Tanuki Martial Arts: How Two Paths Led to the Same Mats

The snow started somewhere around Highway 401. By the time Alex (Gymdesk's fearless CEO) pulled up to the east end of Toronto, it had turned to rain, then back to snow again. 

He'd been circling the block, not expecting much—a door, a staircase, a gym tucked away from the street.

What he found inside was a 15-month-old making noise from a stroller, a kids' class wrapping up, teenagers rolling with adults, and a mom of four who'd just won gold at Pans. 

Nobody was wearing their credentials. Nothing on the walls declared what this place was or what it expected from you.

Then he rolled, his son Neo showing him the video while he got submitted.

That's Tanuki Martial Arts. And that's Seiji Sugiman-Marangos and Marianna Zafiroudis—two people who grew up in the same east-end neighborhood and never met until jiu-jitsu put them on the same mats.

Watch the episode here:

Two Different Paths to the Same Mats

Seiji's martial arts story reads like a tour of the east end. 

Shotokan Karate down the street—same instructor, now in his 80s, still going. Taekwondo at another local gym. Wing Chun. Wushu. Capoeira. MMA. 

The neighborhood shaped him before jiu-jitsu ever did.

He found BJJ in undergrad at a gym in uptown Toronto, full of people active in Ontario's early (and not yet legal) MMA scene. Typical first class: got beat up by everyone in the room, including some teenagers. 

He kept coming back.

Then he did something unusual. He moved to Hamilton for grad school—a PhD in biochemistry—and instead of finding a gym there, he started his own club on campus. As a white belt. 

"We didn't charge anyone anything," he says. "Just a small group, eight to ten people training hard together."

He ran that club for seven years. White belt to brown belt, coaching the whole way.

Three days a week, he commuted from Hamilton to Toronto—an hour and a half each way—just to keep training with his people.

Marianna's path came through boxing. International bouts. Then a coach told her to take a break and reset.

She found jiu-jitsu almost by accident and never went back. She competed at Europeans, won gold at purple and blue belt, then took silver at Pans at brown.

Then she had a daughter—the 15-month-old making noise in the background. She came back to training a few months post-C-section and competed at nationals 10 months in.

In the years before Tanuki, she was doing child and youth work with high-needs kids on the autism spectrum in Scarborough. That background shows up in every Tanuki kids class.

They both grew up in the same neighborhood. They never crossed paths until jiu-jitsu.

The Fight That Ended a Career

During grad school, Seiji fought MMA. About seven fights total, one or two a year. 

The timing wasn't unusual—he was already doing the PhD-plus-martial-arts thing—but the logistics were.

MMA wasn't legal in Ontario. Not for most of his career. So fights happened out of province, or on reservations, and they happened on short notice because nobody wanted to pay to fly in someone they didn't know. 

First fight: Prince George, BC, four days' notice. He got on a plane Friday, weighed in that day, fought Saturday.

"I was the only one who showed up for the weigh-ins," he says, matter-of-factly. "He said, 'Oh, everyone else just phoned it in. They told me they were all waiting.'"

He tells these stories the way someone talks about a weird job they used to have. No romanticizing. Just the facts.

His last fight was the only one he had legally in Ontario. It was televised on The Score.

He lost about 30 minutes of memory from it. Not because he was knocked out—he was conscious the whole time. None of it stuck. His rib separated during the fight.

His first memory afterward was getting the tape cut off his hands while his coach was already talking about the next fight—Ryan Hall, Montreal, the following month.

"If it wasn't for brain damage, I'd probably still be doing it."

He says it without drama. That's just how it went. 

He doesn't regret fighting. He retired, finished his PhD, got a job at SickKids Hospital. And somewhere in the back of his mind, the idea of opening a gym never went away.

A Random Message During COVID

Marianna sent Seiji a message during lockdown. Just checking in. Then she asked him something she'd been thinking about herself.

Had he ever thought about opening a gym?

"I think about it all the time."

They started talking about it. One conversation led to another. Eventually, they decided to go look at a few spaces just to see. One came up on their old street. The same neighborhood where they'd both grown up. 

