1. Maturity, Responsibility, and Character

 

Although it may cease to sound like an advertisement for the BKH program and start to sound more like a warning as to why you should think twice before applying, please consider the circumstances that lead up to the downfall of one recent class of BKH residents. Keep in mind that this dismal description is not a description of how it's supposed to be at BKH. It's just a description of how bad it can get if residents are failing to "get with the program."

As you progress here, more and more will be expected of you in terms of responsibility, maturity and leadership. Your instructor will teach you many things that combine to make up a way of life (karate dormitory life based on the Japanese model) that will provide every possible advantage to you in terms of your chances of becoming strong, both physically, and in terms of character. By the time you're in your second year here, it will be expected of you that you are able to do some of the teaching yourselves of junior dormitory members. You will teach them the basic lessons that you were taught in the beginning so that your instructor can concentrate on teaching you more advanced ones. The primary way by which you will be expected to teach is by setting the correct example.

Take for an example learning how to clean up after your self, a lesson that many of us take for granted. In order to become strong a group of guys living together, sharing bedrooms, a kitchen, a bathroom and a laundry machine, etc., must learn how to keep their surroundings neat. If they don't, if smelly underwear gets left scattered around on the floor and dirty dishes in the sink start to smell bad, and if you live in that kind of environment day after day, it will become very difficult to live with any degree of self-respect. And you can't expect to become strong, of course, without self-respect. Many of you who read this (unless you're parents of adolescents) will be amazed, but many of these guys who apply to the BKH program aspiring to be fighters and instructors dream of doing so in order to reshape lives that aren't going very well and consequently they're often not very good at taking care of themselves. There are very strict rules in the dormitory concerning cleanliness and neatness and if you arrive here and lack the discipline to follow those rules, you will be compelled to do so. If you're told twice not to leave dirty dishes or underwear around it's very likely that you'll find yourself doing some kind of physical exercise that you'd rather not be doing just then. "Don't clean up after yourself, okay, do 100 pushups," something like that. That's one reason why these undisciplined types tend to get so tough: If you can't figure out how to pick up after yourself for three years, you wind up doing an awful lot of push-ups.

Given that some new residents will already possess a healthy level of personal neatness and won't have to learn this type of lesson, if you do have to learn it, you will be expected to figure out ultimately that the reason why you have to pick up after yourself is BECAUSE IT'S A STRONGER WAY TO LIVE. Unfortunately, however, the most advanced level of understanding that this most recent group of senior dormitory members to fail here mustered was that the reason why it was important to clean up after themselves was because they were afraid of getting scolded and having to do 100 pushups.

The age-old expression goes, "you can take a horse to water, but you can't make him drink." These last two "senior members of the dormitory"came here from a history of adolescent issues that included violence and lack of discipline at home and troubles with the law as adolescents that resulted from a lack of appreciation for authority. Consequently, by the time they reached their 2nd and 3rd years here and were still getting scolded, and were still doing push-ups, instead of setting an example for their junior members of how they'd learned to live responsibly, instead of "getting with the program" and learning the lesson as you or I might, they just got rebellious and angry about the fact that they were getting so tough (winning competitions) but were still getting scolded for not picking up their underwear.

We tend to publish on the BKH website our members' accomplishments in terms of tournament victories and tend NOT to describe how they sometimes (as in the case of these two guys) are failing in terms of other lessons vital to making it successfully through the program. They themselves read the website and think, "I'm starting to be somebody . . . I'm a champion." As a result their self-opinion becomes elevated and if they are, for whatever reason, unable to learn some of the basic lessons of growing up - like learning how to clean up after themselves for example - they start to resent it all the more when they're criticized like young teenagers for they way they're "failing to live like champions."

Now imagine this type of scenario and apply it to more important issues than learning to clean up after yourself. Imagine that after two or three years here you start to become responsible for driving a BKH Dormitory automobile so that you and your junior roommates can get to and from work and training and grocery shopping etc. So, the first year is rough, and a car or two gets destroyed, and the program director spends hours and hours instructing and - sometime scolding - and trying to make the dormitory's senior members understand how important it is to check the oil level in the engine, and how important it is to drive safely (rather than like a hot rod), because of course the entire "unit" (i.e. BKH) is dependent on that piece of equipment to make all their training possible. But what if the student never learns the lesson being taught? What if in three years, he personally destroys three cars out of carelessness, three cars that the small amount of income that he brings into the program can't even begin to make up for? What if once when he totals an automobile it's because he's in a hurry because he's breaking the rules to be out of the dormitory anyway?

