Adam Mitchell [00:00:42]:
I wanna welcome you back to this episode of Shugyo. It's been a while. The goal for 2024 was to be able to launch in premiere 15 episodes in the year, and we were able to achieve that goal, by early fall, and, we had some great success. And this year, as a result of sort of that case study there in building a podcast and seeing what the reception would be like inside the community, not just here locally at our dojo, but abroad, We had some good success because we're doing some, really cool diverse work.
Adam Mitchell [00:01:32]:
The goal of this episode here and what we're gonna talk about is sort of a look back at 2024 before we get into the new year of 2025. And I wanna share with you, our dojo, the Yasuragi Dojo in New York, some of the, success that we had and and the things that we were able to to do for our students and beyond. We are a nonprofit. We, exist on the generosity of our donors, of our benefactors, our sponsors, our students, people who purchase our courses. And as a result of that, we're able to provide more and more free high value content for people who want to study the traditional Japanese martial arts and help make it a better part of their life. So it's really important that, we share what it is that we have been doing. So those of you who do do donate a couple dollars, you know where that's being spent, and you see that we are, responsible with the work that we're doing, and we're able to provide our community just some excellent content, some great training, and wonderful experiences. The first thing that I wanna share with you is our students.
Adam Mitchell [00:02:47]:
That's what it's really all about. I was so happy that this year, we were able to welcome 3 students into the shodan level, or some of you may consider it like the black belt level, and they join they they have become one of our in the community of those students, who have really mastered the basics, and they're now ready to progress forward as a skilled student in our martial art and take on more responsibility and are more active in their training. 1, 3 of those were local here in New York, and one was from, one of my schools from abroad, and I'm really happy about that. Each one of these students has over, 8 years, 8 to 14 years in consistent training in our art, very committed. And it doesn't take everybody that long to get to that level, but for some people, they choose to take longer because they really wanna understand the art better. Also, for some of them, of course, life gets in the way, and it does take a little bit longer. But I just wanna share my congratulations to those students in 2024 for reaching that goal. As well, we were able to offer 2 student trips to Japan in 2024.
Adam Mitchell [00:04:01]:
1 was in May, and then the other one was just recently in November where we participated in Manaka Sensei's last class after teaching martial arts for 65 years being present. And being able to bring my students to that experience was very meaningful for me, and it was just something that I'll experience I'll never forget. This year, we were able to welcome, 18 students for the first time to Japan to be able to have that sort of cultural immersion as well as that training experience. Next, I wanna talk about the success, and the completion of some of the programs that we offer and where we where in terms of our lessons and our course programs, what that looked like in 2024 and what we're able to succeed. Now for you traditionalists out there, I will let you know that we successfully began and completed the first two scrolls of the Takagi Yoshin Ryu jutaijutsu. We were successfully able to go through the shodan of motegata and the shodan uragata. As well, we were able to work on and complete all of the Jinen Ryu Sabaki gata tanto jutsu. And this is the knife fighting, part of our martial art that was developed by Manaka Sensei.
Adam Mitchell [00:05:18]:
The year prior, we had spent about 6 months warming up for that, studying the kamai and the tanto jutsu basics. And this year, we were able to begin and complete all of that tsubaki gata. And then as well, we were able to go through different areas of, our sword training. Our sword training was very active. However, the real focus this year was on that tanto jutsu and the Takagi Oshin Ryu. And this year, we completed I was able to teach 240 classes throughout the year. A 190 of those were streamed live to, and throughout the course of the year, we had, representation of students from 26 different countries. I I can't get my head around that.
