You don’t have to be good at martial arts to make money from them. It all started with the Americans.

They brought formatted marketing, franchising, revolving door recruitment, squeezing money out of newbies until they were bled dry and the ‘briefcase sensei’ to the U.K. in the 80’s.

Those of us old enough remember, watched as junior instructors were encouraged to leave their Sensei and association and follow the American ‘yellow brick road’ of a purely commercial Dojo.

When a new student joined, their black belt was put on the wall with the potential date of when they would achieve it.

The low fee that got them through the door was immediately jacked up with upgrades, pro shop sales and 3 year contracts that were immediately ‘cashed out’ by the instructor with HP companies to get the cash upfront so the student was locked in to 3 years of payments whether they attended or not.

It was then in the instructors interests to get rid of them to make space for more ‘punters’.

Then came the Australians with door to door selling, they encouraged new students to go out on the road selling like Jehovah Witnesses and to start up clubs when they had enough recruits and were still were low kyu grades. All the money trickled up with the chief instructor reputedly buying his own castle and helicopter.

The government, sports council and martial arts governing bodies were constantly arguing amongst themselves, a lot of money went missing and any chance we had of organising any standards went with them.

None of these people ever cared about the martial arts, their development or standards. It’s always been left to potential students to do their own due diligence and they only had the bad marketing and movies to reference.

This is the mess the new generation have inherited and the parasites have different masks but are still there. Their customers don’t need to have any skills as artificial intelligence does all the work. Social media is awash with their adverts, AI constructed ‘reels’, videos, posts and articles.

It’s new world based on the old marketing structures using modern technology. We’ll soon be moving from ‘zoom’ and video training to VR headsets.

It’s a crazy world. Meanwhile I’m going to reduce my scrolling and do far more meditation to keep it real.