Mejiro Gym

The room the Dutch style came out of. Jan Plas trained in Japan under Kurosaki Kenji, named his Amsterdam gym after Kurosaki’s, and brought back not a technique list but a method — long high-volume pad rounds in which the coach never lets the fighter reset between elements of a combination. Rob Kaman’s wins in Thailand through the 1980s were the evidence that the method travelled, which is why the Dutch arrived at K-1 in 1993 already expecting to win.