Now imagine a situation where the program director is sacrificing not only his own salary but also his family's personal income (from other sources) in order to get dormitory residents to Japan (again) despite their crashed cars. Isn't it normal that guys after two and three years in the program would start to "wear out their welcome" if they're not starting to demonstrate a normal level of responsibility? Of course it is. So, imagine the final few months of these two guys, two guys who BKH made into stars (at least to the extent that publishing their names and photographs on the website would do so). Imagine the disaster that befell them when the program director finally put his foot down and started making them take responsibility for their own failures when those failures adversely affected the group.

One guy was careless and crashed a car into a telephone pole (in heavy rain at 10 mph). He expected that his instructor would simply fix it again like he'd done the last time and still take him to Japan because he was so "tough" and such an "important member of the BKH team." Instead, however, since more responsibility than that was expected of him by the time he'd spent two years in the dormitory - and since he'd started to wear out his welcome by failing to show that responsibility -- his instructor gave him a box of tools, some dollars, and directions to a junk yard, along with instructions to "go find a matching bumper, grill and hood. Make sure you bring me a receipt. I'll buy the radiator and the cooling fan, but once you get done with your work for the day, every day this week if that's what it takes, it's your responsibility to repair the car that you crashed. I'll help you if you can't figure it out." That student repaired the car of course . . . but because he was failing to learn the lesson of responsibility, he was angry and he resented having to work extra hours fixing the car even though it was he who'd crashed it.

Now imagine that by his third year in the dormitory, after having been taught FOR THREE YEARS how to cook dormitory meals, and how to shop so that there's healthy food in the dormitory pantry, and how important it is to communicate with the program director when conditions in the kitchen start to deteriorate for whatever reason . . . imagine when by his third year the program director actually makes the mistake and TRUSTS that after three years the senior dormitory member was actually successfully taking care of this responsibility that had been assigned to him. Imagine what would happen if instead the "responsible" one in the dormitory was actually failing in his responsibility altogether, and as a result, the quality of food in the dormitory declined. The result of course is that guys that would otherwise be on the path to becoming champions begin to fail for lack or morale -- both these senior members AND their junior members in the dormitory for whom they were supposed to have begun to be responsible.

Finally, imagine that it's become this same senior member's responsibility to call a short list of contractors each evening to try to line up work for the 5 dormitory residents, 5 hours per day, the minimum that we'd decided they'd have to do after their morning training, breakfast and power-stamina training and before karate training each day, in order to get the entire group to Japan for the All-Japan Tournament without the program director having to assume the cost again on his own personal credit cards. Now, there were some days when there was no work, not even for one of five guys, even with the proper telephone calls made simply because nobody needed any physical labor that day (there was often not work in the rain, for example). Those days made it all the more vital that the calls were indeed made to line up the labor lest the group get even farther behind in their fundraising goal. So what is the program director to do - the program director who's still suffering from the debt on his personal credit cards for taking a group that couldn't afford it to Japan the last time - what is he to do when he sees that none of the dormitory population is going to work one sunny day and he asks the senior member "did you remember to make your calls yesterday," and the senior member answers, "no, I forgot"? What is the program director to do if gets that same answer for the 3rd time? What about the 4th? Of course because that's the way it was for the senior resident in his 1st year, and because he was failing to learn the lesson of responsibility, he mistakenly believed, "it's okay if we blow work off again today. Sensei will pay for Japan anyway like he always does," somehow as if money grew on trees.

Isn't it normal that under these circumstances the "dormitory senior member" might start to wear out his welcome? Of course it is. So the program director, finally in that student's 3rd year, started putting his foot down and making the 23-year-old "dormitory chief" take responsibility. "You didn't work 5 hours today? Okay, no training for you tomorrow. I'll call employers tonight and make sure that you personally have 8 hours of work to do for the next two days to make up for today that you spent sitting on your butt in the dormitory paying with your Play Station." Of course the senior member who was failing to learn the lesson of maturity resented the program director's decision. Somebody punched a hole in a dormitory wall.

