Kaiyu Tendo
Chapter 01 / The Dojo
Kaiyu Tendo is a performance coaching practice founded in Brooklyn in 2017 by a three-time All-Japan Kendo champion and an ex-McKinsey strategist. We teach a single method — Shuhari — to founders, executives, and athletes who would rather train quietly than post about it.
On the record
“Bushido is not a costume. It is a quiet, daily operating system — how you show up to training, how you speak to your team at 7 a.m., how you recover after a loss. The samurai were not warriors because they swung swords. They were warriors because they repeated small disciplines when no one was watching. That is what we teach.”
Chapter 02 / The Founders
Co-founder · Head of Method
3× All-Japan Kendo Champion (2011, 2013, 2015)
Co-founder · CEO
Former strategist, McKinsey & Company (New York)
Chapter 03 / Origin
Hiroshi Tendo had just finished his third All-Japan title. Lena Park had just resigned from McKinsey. They met at a Tuesday evening open practice at a small kendo club on Bushwick Avenue, in a converted warehouse with one north-facing window and a wooden floor that had been refinished three times.
Hiroshi was teaching kata to a handful of students who had nothing to do with martial arts — a founder, a violinist, a first-year analyst. Lena was auditing the class as research for a private brief on performance coaching. They argued for forty minutes about whether samurai code could survive translation into a modern operating language.
Six months later they signed a lease on 184 Bushwick Avenue, Suite 3B, and wrote the first draft of the Shuhari Method on a single whiteboard. The first cohort was eleven people. It has been taught to 4,200+ paying members across 38 countries since.
Chapter 04 / The Shuhari Method
Shuhari is the proprietary framework behind every Kaiyu Tendo program. It has been delivered inside 4,200+ paid memberships across 38 countries and is the basis of our corporate retreats for Notion, On Running, Shopify, and 14 Fortune 500 firms.
01 / Shu
In the beginning, you follow the rule without bending it. Sleep, training window, written reflection, recovery — every variable is set and held. We rebuild the daily architecture before we add a single new demand.
02 / Ha
Once the rhythm holds, we stress-test it. Fasts, double sessions, public commitments, controlled overreach. The goal is to find the edges of your current discipline and to extend them under supervision.
03 / Ri
Eventually the method disappears. You read the room, adjust the training in real time, and trust the work you have already put in. This is where most coaches stop teaching. We start measuring.
04 / Do
The final principle is teaching. Every member of the Kaiyu Tendo roster is asked, inside their first year, to coach someone else through a single unit of the method. Mastery is verified when it transfers.
Chapter 05 / The Dojos
Most of our 320+ active monthly coaching clients train remotely. But twice a year, cohorts converge at one of the two dojos we operate — a converted warehouse in Brooklyn and a restored machiya in Kyoto. The rooms are small on purpose.
Brooklyn · New York
Founded 2017 · The original dojo. All in-person founder coaching takes place here.
Kyoto · Japan
Opened 2021 · Annual alumni retreat and the home of the Hiroshi lineage programming.
320+ active monthly coaching clients worldwide · 11,400 lifetime alumni · verified by Userfeed, Q1 2024
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