Adam Mitchell [00:06:05]:
I think it's just so I mean, it's it's just amazing. I I I really at first, I'm kinda like, am I really doing this? And it's just it's something to be in the presence of people who are training together here in my dojo and then also on the big screen at the dojo, people coming in from different continents, different states in the United States, different parts of the world. And and some of them are coming in at crazy hours because we're teaching class at 7:30 at night, and people over in Europe are joining us. And it's just really, it's it's just something that I have so much appreciation for. And I'm so I have so much gratitude to be able to, have those students join me at our dojo. I was able to teach 6 free seminars. Now that was about 20 hours of free streaming, content and and programs that we did in free seminars that some of them we'd host on Thursday nights as we were, preparing for our intensives, our, our 6 week long intensives called the gashiku. And speaking of those, we successfully completed 4 of those gashoku 4 and 6 week intensives, each one with about 20 people in participation.
Adam Mitchell [00:07:16]:
And the topics that we did in the gashoku this year, the 4 of them included the kokisha for the for you traditionalists who wanna know, we were able to complete the Kukishin Ryu Kodachi dori or the short sword, the Kukishin Ryu Jutte Jutsu or the police trojan. We completed the 9 techniques of the Kukishin Ryu Bojutsu Chuden Gata or the middle level scroll. As well, we completed the entire Sabaki Gataata in 6 weeks of the Kukishin Ryu Sojutsu. This is the spear. And then finally, we worked on the last two scrolls in our final gashaku of the Kukishin Ryu Hanbo Jutsu, or stick fighting. And once again, I look back and I I think about that here at the end of the year, and I'm just I'm just in awe. It's really amazing. That's a lot of content that we were doing beside our regular content at the dojo.
Adam Mitchell [00:08:11]:
Some of the new things that we put in place at Yasaragi Dojo for 2024 was, a new kosen judo program that was, that we started. We kicked off in June, and it's under the guidance of, international champion judoka, Joichi Hirao Sensei. Now as a judoka since I was a child, I've always wanted to have a program outside of the kobudo that conditions students, helps those students that really wanna kinda you you know, they really just wanna get down. They wanna train. They wanna spar. They wanna get stronger through their art, and they wanna be able to apply that form that sort of the, the benefits of that type of training into their kobudo. And I've always thought that judo is such an incredible resource. However, I've found as a practitioner that sport judo can sometimes hinder your training and your growth inside of kobudu.
Adam Mitchell [00:09:13]:
So it's been a goal of mine to really pursue the traditional old style, and the kosen rule set of judo. In fact, if you go back to one of the previous episodes of Shugyo with, my friend and colleague Sean Askew from the Bujinkan, we talk quite a bit about Kosen Judo. And there's another episode with Joichi Sensei where we go deep in Kosen Judo. So we've begun this program, at our dojo. Joichi Sensei comes in once a month over Zoom and teaches the class, gives us the content that we're gonna work on for the whole month, and, I've been able to launch a free judo program for our community. We're not charging for this. This is another one of our free programs as a nonprofit, where, you know, these are the kind of things that I wanna be able to offer, people to come in and train. Now if they wanna make a donation, they certainly can.
Adam Mitchell [00:10:08]:
But this is something that for now is completely free for any of my Brazilian jiu jitsu friends, any of my MMA friends, any of my, judoka friends from a different judo school that wanna come in and and work inside the Kosen rule set. This is something that we explore on Tuesday nights now, and we started that this year. Next, we also launched the first of what I'm hoping will be many because in 2025, we have a goal to launch 3 more of these. But the first one is a 4 day instructional on, kenjutsu, on sword. So an introduction to the Japanese sword. These are gonna be short micro courses that are 4 days long that don't go don't we don't use a lot of Japanese terminology, but in each one of the the topics that we're we're introducing someone to, we go over the most core fundamentals of, for example, the Japanese sword. So this is, this is a program that anybody can take. It's 4 days long, and it teaches you everything about holding a sword, drawing a sword, stances, postures, basic cuts.
