Hello everyone. Thank you for reading this article. I’m Shogo from Let’s ask Shogo, the interpreter of the online lessons and owner of this website.

We recently achieved our goal of hitting 100K subscribers on YouTube within a year and now have more than 80 members in our online lessons. These are amazing achievements, and we are honored that many people enjoy our content. However, our ultimate goal is actually something completely different. It’s so huge that it’s impossible to achieve without much help from everyone reading this post. To make a long story short, our ultimate goal is to “revive the golden age of Asayama Ichiden Ryu when we had 7,000 students nationwide.”

Kobudo Asayama Ichiden Ryu, which you can learn through our online lessons from the 22nd headmaster Seki Sensei, is an ancient Ryuha style that was born during the end of the Sengoku war era (1467~1615) and now has a history of about 400 years. During the following Edo period (1603~1868), it became so popular that it had more than 7,000 students nationwide in its golden age. However, through Westernization in the Meiji era (1868~1912) and WW2 (1945), many Kobudo ancient Japanese martial art styles lost their power. Every year many Ryuha styles die out, and Asayama Ichiden Ryu too, at worst, only had about 4 or 5 students. If Seki Sensei and his closest students hadn’t decided to start YouTube, we may have also disappeared in a few years.

We now have more than 40 students at the main dojo and more than 80 online lesson students. I would like to be more aggressive instead of setting a goal of just barely surviving as it is. If we are going to set goals anyway, the bigger the better. That is why I have decided to revive the golden age of Asayama Ichiden Ryu in Seki Sensei’s place. However, 7,000 people is quite a large number. We cannot do it by ourselves. There must be Asayama Ichiden Ryu dojo worldwide, not just in Japan. I want you to join our online lessons, improve your rank, participate in our training camps, and open your own clubs and branches. In this way, let’s spread Asayama Ichiden Ryu throughout the world and make the name of the 22nd generation Seki Sensei engraved in history. Please continue to support us.