“Teaching” — What I Realized After 15 Years of Tango | The Origin of KaradaNaoru (3)

A tango-loving woman from Kyoto had been asking me for some time,

“Could you teach me Diego & Aldana’s technique?”

So the other day, I finally did.

Diego & Aldana are, without exaggeration, among the most popular tango dancers in the world today.

They were the winners of the 2025 World Tango Championship and now tour internationally across the globe.

Their studio is located in Yutenji, Tokyo.

I used to live in Nakameguro, close enough to walk there, and I had already been taking lessons from them even before they opened that studio.

It has now been nearly ten years.

Even elite professional dancers study and imitate the way they move.

That is how overwhelming their presence is.

And now, I teach those techniques to my tango friends for free.

Actually, not even for free.

We split the studio rental cost, so in a sense I am paying out of pocket to do it.

Still, there is something deeply meaningful about teaching.

Watching someone improve little by little is genuinely joyful.

Their posture changes.Their movement changes.Even their expression begins to change.

That kind of joy is completely different from money.

The same is true in my work.

At KaradaNaoru workshops, I openly share the philosophy and techniques I have developed over the years in as much detail as possible.

People have asked me before:

“Are you sure you should teach people that much?”

“Aren’t you just creating competitors?”

To be honest, I have never really thought that way.

Lately, I have started to think:

“Maybe this is my father’s DNA.”

My father’s favorite phrases were always:

“For my older brother.”

“For the employees.”

For better or worse, he was the kind of person who gave what he had away to others.

Tango, for me, is something I built through enormous amounts of time and money.

I have been dancing for nearly fifteen years.

And yet, the feeling of:

“Ah… this is what tango-like body movement actually is,”

only began to make sense to me within the last one or two years.

In other words, I have only recently started to glimpse the most important part.

And now, I casually teach that to friends for free.

The same applies to both remote and in-person bodywork.

I try to teach the methods I believe are the most reproducible and practical as carefully as possible.

But the bodywork teacher I used to study under was different.

What she did was closer to “forcing” than teaching.

For some reason, we were made to eat huge amounts of garlic, drink excessive amounts of water, and endure all kinds of extreme practices in the name of “creating energy.”

At the time, I simply assumed:

“Maybe this is how this world works.”

But looking back now, it would absolutely be considered unacceptable by modern standards.

And yet strangely enough, now I understand that it is possible to feel, adjust, and even control energy without doing any of those extreme things.

That is probably why many of the people involved back then would prefer to seal those years away as a kind of “dark history.”

Still, human beings are strange.

Once light shines on the future,even painful experiences from the past can transform into something almost precious.

Now, I even feel a certain gratitude toward those years.

In the end, perhaps people do not suffer from the past itself.

Perhaps what changes our lives is simply:

how we choose to give meaning to that past.

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At KaradaNaoru, we do not view the body simply as a collection of parts.

We see it as something deeply connected to:

human relationships,

emotion,

environment,

space,

and the way a person exists within the world.

In addition to in-person sessions at our Meguro salon in Tokyo, we also provide online support for clients living far away.

▼ KaradaNaoru Official Website

https://www.karadanaoru.com