Since I still see people visiting our site from Bu!!shido, I would like to share a summary of that nonsense.
The Bu!!shido is supposedly a website created for the purpose of exposing phoney martial arts schools. Nothing wrong there so far. You would think that the creator of the site is a reknowned, world class martial artist and expert in all fields of martial arts. Sad to say, he is neither. After my experience with the site, I investigated it myself.
Let me give a little backround into the initial interaction. I came across a website called the Martialist. The author of the site is Phil Ellmore. It is an interesting site that has opinion, interviews etc. It is about no particular martial art, but covers fighting, guns, knives etc. I saw on the site that Bu!!shido had attacked the sites creator, Phil Ellmore. He was called fat, and other immature names. No constructive criticism, just abuse.
I decided to try my own experiment. I logged onto Bu!!shido and asked a question. I posed as someone wanting to know about my own school. As you can see from the 56 pages that followed, the site is all about bullying people. You receive a "Bully" rating for such posts. Needless to say, all manner of ignorant, infantile keyboard wannabes attack anyone and everyone. Now, no one ever came to my school, as you would would think they would, to determine if my school was up to their standards. Nevertheless, using photos from my website as their only guidelines, picked apart my school. One student in a photo was called fat. Techniques were mocked. They even had a problem with how the school name was painted on a wall. It was noted to be poor calligraphy style.
The biggest frustration to them was, upon demanding that I scan copies of my diplomas ( my certificates from Japan do not fit into my scanner, too big) I did not do so. They contacted a member of a ranking organization and it was the wrong one. The poor man couldn't apologize enough to me.They demanded to know who my teachers were. One has his picture right on my website. The others can be learned by a visit to my class. Despite numerous invitations to view my class, no one came, nor did I expect that they would. The site is mainly dedicated to MMA style of fighting and dismisses most other traditional arts.
The main way they determine the quality of a teacher is by how many professional ring matches he has had. I couldn't use my style in a ring. A fellow teacher of mine entered a San Da competition with one of our teachers. He was disqualified because he couldn't keep to the rules
It is sad that so many people go along with such garbage. I guess it is easy to bully people online when the other person cannot reach you.
So, that is the Bu!!shido story.