Adam Mitchell [00:11:10]:
We do it in English. I begin to introduce the Japanese, but it's a very easy to follow, and very comprehensive step by step program that's completely free. Now if a student wants to then bridge that over into doing a gashuku or joining our evening classes, they're welcome to do that, and but this gives them at least that introduction, and and they can leave with some value. So I'm looking forward in 2025 to launching 3 more of these programs. We're gonna talk about that in a minute. A couple of the events that were hosted by our dojo, the goal in 2024 was to have one international event away from, our dojo and then one, at our dojo. And the one that I that was hosted in internationally was in Mexico, and it was at the Morelia Yasuragi Dojo, Shibucho. And that was just an incredible seminar, that was attended by I don't think I think we had about 60 people at this, at this seminar.
Adam Mitchell [00:12:11]:
The topics were tanto jutsu and gyokorokoshi jutsu. And then in this fall, we had Amanda Charrier come in who's a Jinen Ryu, Menkyo Kaiden, and she came and taught Tanto Jutsu here in New York to a packed house. So we were able to really have 2 wonderful events this year. Now, some of the as you can imagine, there's some impact across the web because Yasuragi Dojo is and has been since 2006 very much at the forefront of putting a lot of content out and teaching online. And as you're listening to right now, in March of this year, we launched the Shugyo podcast. And as I said at the beginning of this episode, we successfully put out 15 great episodes. And this year was really again, it was a bit of a pilot for me, It was a bit of a case study. I wanted to see if I personally had the time to do this because it's not just about hitting the record button and throwing it up on the Internet.
Adam Mitchell [00:13:08]:
There's a lot of work that goes on in the background of each one of these episodes, and I wanted to see if I had the bandwidth to be able to do this. I wanted to see what the response from the community was, which was great. Thank you, by the way. And, I wanted to just see if I just generally had the vibe to keep this going, and I certainly do. So I'm looking forward to, in 2025, expanding Shugio into something, better and, and and hopefully continuing to bring more and more value to the community through Shugyo. And we really wanna have a focus in 2025 on more of the the Budo lifestyle and what it is that that entertains us here in both training, but also how we're able to bring the the aspects and the teachings of what we do in the dojo into our everyday life, and what are some of the different arms of that. That's what you can look forward to in Shugyo. Then as well, I want to take a moment to talk about our YouTube channel because here, in 2024, I put up a lot of content.
Adam Mitchell [00:14:09]:
Our YouTube channel grew over a 1000 subscribers, which is great, but really what got me, excited was that we've got a 125,000 views of our videos. Now, these aren't impressions. If you know anything about Google Analytics, you'll know that we were able to get over an 80% view rate, with a 125,000 views over 80% of our videos. Now, I'm I'm gonna say is that in in my other life, as a digital marketing manager for a large nonprofit organization, that's a pretty easy thing to hack. You can just make 1 minute videos and if someone watches, you know, whatever 40 seconds, then you're you're looking great. However, that's not what our average on our videos were. People were really engaged in our videos. We've had great feedback.
Adam Mitchell [00:14:56]:
We hold over a 90% like rating on all of our videos. So that just tells me that you're enjoying the content, you're getting value from it, we're getting more subscribers, so we're doing our job, and this is all free content. This is free learning, and we're doing our best to make it the most valuable for you. So again, I wanna thank you if you're a subscriber on our YouTube channel. If you're not, hop on over there. But we're gonna be continuing to invest more in YouTube as the year, as we enter into 2025. We'll be pulling back a little bit on Facebook, not doing so much in the communities there. As you know, in our, on our dojo, another big thing, on on the web is that we launched our mobile app this year.
Adam Mitchell [00:15:41]:
So we had the community inside our website already set up, which some of you are probably a member of. But now, you can go to iTunes or you can go to the Google Apps and you can download. Yeah. Just type in Yasuragi Dojo, and you'll be able to download our Dojo and join our community. You can access our courses, our programs there. You can build your own library of courses and videos. You can join our free courses, which there are a bunch of as I've already mentioned. But now, we have a full on mobile app, that's amazing.
