In Asian society, but especially in China, Korea, and Japan, a system within martial arts schools (Ryu-Kwan-Kwoon) was a practice that is called “dojo/dojang/kwoon storming.” In Korean, it is called dojang jick-eojim 도장 찢어짐, and in Japanese, it is dojoyaburi 道場破り.
In the most modern use of Dojo storming, we see it in the recent Cobra Kai Series that is on Netflix. Where one instructor and or their students challenge another school’s instructor and or students, and the winner takes over the schools and their students, etc. Many martial arts movies depict this type of thing, even indirectly.
We even see it in the original Karate Kid movie from 1984, and others like Fist of Legend, Iron Monkey, Once Upon a Time in China, Lady Hapkido, Bruce Lee’s The Big Boss and the 1978 film Five Deadly Venoms.
We have seen a lot about it in the movies we have watched, but it’s not been seen much since the mid-80s as the culture of martial arts shifted from mainly adults to mainly children. And since the advent of the internet, we have a digital version of it, of classic bullying to dedicated sites that will expose schools that they consider inferior or just downright criminal in nature.
Much has already been written, and several YouTubers have done videos about “Count Dante”; he was very familiar to those of us who were brought up in that era or shortly after. Since much of my martial arts training in Kenpo and Aikido took place in the Chicago area, the subject matter often came up, especially in the early to mid-1980s.