They signed the lease in March 2022. Then one more lockdown hit.

They spent it renovating the space downstairs. By the time they were done, the lockdown was over. April 2022, first classes. About a month from lease to mats on the floor.

The name came from a brainstorming session where they kept shooting down each other's ideas. 

A friend had advised them not to use a geographical name—you don't want to be Greektown Jiu-Jitsu if you ever move. So they were going through options. Seiji said "Tanuki." Marianna paused.

"I was like, 'Oh, you know what, I kind of like it. It's like a trickster animal.'"

In Japanese folklore, the tanuki is unassuming. Looks like a raccoon. Not obviously dangerous. That's the whole point.

The Gym That Wasn't Supposed to Be a Fight Gym

When they were planning Tanuki, Seiji was clear about one thing.

"I didn't want this to be a fight gym. We're much more community-oriented."

That's a notable thing to say when you've done seven MMA bouts and your co-founder has won at Pans and Europeans. But it's the kind of call that shapes everything downstream: who joins, who stays, what the mats feel like on a Tuesday night.

The average member age at Tanuki is in the 40s. They've got 14-year-olds and people in their 60s. Families where kids and parents both train.

On opening day, only two students were brand new. Everyone else already knew how to train. That set the tone before Seiji and Marianna had to.

"We don't really need to reinforce that," Seiji says. "We don't have any rules written on the wall. I don't need to give people a talk ever. Like everyone kind of understands that we're here to train hard, have fun, but not get hurt and take care of each other."

No one's moving out of the way based on belt color. No one's using rank to pressure a newer student. The belt system is earned and respected at Tanuki. But it's not a weapon.

Everybody teaches. "Everyone is deputized to teach. If you have a question, you don't have to defer to me."

That's not accidental. Gym culture doesn't come from a poster. It comes from what people experience in their first few rolls. People stick around because they feel safe enough to come back. 

And because they actually improve.

On pricing: everything's on the website. No consultations. No sitting someone down to explain why they should sign up.

"I personally hate going into a gym and getting put in a corner and talked to about why I should be signing," Marianna says. 

That's the whole philosophy right there. Transparent gym pricing, equity-deserving memberships listed openly for anyone who needs financial support, no upsell.

For the admin side, Seiji found Gymdesk—which he'd come across years earlier as "MA on Rails," the earlier version. 

"Most intuitive of everything we tried," he says. 

His PhD brain demands complete data sets, so even on vacation, he pulls up the cameras every night to manually fill in attendance records. The check-in tablet has been on the to-do list since they opened. It's still not up.

What Four Years Without Marketing Looks Like

Tanuki doesn't run ads. Doesn't do campaigns. Doesn't have a playbook beyond word of mouth and showing up on Google Maps when someone searches for a BJJ gym in East Toronto.

"We don't do any active marketing," Seiji says. "We usually get people who are seeking us out."

And yet: a mom of four just won gold in her division and silver in the absolutes at Pans. Competitors keep emerging from a room that wasn't built for competition. 

The gym has grown slowly and steadily for four years. Seiji doesn't know how many members he can have before he stops knowing everyone's name, but he's thinking about it.

They've recently started expanding the kids program, adding a general fitness component alongside the existing jiu-jitsu curriculum. Seiji and Marianna still teach most of the kids' classes themselves. They haven't handed that off. They're not ready to.

If you're thinking about how to open a BJJ gym, Seiji's advice probably isn't what you'd expect.

"It was kind of easier than I expected it would be."

Not easier because the work was light. Easier because they weren't manufacturing anything.

They opened in the neighborhood they grew up in, with people they already knew. They cared genuinely—about the kids' classes, the Tuesday night regulars, the person who needed a different membership to afford training.

The culture didn't need engineering. It was already in the people who walked through the door first.

That's it. That's the whole thing. Start with the community. Everything else follows.

Seiji and Marianna never met growing up, despite sharing the same neighborhood. Jiu-jitsu found them both. Then a pandemic. Then a gym.

To find more stories like this, check out our Gymdesk Originals. To find a gym management software built to give you more time on the mat, check out our 30-day-free trial.