Who is The Founder of Shinken Experience?

The founder of Shinken Experience is Kenneth Lim (Tee Hak). He is a Malaysian who grew up from a small family in Gombak, Kuala Lumpur. He completed his tertiary education in Selangor, one of the 13 beautiful states in Malaysia that is rich in traditional culture from various races. He enjoys all kinds of fruits, noodles, nasi lemak with rending ayam and kuah dahl with tosei.

As soon as he left school, he started his career as a sales and service executive in a MNC (Ecolab Inc.)that specializes in cleaning and sanitation technology for hospitality industry, food industry and beverage industry. He enjoyed working closely with many business associates to meet various demanding hygiene standards and expectation in the industry.

He worked his way up to the corporate ladder and was appointed to be the general manager to run Malaysia office. As the youngest general manager in Asia Pacific region then, the role gave him extensive multinational business and cultural exposure in US, EU and Asia Pacific. Apart from his career, one of his hobby is kendo, a sword fighting martial art that was originated from Japan. He started to approach Kendo in 1995. In 2006, he represented Malaysia to participate 13th World Kendo Championship in Taiwan.

In Kendo, he noticed the uniqueness of teaching method in his kendo dojo. In his Kendo learning process, he was asked by the sensei (teacher) to hit his bamboo sword onto his sensei’s kote (hand) and man (head). Despite Bogu (protective gear) was worn, the pain can be unbearable if the beginner like him hit it with a wrong way. He was touched by his kendo senseis who born the pain to correct his ashi-sabaki (foot work), kote-uchi (hand hitting) and shomen-uchi (head hitting). This prompted him to learn more about the spirit behind the sword of kendo. He felt there was some kind of significant implications from the spirit behind the teaching method. Hence, he started to research on the kendo related literatures and was finally learnt to know about Miyamoto Musashi.

In 2007, he resigned from the company where he had served for 12 years and left for Japan to further his research in kendo and Miyamoto Musashi. He spent 2 years apart from his family and study in International Budo University (IBU) in Katsuura city of Chiba Prefecture. In Japan, he enjoyed the friendship from many new friends around the world and is thankful to have many helpful senseis and professors in his learning journey. He completed his research on Musashi and returned home in early 2009.

Shinken Experience is the summary of what he had learnt, practiced and experienced from the spirit of kendo and Miyamoto Musashi.