Jan Plas, Kurosaki and the birth of the Dutch school
The most influential school in the sport began with a Dutchman training in Japan and bringing home not a set of techniques but a way of organising them.
Jan Plas trained in Japan under Kurosaki Kenji, a Kyokushin karateka who had been central to early Japanese kickboxing, and returned to Amsterdam to found Mejiro Gym in the mid-1970s. Thom Harinck was doing parallel work at Chakuriki. Between them they created what became the most influential school in the sport.
The Dutch contribution was not new techniques. It was a mechanical insight about the ruleset they worked under — leg kicks legal, clinch too brief to rest in. Under those conditions the optimal pattern is a chain rather than a single weapon: hands at head level to lift the guard and load the opponent's weight forward, then the leg taken from underneath. The cross rotates the body into exactly the position the rear low kick launches from, so adding the kick costs nothing.
The training method mattered as much as the tactic. Dutch pad rounds are long, high-volume and run at pace, with the coach refusing to allow a reset between elements of a combination. The result is a fighter who throws the sequence without appearing to decide to. That automaticity, not the technique list, is what separates the school — and it is why Dutch fighters would dominate the division K-1 created two decades later.