Adam Mitchell [00:16:12]:
So check that out. And we were this is all, you know, this is all stuff that happened this year. And finally, because once again, we are a non profit, I do have to share with you some of the, fundraising initiatives that we had and where that money went to. We offered 2 different fundraising initiatives. 2024 was really a year about program development. A lot of that money went towards the mobile app that I just told you about because that was a pretty expensive, initiative as I'm sure you can imagine. In, in February, we had a fundraising dinner that we did at the dojo. We're able to successfully raise after all of a sudden done $6,000, And then we did the 1st virtual open house in September, which was attended by a 162 people.
Adam Mitchell [00:16:59]:
This is really cool because we, actually gave away a trip to Japan. We've raffled off a bunch of, great prizes. By the way, if you haven't received if you won one of those prizes and you haven't received it yet, it means that we may not have gotten your address. So if you're hearing this and you're one of the raffle winners and didn't receive your prize, can you please hit me up and let me know? Because I wanna make sure that everybody does get their raffle prizes. The virtual open house, we successfully raised $2,200. So look. We're we're not professional fundraisers. We're martial artists.
Adam Mitchell [00:17:32]:
And, we're just kinda dipping our toes in this. And even though Yasuragi Dojo has been a nonprofit and the cultural arts center that we ran goes back all the way to 2,000, we really turned up the, the initiatives for offering free content, free courses, free lessons, community based programs, and, a lot of great opportunities for people through our dojo, whether it means travel, whether it means cultural immersion, whether it means, training in in the martial arts. We're trying to make it more and more accessible and more available to people like you and I, at an at an affordable cost. And again, we rely on our donors, we rely on our benefactors, our sponsors, our students, our members, and, that's to to keep it going and to keep this expanding. It's a lot of work. So what do we have to look forward to in 2025? There's a lot that we have on our plate. Then as I already said, the $8,200 that we raised this year went to, a 100% of it went to the development of our programs and the payment for our mobile app. That mobile app is really expensive in the beginning.
Adam Mitchell [00:18:46]:
It's about $300 a month throughout the course of the year. And then there were some development costs, some licensing fees that we had. If you're if you're an Apple developer, you know what those fees are. It gets pretty expensive pretty quick, but it we are able to cover our costs and make a free app for everybody. So we wanna kinda continue that. So if you're inspired, if you've been getting some value from some of the work that we do, and if you care to support us, then please feel free to reach out or just hop on over to our website and, you know, throw a couple quarters in the can. That's, would certainly be appreciated. In 2025, we're gonna be focusing on continuing to develop our programs.
Adam Mitchell [00:19:26]:
However, the focus is also gonna be more on the structure and the actual facility of our dojo. Our fundraisers are going to be focused on making the facility more, more better set up for the new equipment and hardware that we have, the new cameras, the new lighting. We wanna be able to roll out much better video content and bit better audio content. So the, it probably doesn't look like in the videos, but the dojo is pretty worn down. The mats are over I think they're, like, 28 years old, so they're pretty, they're pretty they're pretty tired. So we'd like to put a new flooring system in, in the dojo, and then we'd also like to change out the walls, which isn't gonna be a hugely expensive thing, but we wanna make it with, more thought on our lighting for our video content. So there's a lot of thought we're putting into this. We don't want them we don't want it to be too luxurious or expensive because that's not who we are.
Adam Mitchell [00:20:26]:
If you know if you've ever been to our dojo, if you know anything about us, then it's freezing in that dojo in the winter, and it's hot in there in the summer. We like to train outside, and we like to keep it as minimal as possible. So it's not extravagant, it's not big, but it is, it is our our dojo. It's your dojo when you're visiting us, or if you're a student, and we like to have that sort of that small sense of pride in it. So this year, it's really gonna be about the facility. Couple of things that we have going on in terms of our curriculum and what you can look forward to is we will be completing all of the Takagi Yoshin Ryu Juaijutsu, and the final scroll will be done in a seminar in December. I'll be hosting a 2 day seminar in December. You're welcome to sign up for we're gonna have a pre enrollment up probably by March for the seminar.
