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. Happy New Year from Japan! We hope you enjoyed your holidays and are excited that a new year has started. 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:

1. Starting “Let’s ask Seki Sensei”
2. Starting the online lessons and welcoming 90 members
3. Reaching 100K subscribers within a year
4. Surprising Seki Sensei with…!

First of all, 2023 was the year I started a YouTube channel called Let’s Ask Seki Sensei. 2022 I had the opportunity to collaborate with Seki Sensei once on YouTube, and he asked me to create an English channel at that time. I have been a big fan of Seki Sensei for a long time, so I was very happy. Thank you so much. The silver plaque also arrived safely and Sensei happily displayed it in the dojo.

We also started online lessons in March 2023. It was my idea to start this business, but I had no experience in online lessons at all, and we had a lot of management and mechanical troubles at first. However, by the end of the year, we had more than 90 members, making it a huge online dojo, and from April 2024, we plan to add one more lesson slot, giving a total of four lessons per week. Asayama Ichiden Ryu lessons used to be held only on Saturdays, but from now on they will also be held on Sundays. If you are able to attend on Sundays, please look forward to it.

Finally, there was actually a big surprise in the summer of 2023 that made the teachers very happy. But please wait a bit for the video of this on our YouTube channel…!

Goals of 2024:

1. 500K subscribers on Let’s ask Seki Sensei
2. 300 members on our online lessons
3. A great success of the first training camp

Well, last year was a year of beginnings, and this year will be a year of further acceleration. First of all, I would like to increase the number of subscribers to our YouTube channel to 500,000. In the past, we have had a few videos that created a buzz and increased the number of subscribers at once, and if we can make a few such videos this year, I believe this number is not impossible. If you have been watching our videos without subscribing to our channel, please take this opportunity to subscribe to our channel.

Next, we would like to increase the number of members of our online lessons to 300. In the first year, we still had a lot to figure out, but this year we want to put more effort into advertising and publicity so that more and more people can learn from Seki Sensei. We will increase the number of lessons, and we hope that more people will be able to fit our schedule. Finally, we are planning to hold our first training camp in May 2024. We are already looking forward to it very much, as we are planning to have over 30 people there. At the same time, I am a little anxious because it will be my first time. We will do our best and hope to make it a great success. For those of you who have already bought tickets, we are very much looking forward to meeting you. If you have not yet purchased tickets, please do so before they sell out.

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