To make a long tragic story short, two senior guys in the dormitory, who were getting so tough by that time, were well into wearing out their welcome for their lack of maturity, their lack of responsibility, and their lack of ability to serve as role models for junior members in the dormitory. As a result, their instructor started making them take responsibility, and it was then that their anger and resentment for having to do push-ups for not picking up their underwear peaked, and they quit in a huff, thinking that if they left and brought their two junior members with them by promising them brighter horizons at the end of their rainbow, that they'd bring down BKH and not have to be another in the long list of guys who failed to graduate.

It was reported later to the program director that this senior member had complained to his juniors as they "discussed" departure. "Sensei changed," he'd said, "he started to be interested in money." What he failed to understand, however, was that "sensei" had always been interested in money out of necessity cause it was his responsibility to keep a roof over everyone's head and get them to their competitions. He was right though that "sensei changed": Sensei changed to where he started making a couple young men who still hadn't grown up to take responsibility for their actions for the first time in their lives, and because they had become accustomed to having their hands held and being carried, that was a change that they simply couldn't tolerate.

Ironically, they quit and Budo Karate House got stronger. Their departure cleared the slate for guys like current dormitory residents Jarrett McIntyre and Robert Schnoes, to live and train without having to live in the dormitory with its pair of dormitory tough guys who were failing to get with the program all the way into to the end of the 2nd and 3rd years here. And the new students are amazed. "One of them asks, "you mean he only had six weeks left to graduate, and he quit? What an idiot! I'd never quit if I'd already been through 940 days here!"

But then their teacher has to explain. "No. They're not idiots. At heart they were not bad guys and they're not exactly weak either. They were really tough, much tougher than you guys right now can imagine. They were simply not of a strong enough character to make it here when the going got rough. Just like all the warnings posted on the website and published in all the introductory materials all of you were sent when you were applying, 'if you're not cut out to live up to the program's strict expectations, you won't graduate' here either. The purpose of the program is to create champions, but more importantly it's to create a body of guys who can draw people to them BECAUSE they're champions, and at the same time live a life that sets a higher standard for living in a more correct way, so that others - their juniors, their students - will aspire to live better lives as well.

"The situation really comes down to the philosophical question as to whether or not a 'tiger can change his stripes'. Many people say, no. If a 'flawed' person's stripes, as in this case, are the lack of maturity, responsibility and ability to serve as role models that these guys entered the program with, sure they can go through the motions for weeks at a time and actually behave responsibly and maturely -- i.e. they can hide their stripes -- but can they ever fundamentally alter those stripes, or can they make them go away once and for all? I know for a fact that in the case of these two guys they ARE capable of fulfilling the 'growing up' expectations of the BKH program. I know this because I've seen it. They've showed it to me for periods of weeks on end. But then there in the end, the going got rough for them when their instructor started making them take responsibility -- and since no one had ever made them take that kind of responsibility before -- their old stripes showed though loud and clear. Nevertheless, the answer to the question, I believe, is: Yes, a tiger can change his stripes in a fundamental and permanent way IF he wants to change them bad enough. If he makes changing his stripes a priority and remains committed to that goal, he WILL be able to change them. These guys in the dormitory there at the end, however, had given up. Their priorities had changed. Instead of visualizing themselves in their fantasies as champions, yes, but also of adults of a quality that other people would respect because of the strengths of their character, they visualized themselves to be the 'tough guy' champion who throws his arms up in victory in the 'in your face' nature that's so popular today. And in that vision, there's no room for being scolded for failing to pick up your underwear, and for failing to schedule the day's work that they resented having to do anyway."

It's not over for these two guys who quit BKH last year in a huff. It's not too late. One of them certainly, had a really serious issue with honesty, or rather a lack there of. Consequently, it would be truly difficult for us here at BKH to trust him in any kind of future involvement. The other one? He's got a pretty good excuse: He was only 17 and 18 when he was here. He's got lots of time to grow up and realize how he (and his 23-year-old roommate and role model) contributed to ruining what could have been such a great outcome for himself.

