Click on Add Your Club from anywhere in the Shotosphere area if you know a karate club that is not listed. Make sure they aren't listed before you add them. The Shotokan industry has an advantage over the consumer in that most students of karate are not aware of the choices they have between karate clubs. In an effort to break the oligopolistic hold the Shotokan industry has on the average karate student, I began a list of karate clubs in the United States. My goal was for the consumer to comparison shop for karate clubs, forcing the karate clubs to compete for your business.
Competition is what business is all about.
Competing karate clubs treat their customers with more dignity, provide better services, and lower their prices in order to capture market share. Until the Internet came along, most instructors felt that if they swaggered like cowboys in white pajamas that you should beg them to teach you. The Shotosphere might be a hack of a perl script, but it's working. This database now contains well over 1000 karate clubs in over 20 nations from around the world. Every continent except Antarctica has a club in the Shotosphere, and with the addition of the new search engine, the Shotosphere is being used more and more every day.