Evolution of a dojo name

I began my adventure to teaching at my father's dojo, I started out by leading exercises, then teaching children's classes, then filling in for him when he wasn't there and eventually acting as Chief Instructor when he moved away. After a few years of leading the dojo, I got some advise from Mr. Phillip Koeppel, did a lot of soul searching and decided in the Winter of 1993, that I was going to stop using the name of my father's dojo and use my own name.

I am sure there will be several people that will say "oh my" and "how could you", well I wanted to pursue and teach a more authentic Okinawan karate, and could not do that in that particular dojo. On January 2, 1994 I opened my dojo and called it Mike Jones Karate-do Budokai, again taking advise from Mr. Koeppel.

The more I pursued the Okinawan arts, I decided that my dojo needed a Japanese name, eventually the dojo was called Yushikan (a name that we still use, but only by those already in the dojo). For almost 10 year I taught all classes at the Yushikan located on the back of my property adjacent to my home. I had grown tired of commercial karate, that coupled with my schedule as a law enforcement officer and eventually Chief of Police lead me to make the dojo private and I was very selective about who was admitted into the dojo. Training was old school and hard core, it was not for the feint of heart and not many people made it through the training. I was particularly hard on my children.

Fast forward to July 2014 and I had grown tired of the politics of being a Chief, the climate against police was turning, the Ferguson Riots had happened and the War on police was beginning, I decided it was the right time for me to retire and do something else in my life.   In October 2014 my family, a couple of students and I began construction on a newer and much larger dojo, which opened in January of 2015.

After several sit downs with the family and black belts, it was decided that normal people would have a hard time understanding Yushikan and being able to pronounce it. So we decided that we would have a public name for the dojo that would be better received by those unfamiliar with Japanese language of martial arts culture. We choose the name Okinawan Martial Arts Center, which made since, it was kind of generic but we thought hey we teach Okinawan karate, Kobudo and Toide, so it was kind of a catch all name that we thought the public would better understand.

You would be surprised how many people can not pronounce the word Okinawan, and don't get me started on the number of people that have called asking about marital advise. In hindsight maybe I should have kept Mike Jones Karate, people didn't have trouble with that. Then again, one of these days one of my son's will take it over, so having my name on it isn't planing for the future.

This year we celebrated 25 years since I opened that first dojo. Some years we have so many students we have to split classes and then some years it is just the small dedicated group that trains regularly.
My advise is that if you open your own dojo someday, keep it simple, name it after your city or county or your last name followed by family karate. From a marketing standpoint, regular people just don't get it.