At the age of 20 the BKH program director, himself, FAILED after two years to complete the 3-year dormitory program he was attending in Japan (see "Program Director" link), but he failed for a lack of toughness. He left Japan heartbroken because he loved his teacher and was 100% committed to his cause. Yet he wasn't tough enough at that time (at the age of 20) to endure the grueling physical hardship of a program that no foreigner had ever graduated from. These two guys who left BKH were tough enough. They were enduring the program and they were on the road to becoming champions. Yet they left angry, full of resentment, and hating their teacher here for not "letting them be." So, it will be harder for them to bounce back and no body at BKH expects them to, but the challenge is not insurmountable were they to decide that that would be their path. They were on a growth curve here at BKH that it's very likely they'll never find anywhere except at BKH both in terms of deepening their character and their athletic ability. And that's unfortunate because, at heart, those young men were not "bad". They just missed out on some learning that many of us get as teenagers. One was an orphan since he was 14 and the other came to BKH from a series of programs for juveniles with discipline problems. At BKH they were successful in hiding those stripes fairly well for a lot of the time. But in the end their resentment-driven departure made it very clear that they hadn't managed to change those stripes in enough of a fundamental way.

We at BKH (and of course it's BKH's Program Director who's writing this essay) sincerely hope that all of the guys who have attended BKH for significant amounts of time and failed, will ultimately find their way, and we encourage them to never forget that for those 500 or 700 days that they were here at BKH, they were members of a family that would have stood by them through anything, anything at all short of their own failing to stand by that family themselves. And as for future residents who may never get the pleasure of meeting those here that don't make it? Hearing the stories both of those guys' successes and, more importantly, the stories of their failures, will improve their chances of emerging from BKH as the true champions that all BKH students aspire to become.

 

 

2. The Nature of the Work You Will Do
to Help Support BKH Financially

 

The primary source of BKH's income is money earned by labor performed by BKH residents. There is no cost to residents for participating in the BKH program but if you come here you WILL work to support the program while in the program. All money that you earn while in the program will be controlled by BKH (according to the legal guidelines of course of a government-approved 501.c.3 nonprofit corporation), and BKH, in turn, will then support you to the best of its ability.

The significant benefit that you will receive here (and I dare say not find anywhere else) is that because you will be living in a dormitory setting (sharing close quarters, sharing expenses) you will have to devote much less of your time and energy to work than you would have to do if you were on your own, thus maximizing your time and energy for training. How many young men in America today between the ages of 17 and 23 can work an hourly-wage job for part-time hours and make enough money to feed and house themselves, pay a qualified instructor to train them at a professional level, and go to foreign countries 3 or 4 times per year to compete in tournaments? Not many, of course.

The "way" of the Budo Karate House Dormitory is based on the way of dormitory life in the program that BKH founder, Nathan Ligo, attended in Japan as a personal student of Kyokushin Karate founder, Mas Oyama. In that sense, dormitory life is like in a monastery. Of course there's no religious training here (To each his own!), rather it's all about living in such a way that you can devote your life to the discipline of Budo Karate. BKH residents do not have spending money, they do not come and go from the dormitory when they please, they do not have girlfriends, and they don't order pizzas whenever they want. They do have a roof over their heads, blankets to sleep under, lots and lots of very healthy food to eat (assuming they cook it properly and exercise some discipline when shopping), books to read and study, a TV to watch when/if the day's work is done, and lots and lots of training, traveling and competing opportunities.

Let there be no doubt though that one of the training experiences based on the Japanese model that BKH employs to make you tough both physically and spiritually is to show you how you can DO WITHOUT many of the creature comforts that young American men tend to take for granted. There are no bars on the dormitory (of course) so you can quit any time you like, but otherwise for the most part when you're not training, or working, or traveling for competitions, or grocery shopping, etc. you'll be spending your time in the dormitory writing letters, reading, sleeping, recovering from the day's training sessions, etc. This simplistic way of life is both one of the reasons why BKH fighters get so tough AND one of the reasons that you can work part-time hours and do all the training that you do and still compete in overseas competitions.

The nature of the work that BKH residents do has evolved over time to meet the necessity of having to support the program and its educational activities. Six years ago, a full year before the first BKH resident arrived, the BKH founder took a job as a security guard (night watchman) for the University Public Safety Department here, and worked that job full-time for that year in order to develop a relationship with that department's management so that when his first students arrived he would be able to recommend them for the job and get them jobs relatively easily doing something that both made $10/hour (which is pretty good of course for young men without working experience or training) and provided for them something that sounded "cool" so that potential applicants wouldn't be turned away by the notion of having to work to support a program that had no track record.