Adam Mitchell [00:21:16]:
And, we will be going through all of the Takagi Yoshin Ryu from the Chuden Sabaki Gata forward, that middle level scroll, all the ways through the rest of the scrolls. We are going to be starting, this week, the Kukishin Ryu Hanbojutsu. We're doing that for about 6 months, and we will be completing that in 2025. And then we're gonna be switching over to the Kusarifundo Jutsu of the Jinen Ryu. We're not gonna be able to complete that in 2025, but we're gonna be able to get, a really good, solid start on it in the last 3 months of the year, last 4 months of the year. In the sword program, in our sword classes, we are going to be spending 1 month in each one of the Jinen Ry Iai kata or from the Iai no Maki as it's called. These are the drawing routines that Manaka Sensei has developed. They're phenomenal.
Adam Mitchell [00:22:07]:
They're complex. They're fun, and they really help level up your skill with a sword. Each one we are gonna be spending a month in over the course of 5 months. Following that, we're gonna be starting the Togakure Ryu Bikenjutsu, and we will be completing that as well this year. As we get towards the end of the year, we're going to be in the month of December, and the week after the Thanksgiving. We're gonna be starting the togaku ryu Goton no Jutsu as with the b ken jutsu as our, a baseline cut like, the the techniques that we will be doing the Goton no Jutsu with. We're gonna be doing this all outside. It's gonna be really a special class.
Adam Mitchell [00:22:49]:
Everybody's welcome to join us for that. As well, we have, curriculum books coming out this year. Our goal is to, by month 6, have our curriculum books completed. There's gonna be one public curriculum book. That's gonna be all of the jiseng kobodo techniques. How we have the our training at our dojo structured and arranged. And then the second one is gonna be a student manual. And this is going to be for the students at our dojo, and the curriculum that we have and how they can, progress through the material and the ranks as it's been set up by Manaka sensei.
Adam Mitchell [00:23:23]:
So I'm really excited about that. There's a few other things that we have going on at the dojo. We will be having a Japan trip. The focus on this trip, because Manaka Sensei is retired, is really gonna be focused on our judo training down in Otsu. We'll be spending a period of our trip in Kyoto, and then we'll be, traveling up to Tokyo, for the second part of the trip. We're looking at right now, we're not affirm on when that's gonna be. We're up in the air between August or October, but we plan on having the final dates for that sometime in the end of, January. I'm gonna be teaching a seminar, February 21st through 23rd in Morelia, Mexico, and this is gonna be on the arresting techniques of the samurai.
Adam Mitchell [00:24:10]:
We're gonna be drawing in, or we're gonna be drawing from some of the traditions that are more security based, such as the Kusari Fundo, the Jutei, Takagi Yoshin Ryu, and we're gonna be doing a really creative and, and and and strong curriculum for the seminar based on those arresting techniques. So if you're in the area, you're welcome to join us. If you'd like to join us for the seminar online, we're gonna be streaming as well. So reach out to our dojo, on any of our social channels or shoot me an email if you're interested in participating in that. So that's it for now. I wanna close-up this episode of this wrap up of 2024 and share, just a couple of things that we have in the pipeline for 2025. If you haven't done so already, please download our app as I already shared with you, Yasuragi Dojo. Subscribe to the Shugyo podcast.
Adam Mitchell [00:25:02]:
We've got a lot of, episodes that are in the planning right now. I'd like to get into a every other week and eventually every week cadence, but I roll them out as I can do them. That that's just my honest truth. I don't have a team. It's all me. There's no production group behind this. I don't outsource anything. I don't send it out yet, to a, podcast, company or agency.
Adam Mitchell [00:25:25]:
This is all me. So have patience with me. I really appreciate it. And I really look forward to offering, some more great content, some great topics, and some great training for 2025. Wish you a happy new year, and once again, my gratitude for such a wonderful year in 2024. I hope that 2025 is every bit as good, as exciting, and as rewarding as it was for me, for you, and I look forward to hopefully being able to meet and train with you in the coming year.
