial arts such as karate, judo, aikido and mma dominate the community and of these people only a small portion may look into koryu.
Our martial art also favours budo practitioners 20 + years who have already gained a dan grade in a Japanese martial art. So this narrows down future students even further.
It is my hope that after the release of this article and increasing our digital profile with a new website, we may get one or two committed students to join our ranks.
Very nice article to raise awareness about what we do. It's tough for us to get interested students to commit to the art. It's even tougher to retain students. It's the nature of koryu, i guess. We're in southern California and our dojo has been fluctuating between 2-3 students, despite the fact that we have a huge, and diverse population. Not to mention martial arts dojo of all styles on almost every block and in almost every strip mall. In order to understand and commit to koryu, people have to change their general perception about martial arts and it's a hard thing to do.
ReplyDeleteI hope to make it out to New Zealand one of these days and visit you guys.
That would be fantastic. As an update, we have two new students and a third making inquiries. Fingers crossed.
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