With the exception of those that had ANY criminal record, most of BKH's first 15 or so residents worked as security guards for this department. By the time the first few BKH residents arrived, BKH founder had been promoted to a sub-management position, and he actually became one of the supervisors on the job for his own students. As time passed and the dormitory population increased to four (and as his income from his other non-karate business increased) BKH founder eventually resigned his position as Security Supervisor and his dormitory students continued to work in that job.

In the beginning (for the first 2 years of BKH's existence), we had no aspirations of taking residents overseas, certainly not 4 times per year. Consequently, the program was advertised as follows: Expect to work 40 hours/week for your first month, 30 hours/week for the next 3 months, and 20/hours per week for the rest of your three years after that. In this way, new students, who can't train at this intensity for more than a couple hours per day anyway would work the most both because they had the time, and to deter unscrupulous guys from coming here with the intention of "mooching" off the program for a few months and then quitting (guys often incorrectly think they'll actually befit from doing just a few months here). The senior guys, meanwhile, who have begun to prove their dedication, and who are getting stronger and can train more than a few hours per day, will be partially supported by the newcomers (those that are most likely to quit), and the senior members, therefore, get some benefit by having lasted in the program the longest.

This worked for 18 months or so until more and more BKH residents got jobs as security guards and more and more of them started screwing up on the job. Imagine how embarrassing it was for the program director (an ex-security supervisor) when one of his ex coworkers would call him to report that another one of his BKH residential students got caught the night before, sound asleep, curled up like a dog in the floor of the guard booth where his job description required that he be keeping a vigilant watch on the property he was guarding. And then there was the time that one BKH resident quit the program and chose to use his shift on the job as the "window of opportunity" by which he would run away in the night, abandoning his shift and leaving his site unguarded. There were a number of incidents like this - because remember that the average BKH applicant isn't YET the winner that he aspires someday to become. The final straw was when some officers in the University Police Department noticed that candy bars where getting stolen from a save-the-children charity jar (in which one was supposed to drop a dollar in the box when tanking a candy bar), so they got with the department's detectives and positioned a microchip video camera in the room to see who the guilty party was. Well, unfortunately, there were two guilty parties, they both got caught on tape, and they were both BKH residents, one of them this most recent BKH "senior-member" who used to be so prominently displayed on the website.

Of course they were fired, and as is an unfortunate pattern for the BKH director HE lost the credibility because HE was the one who'd recommended his students for the job and it reached a point where he could no longer, with a clear conscience, recommend future students for the same job. As is an unfortunate normal pattern around here, weak guys who fail tend to ruin opportunities for future residents who've done nothing wrong. Interestingly, it was about at that same time that the notion of international travel for competitions and seminars presented itself as we formalized our connection with the Japan-based nonprofit organization, Kyokushinkan.

Six weeks later there was a training seminar in South Africa (see photograph below) that we had been invited to. Of course of all the places where we travel, South Africa is about the furthest away, and therefore the most expensive to buy a plane ticket for. There were 3 residents in the dormitory at that time and the program director asked them for a rare silent vote. "We have an opportunity to participate in a training seminar in South Africa," he explained, "but there's no money in the coffers right now to be able to afford it. I think it's possible that we could raise that much money between now and then but it'll mean dropping our evening training for a little while and working our fingers to the bone doing manual labor, all day every day if necessary, between now and then to be able to afford it."

"If you want to make that life change for the next six weeks and go to South Africa," he continued, "I want to hear it from you." He went on to ask all three residents to put one hand behind their backs and make a fist if they wanted to work that hard in order to go, and to leave their hands open if they preferred to not work so hard and continue as we had been. Of course all three guys made tight fists behind their backs and that was the start of manual labor as the primary "bread and butter" of the BKH program. The guys worked - in that case side by side with their instructor - and their first job was to clear an acre of fallen timber. A developer had a piece of property where a tornado had touched down and knocked down 100 pine trees. The developer offered BKH $1500 to clear the lot and estimated that it would take at least 7 days. BKH director and the dormitory's oldest member went to work with chain saws while the other guys dragged logs, the BKH director motivated the guys to treat the labor like training and they stunned the developer by clearing the lot in less than 4 days.

