Dear Branch Chiefs,

First of all, I would like to wish you a Happy New Year!

I also want to thank you all for your hard work during the past year, and I’m looking forward to continuing to work with you during the coming year, 2010.

2009 was a year focused mainly on the World Cup, which ended in great success. With this success in our minds, we will be able to start 2010 with a lot of hope and expectations. I assume that you all already have made several plans for the coming year, and I wish you success in your work.

As you know, our organization is working on a four year cycle, ending with the World Championship every 4th year. 2010 will be the third year of the present cycle, and next year, the 10th World Championship will be held. This means that this year will be a busy year preparing for the World Championship, and many countries will start their selection tournaments, which means that the competitors will start to train even harder and become more focused on their goal: to fight in the World Championship, which is the ultimate dream and goal for all Kyokushin fighters.

As an organization we will continue to work on our goal to become the “largest and strongest Budo Organization” and to reach our goal of “100 affiliated countries”. We will especially focus on the globalization of our organization this year, and hope that more countries will join us. I am sure that you all will do whatever you can to cooperate to enlarge our circle of friendship.

I also have good information for you; the acceptance of the WADA Code has now been finalized. This is the first time ever that a Full Contact Karate organization has accepted the WADA Code, and I’d like to thank everybody who has been involved in this work: The Doping Control Committee, our legal adviser, and our office staff. This is a very important step in our work for fair play, and also in our work for improving the moral of competitors; it all fits into our ideals for our organization.

Lastly, I hope that I will be able to visit you all this year again and I will do whatever I can to adjust my schedule to be able to accept your invitations. It is a great experience to visit you, to meet with your students and to train together, it is important to never forget that we and our students, and all member of the organization are important for the growth of WKO. We all together make this great organization.

Let’s together make the year 2010 to be a successful and prosperous year!

OSU!

Kenji Midori
President
WKO