20/05/2026
Afgelopen weekend organiseerden we met Seikan een Europese stage voor Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo-Jutsu. We mochten 34 deelnemers ontvangen uit 5 verschillende landen. De stage stond onder leiding van Ante Brännbacka uit Finland. Tijdens de stage werden ook examens afgenomen en enkele leden behaalden daarbij een hogere graad. Op zaterdagavond gaf ik een speech, waarbij ik de filosofische basis van onze krijgskunst in de verf zette, met een prominente rol voor Tielt als Europastad. Enkele sfeerbeelden en de tekst van mijn speech:
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BALANCE - Speech delivered by Ludovic De Cuypere, Tielt, 15 May 2026.
Tielt takes pride in being a “European city”.
And we - The Seikan Dojo - are deeply honored to host this years European Gasshuku and to welcome you all.
Bringing like minded people together in the pursuit of common goals. This is one the high social aims of KU.
And it is our deeply shared passion for KU that brought us together.
• To condition the body,
• To cultivate the mind
• To nurture the spirit.
I can’t help but wonder if that spirit should only be interpreted as our own personal spirit, or whether it should be be understood as a shared spirit – an immanent and all-encompassing “weltgeist”, in the German idealistic sense of the word.
That we are gathered here today should not and should never be taken for granted.
KU stands on the shoulders of many giants and our contemporary fighting method is deeply rooted in classical history.
I don’t think I need to remind anyone that Europe has not always been the peaceful and prosperous place it is today.
Through our European Gasshuku, we also foster the European flame.
Through our European Gasshuku, we not only nurture our own, but also a larger spirit of cooperation and peace.
I’m grateful to all of you for nurturing our spirit.
I also take the opportunity to express my deep gratitude to Hanshi McCarthy. Leading a world wide organisation is not and should never be taken for granted. Hanshi created the first spark and cherished the fire for all these years.
As we celebrate our 21st anniversary this year, the Seikan Dojo has developed deep roots and tall branches. Our trunk and core strength is well-developed.
Our dojo tagline reads:
“Waar vrienden samenkomen om de meest complete vechtsport te beleven”.
Allow me to translate:
“Where friends come together to – and this is the hardest part to translate – Experience the most complete fighting art."
Experience doesn’t quite catch to full meaning of “beleven”.
Present day English uses phrasal verbs (like start off, or begin with, catch up, etc.), so a combination of a verb and a preposition-like word.
In Old English – the language spoken in England roughly between between 450 and 1100 AD, there were prefix-compound verbs, including verbs starting with be- (as in Present Day Dutch).
Let me give you an example.
You are all know the verb “to sit” (your are all sitting right now).
In Old English word for “to sit” was sittan.
Old English also had a verb besittan, which meant something like “to hold possession of something”, so a figurative way of sitting onto something and own it.
In present day Dutch, this is similar to the distinction between zitten en bezitten.
The prefix be- has many different senses, but it generally transforms an intransitive verb indicating an action, into a transitive one, an action that affects something.
So Dutch “beleven” is a combination of be- and leven or to live, so beleven can be translated as to “put or breathe your life into” the martial art.
At the Seikan we don’t practice KU, we live it.
In our tagline, I’ve never been fully content with the term “vechtsport” – fight sport.
We sometimes use the term “multivechtsport” or “multi fight sport”, but that doesn’t quite capture it either.
“Fighting art” or “martial art” comes close, but it’s still doesn’t capture what we do, it’s neither fighting nor an art, in my lived experience of KU.
Budo or Koryu Uchinadi Kenpo-Jutsu feel right to me, but they are also hard to sell to sell to prospective members.
After all these years I’m still pondering an apt Dutch term for what it is that we do.
However, after all these years I still cherish the term Seikan, a word that I borrowed from Gichin Funakoshi, through sensei McCarthy’s translation of the text with the same title.
After 21 years, I can also say that for Seikan, Nomen est Omen. Our name has turned out to be our destiny.
Seikan means “to remain calm in the eye of a storm and to calmy observe.”
Our tree stands tall and proud.
I’ve never been a man of big words and rhetorics, but allow me to declare loudly and clearly: The Seikan Dojo is one of the best dojo there is.
Allow me to reflect for a moment on what I think is the key to our success.
First and foremost, embracing KU has been most rewarding in the accomplishment of our success.
Our success does not lie in creating tournament winners.
Our success lies in creating a warm community of budoka, who enjoy and find value in learning and practicing KU and martials arts in a small local dojo.
Slowly walking the path, learning new skills along the way, some a bit faster than others, and all in the spirit of camaraderie.
The KU emblem depicts the pen and the sword
A fine and delicate balance, as in
• Ying and Yang
• War and Peace
• Life and Death
The Seikan dojo culture is all about finding balance
• There would be no dojo without our dojo bar
• Without a dojo bar, there would be no dojo
Seikan stands for:
• Serious learning, but always with a good laugh
Seikan stands for:
• Hard practice, but always in a safe learning environment
Seikan stands for:
• Dedicated training, but always in a way that improves our life
Dear friends, let’s face it:
The real enemy today is not so much the masked man on the parking lot.
Today the real enemy is:
• Social isolation
• The Sick Ageing Phenotype caused by high blood pressure, obesity and diabetes
The enemy is also:
• Social media inflicted Anger
• Status Anxiety
Indeed, at the Seikan Dojo, we fight many battles.
One balance that I have struggled with as a Dojo-Cho as the principal instructor at the Seikan dojo, is the one between sacrifice and rewards.
Leadership, in my case of a small non-commercial dojo, requires sacrifice.
Admittedly, at times I have felt like the sacrifice was too much, and I had to rediscover my personal balance.
Teaching requires sacrifice and the rewards are not always tangible.
It’s a tough balance, but one that I have been able to keep with a strong army of dedicated fellow instructors and a board of directors.
And this is a good time for me to thank each of these fellow travellers of the path:
My current fellow board members:
- Sam Leyn [APPLAUSE]
- Jonas Geiregat – Jonas deserves a lot of credit for being the brains behind this organization [APPLAUSE]
My fellow instructors and Seikan senators:
- Rodney Vandemoortele [APPLAUSE]
- Benny Loones [APPLAUSE]
- Alexander Desseyn [APPLAUSE]
Dear friends,
Practicing martial arts, budo, Koryu Uchinadi comes with many small benefits that might not be obvious.
We like to post-rationalize why we do something, but rational explanation is not necessarily the real driver of human behaviour.
Marketing expert Rory Sutherland keenly observes that the real value of a product might not be what people think it is.
One of his famous examples is the door man in grand hotels. Yes, the main function of a doorman is opening the door, but his real value lies somewhere else.
Rory Sutherland refers to these features as “Value Creating Components”.
Thinking about the Value Creating Components of our art – the things that matter without us realizing how hard these thing really matter – I can see many things that make a difference to our lives:
• Physically touching another human being – it’s the human touch that resonates most
• Looking another person in the eye
• The dojo as a safe space where you are allowed to struggle
• Struggle breeds confidence
• Confidence to perform in front of an audience
• Confidence in your training partner
• The confidence that your training partner could potentially hurt you, but restrains himself
• Having to go to the dojo on time, especially when you don’t feel like doing so
• Feeling the ground beneath your bare feet
• Learning a few words in new language
• Mobility
• Agility
• Orientation
And, of course:
• Balance
And yes, all these value creating components are captured in the KU-goals as defined by Hanshi McCarthy:
• Condition the body
• Cultivate the mind
• Nurture the spirit
If we can find strike the right balance between these three goals, then our lives will have been meaningful, and we will all have contributed to a better world spirit.