Once in Cape Town, BKH was invited for the first time to send fighters to the All-Japan Weight Category Tournament several months later in Japan, and since the door had been open to contractors who needed unskilled manual labor and would pay $10/hour for it, and since the BKH residents at the time all wanted to fight in Japan, the three of them came back from Africa and went right on working, replacing the morning to night work with 'short and sweet' 5-hour work days from 10 am to 3 PM so as to be able to still maximize their time for training. In the morning there was "morning training" at 7:00 (running, push-ups, jumping squats, etc.), then breakfast, then "power-stamina" training, before ideally resting for at least a half-hour before setting off for a 5 hour work day, digging ditches, moving lumber, cleaning up on construction sites, even painting. Finished by 4 or 5 in the afternoon, they could then come home to eat and rest for another half-hour or so before Karate training at or around 6:00.

Of course this is EXTREMELY exhausting, and the guys who could endure it got EXTREMELY tough because of it. BKH application materials and the website was changed to reflect the change from working as security guards to "doing mostly manual labor," and since then the most recent 25 or so guys have been admitted to the program with the expectation of 5-hour work days, Monday through Saturday (30 hours/week total except unfortunately there are frequent days when there's no work). This worked quite well for quite a while, especially because it helped us weed-out very quickly guys who came here who weren't going to be tough or dedicated enough. Of the 25, many quit not because the work was too hard or because the training was too hard, but rather of course because the two together is extremely hard. In that sense, BKH is about the survival of the fittest, which is why those that succeed here for any amount of time get so strong, i.e. physically strong at least with the opportunity to becoming spiritually strong as well depending on what they're made of to begin with.

Here's where the end part of this essay starts to merge with the end of the previous one, because this 5 hours of manual labor per day to support BKH didn't always work as well as it did there for awhile. Of course even the strongest of guys can get burned out maintaining this routine and that's normal. However, of course, BKH is not about making "normal" guys. Obviously, if you read the above essay on "Maturity", you'll be able to identify the fact that those guys who were failing there at the end of last year where exhibiting all the symptoms of getting "burned out" with such an amazingly difficult routine. And it's a fine line that the BKH program director has had no choice but to try to walk from the beginning:

"Don't take the boys to Japan this year and some will quit because dormitory life is so hard AND the average BKH resident isn't historically of a strong enough character to continue such a hard lifestyle without frequent, substantial rewards such as the excitement and honor of fighting in Japan in one of the world's strongest tournaments. Take them to Japan this year, on the other hand, and guys will be motivated to continue but the only way to afford it is to work them half to death (figuratively speaking of course), and then put the remaining quarter of the cost on your own credit card, AGAIN."

In the end of last years collapse, the guys were having trouble scheduling work for themselves, of course, because they were getting to the work sites and doing crappy work. Their days got shorter (4 hours with all the breaks instead of the 5 they were getting paid for) and the quality of the work diminished. If 5 guys go to a construction site and a contractor pays the five of them $50/hour for 5 hours, he expects to get $250 worth of work done. Of course he does! And to the credit of this class of BKH resident, MUCH of the time, these contractors LOVED to have BKH residents working for them because, MUCH of the time, these guys worked twice as hard as the average day laborer. Those days that they treated the work like training, certainly, they did 10 hours worth average day labor in 5 hours. But the bottom line of all of this that you need to pay very close attention to if you're considering applying to BKH is that even those guys that were so strong (as to win all the competitions you've seen on the website) weren't quite strong enough to endure BKH's 3 years of training because "strong enough" means both physically AND in terms of character development.

There's no question that it will be very hard but if you come to resent the "hand that feeds you" because your life is hard, even though that "hand that feeds you" is feeding you at a perpetual loss (i.e. no profit to date for BKH, no salary to date paid its director), the bottom line is that YOU'LL BE SHOWING YOURSELF TO BE NOT STRONG ENOUGH TO COMPLETE THE PROGRAM because THIS IS WHAT THE PROGRAM IS. It's not what you wish it was. It's what it is. It is extremely hard, and it has been advertised from the beginning as such. These young guys that read the advertisement and decide immediately that their prayers have been answered while at the same time failing to believe what's written on the page in front of them to read are destined to fail here. We at BKH are not about making mediocre fighters and instructors of Budo Karate; we're about making champions and the country's best instructors. We could sell out on that goal, and brush people through who weren't developing both their bodies and their characters, but we don't. This has been outlined in our literature very clearly from the beginning.

