Saikoshihan said that nobody should make their living teaching Taido. 

This was big news to me the first time I heard it, because I grew up learning from a teacher who made at least a portion of his living teaching Taido. 

Saikoshihan was aware of this situation and even personally endorsed that plan. Perhaps the distinction at that time (I’m specifically talking about his visit to the US in ’94) was that my former teacher also had other businesses that arguably generated more revenue than the dojo (though the dojo eventually began to be run more and more like an independent business as his sons grew up and had families of their own to support). 

In Japan, people still talk about this proscription against making money teaching Taido. 

And one reason they talk about it is that some teachers are charging a good deal more than breakeven rates and making substantial income from Taido. Of course, it’s not their main income, so it’s technically OK, right? Well, that’s the question, because nobody knows exactly where the line should be drawn. 

The answer in America is simply that it would be very difficult to grow a Taido school as a non-profit venture. We don’t have widely available practice spaces that meet Taido’s requirements (a large tatami area), so somebody has to build and maintain those spaces, and that costs money. And without socialized healthcare, insurance and liability coverage are quite expensive.

To support the cost of even having a dojo, we need a large number of students paying fees. And that means we need a lot of classes, which requires a lot of time from the instructors, who will need to be compensated since it’s hard to hold down regular job while teaching 20+ classes each week. And yep, that requires even more students paying fees. 

So in the US, having a consistent and safe training area almost requires it to be built around a commercial venture. 

Of course, there’s always exceptions. 

I started my first dojo at GA Tech and grew it to ~40 students before moving to Japan a few years later. And I did charge enough money for gas and beer, but the facilities and insurance we handled by the university. 

There were some compromises. We didn’t have tatami. We only had certain times available. We were only able to train university students. 

But we did manage to run a successful dojo. It’s still running, over thirty years later.

There’s thousands of colleges and universities in the US. Also churches and community rec centers. Perhaps the necessity of commercial training facilities has been overestimated. To be honest, I’m not certain. 

Regardless, there’s a few very strong arguments in favor of having professional Taido teachers:

  • Professionals get a LOT of practice in their craft. In this case, a full-time Taido teacher gets tons of practice in teaching Taido techniques.
  • Things like CPR and First Aid training, fitness education, and coaching education at a high level can be justified as business expenses.
  • Likewise, better training equipment. 
  • The dojo can be open more often, and the instructor can devote their full attention to the training. 
  • Since Taido is aimed at training for success and creativity in society, running a dojo as a business could be seen as a direct application of that idea.

I’m a capitalist business owner, so I’m a bit biased to the notion that the flow of money has a lot of power to make things work better. When a professional teacher gets better at teaching and managing their school, they are rewarded with more students who get better results. This is a clear win/win, and it’s good for Taido as a whole.

However, what happens when the professional instructor begins optimizing for business outcomes instead of Taido outcomes?

Here’s some of the downsides:

  • Rank inflation. Simply put, charging for belt tests is profitable, and in the US, commercial martial arts schools love adding new color belts to the “revenue rainbow.”
  • Cost cutting. The other side of profits is to spend less money on things like uniforms, cleaning, maintenance, etc. 
  • Instructors aren’t free to give negative feedback or teach strictly for fear of angering a student (or parent) and losing revenue. It’s tempting to promote poor students so they’ll keep paying. 
  • Instructors are not incentivized to experiment with new methods or give the appearance of making mistakes, also for fear of losing the trust of their paying students. 

It’s kind of a trope that incentives can be at odds with integrity, so we can all imagine lots of reasons that Taido as a commodity might not be a great future path for Taido as a martial art. 

My current personal opinion is that a commercial Taido school (like our US dojo in Atlanta) can operate effectively as a business while also teaching high-quality Taido. And part of my personal mission is to ensure that all students have access to a high standard of instruction and get ranked and evaluated against the international standard. 

I can do that because I don’t receive any financial compensation for teaching, even when I’m visiting a commercial dojo. And I can do that only because I’m very fortunate to have my financial needs handled with enough extra that I can fly around the world and do Taido pretty much whenever I want.

But I wonder what the ideal model for the future might be. 

We can’t rely on independent, uncompensated, traveling instructors to volunteer as a balancing force. Not forever, anyway. 

For now, I can see benefits to having professional teachers, though quite a lot of volunteer instructors are incredibly dedicated and skilled, even without making it their full-time gig. 

So I’m curious to see if Taido Honin does someday draw that line more clearly, especially in Japan, but also for other national organizations.