Chapter three, of this story of labor performed by BKH residents to support the program has only just begun. Jarrett McIntyre and Robert Schnoes are both currently working installing satellite dishes at people's homes. It's less physically demanding than the the manual labor that the earlier class did, but it's much more technologically demanding and it requires a much higher degree of personal responsibility. They have to do a lot of driving and essentially manage themselves once on the job. For the time being it's working well and they make a lot more than $10/hour which, in the long run, ought to make things easier for everyone. They are both reminded frequently that if times get rough, or if this job doesn't work out for whatever reason, there's always the type of manual labor that other residents have done in the past and they are reminded to prepare themselves in case that option becomes a necessity for any reason.

(Residents with criminal records, and poor driving records will not be able to do this kind of work even if it is available. Furthermore, no resident will be allowed to do this kind of work who can demonstrate to the program director that they're mature enough to handle it both in terms of safety and professionalism. All BKH applicants, therefore, should expect that a part of their routine here in the BKH program for three years will be MANUAL LABOR.)

We sincerely hope, by the way, that senior students by the time they reach their 3rd year will not have to work at all. We'd much rather have them teaching classes in the dojo (or future dojos) but whether or not that can ever become a reality depends both on the growth of the program (and dojo student body) and also on the individual's personal development. One of the reasons why a couple of these guys who quit were likely angry, was because their instructor often told them that if they played their cards right they ought to be able to be instructors by the time they were in their 3rd years rather than manual laborers. What they failed to understand, however, was the "if you play your cards right" part of that concept. Reaching that point, means developing a certain level of achievement in the dormitory population in terms of growth and maturity. The dormitory's growth, of course, depends on the personal growth of its senior members and since those senior members ultimately failed to grow up in the way that they needed to, the dormitory population remained small and of a quality that could not have supported that kind of 3rd year future for them. If you're succeeding here, therefore, we encourage you to HOPE that by the time you're in your 3rd year you can replace most of your time spent working with time spent training and teaching junior members. However the only way to be as sure as possible of your chances of success here is to EXPECT that you will spend the entirety of the program doing the minimum amount of work necessary in order to maximize your time and energy for training.

Bottom line: The primary element to understand for future applicants is that working the equivalent of 5 hours per day, 6 days per week (sometimes more, often less) is a requirement of participation in the program. It's a vital part, of course, of any young man's education towards responsibility, but more than that it's also a necessity in terms of putting food on the table and quality competitions at our fingertips. Money does NOT grow on trees in the BKH dormitory, and you would be well cautioned to understand these two facts very well: 1. The work that you will do here at BKH is very, very hard work in conjunction with the training. 2. The BKH program director has taken money out of his own pocket time and time again in order to make up the difference when BKH residents' earnings fail to meet the mark, and you would be smart therefore to think of him as a SPONSOR as much of as a teacher. You will work very hard, yes, but the amount of work that BKH residents have done to date has never been enough to pay for the benefits they receive. If you come here and start taking the BKH director's sponsorship for granted -- like this recent failed class ultimately did -- then you will wear out your welcome here and BKH maintains the right to withdraw that sponsorship from you at any time. No matter how hard you work, if you're not growing up and "getting with the program", you will be asked to leave.

Mitsumine Falls Camp 2006

4th All-Japan Open karate Tournament 2006

All-Japan Tournament Preparation, October 2006

Honbu's Summer Camp 2006

Court Victory Against Matsui

Korea Open International '06

Korea Open Kyokushinkan Karate Tournament, August 2006

South Africa
Seminar '06

South Africa Training Camp, May 2006

4th All Japan
Weight Cat.'06

All-Japan Weight Catogory Tournament, April 2006

Seminar
Fukushima '06

A Newspaper Article About BKH, February 2006

Another Friday Night Fight, January 2006

Ligo Dojo and BKH News, January 2006

China vs. Russia
Sanda Event'05

3rd All Japan
Open '05

Japan Open Tournament, November 2005

2 BKH Resident's 1st Tuffman Competition, Octonber 2005

1st World
Moscow '05

Kyokushinkan 1st World Open Karate Tournament, Moscow, September 2005

Newspaper Article about Ligo Dojo, June 2005