chrismay101
Green Belt
Do any of you guys know a site I can download this episode?
Human Weapon- TKD
- Thread starter Laurentkd
- Start date
Watching the way the Taekkyon guys executed technique (front kick, back roundhouse kick, jumping kicks, roundhouse kicks, side kicks), it was almost exactly the way we were taught to do it when I was coming up in Chung Do Kwan. That's how we did technique. We practiced the back sidekick step (shift away, turn, then shift toward) exactly like that. Only difference is we didn't kick like the mule kick. Everything else was the same.
Now, if the Taekkyon practiced today is little like the Taekkyon of 500 years ago (I suspect it is quite similar), but is still considered Taekkyon, then so be it. As far as I'm concerned, based on the techniques I saw on Human Weapon and knowing how we trained in Tae Kwon Do, the stuff I was taught to do is directly descended from Taekkyon. Videos I have seen on Youtube bear me out. Not everything is the same, mind you, but much of it is.
Now, what I suspect is happening is students of Jidokwan, Changmookwan, Moodukkwan, and most of the others had no experience in Taekkyon and so, to them, their version of Tae Kwon Do would simply be Koreanized Japanese karate.
Now, if the Taekkyon practiced today is little like the Taekkyon of 500 years ago (I suspect it is quite similar), but is still considered Taekkyon, then so be it. As far as I'm concerned, based on the techniques I saw on Human Weapon and knowing how we trained in Tae Kwon Do, the stuff I was taught to do is directly descended from Taekkyon. Videos I have seen on Youtube bear me out. Not everything is the same, mind you, but much of it is.
Now, what I suspect is happening is students of Jidokwan, Changmookwan, Moodukkwan, and most of the others had no experience in Taekkyon and so, to them, their version of Tae Kwon Do would simply be Koreanized Japanese karate.
I would say it is almost improbably the reverse in that the Tae Kyon you see today is probably descended from students who practiced Tae Kwon Do the way you did back then.
We'll probably never know, since they didn't have cameras 500 years ago! I have read anecdotal stories of Taekkyon students doing leg techniques we would recognize, and holding matches where kicking the head earned the highest point.
The Korean Martial Arts are great and I enjoy them very much. Still I wish the history would come out truthfully. People like Exile and I enjoy hearing and knowing the truth rather than reworked history or imagination. Still both of us love the Korean arts even if I have moved on a bit!
Thing I find ironic:
Jason and Bill (who I thoroughly enjoy watching btw) have traveled to several countries and experienced judo, karate, muay thai, escrima, to name a few. In that time, the worst they ever suffered fighting skilled fighters was a few bumps and bruises.
It was a Tae Kwon Do fighter, representing an art many people scoff at, who did what had not been done before: knock out one of the hosts on his own show. And I don't mean Bill gets hit and stumbles around a bit, I mean stone cold knocked out.
Maybe now people will realize what Tae Kwon Do can do.
Jason and Bill (who I thoroughly enjoy watching btw) have traveled to several countries and experienced judo, karate, muay thai, escrima, to name a few. In that time, the worst they ever suffered fighting skilled fighters was a few bumps and bruises.
It was a Tae Kwon Do fighter, representing an art many people scoff at, who did what had not been done before: knock out one of the hosts on his own show. And I don't mean Bill gets hit and stumbles around a bit, I mean stone cold knocked out.
Maybe now people will realize what Tae Kwon Do can do.
It's not 'considered' Taekkyon; it's called taekkyon by those who do it, which is very different. As I mentioned at one point, there is a version of modern Kenpo which is called Shaolin Temple Kenpo. And if you believe that it has any historical connection whatever to what the Shaolin monks were doing in the seventh century or whenever it supposedly was that Bhodidharma taught them the basis of their MA (whatever that was), well, I've got a bridge that I'm forced to sell a considerable sacrifice that I'm sure you'll want to consider purchasing!
Your criterion for deciding a matter of historical fact is what you saw in a brief segment on a one-hour popular entertainment television show??
The point is, YM, what you saw cannot possibly provide you with the evidence that would justify that conclusion. If you see something called Taekkyon and it looks like something you did in TKD, those facts by themselves give you no justification for drawing any conclusion whatever about the relationship between the two. First of all, nothing you saw on HW establishes the time depth of taekkyon at all, does it. To do that, you'd need to review the documentary history of the Korean MAs and look at what recorded oral materials there are from earlier time periods that bore on the question. And that is exactly what the MA historians I mentioned in my previous posts have done, reading the available Chinese, Japanese and Korean sources and analyzing the evidence they contain. And as I pointed out, there is virtually no mention of taekkyon earlier that the 19th century; when people talk about 'ancient' taekkyon, they are, as Stanley Henning demonstrates in the paper I cited, confusing the transliteration of taekkyon (which appears in no old records) from that of takkyon, meaning 'push-shoulders', a generic label for unbalancing moves (as vs. striking with the hand or using weapons). And what contemporary records we have are, as Steve Capener documents in the source I cited, unanimous that taekkyon was a folk leg-wrestling contest practiced at village festivals, where it was the basis for much gambling activity, and was actively suppressed by the Japanese early on during their extended occupation of Korea, starting with the last quarter of the 19th c., though it only became official thirty years later. We also know that taekkyon was 'revived' by KMAists during the post-Cold War era who were surrounded by thousands of people doing kicking techniques representing extensions of the Shotokan/Shudokan kicks that the Kwan founders had brought back from Japan with their freshly minted dan ranks in those JMAs. And then, surprise surpise, we find devotees of this newly-hatched `taekkyon' doing the same kinds of kicks as the premier KMA of the time, heavily sponsored and promoted by the military dictatorship that ruled Korea for 18 years in the post-Korean War era, and on this basis you form the belief that you're seeing the demonstration of an ancient KMA that TKD descended from?? :lol:
Bears you out?? How do YouTube demos bear that picture out any more than the Human Weapon program bears it out?? Exactly what evidence do those videos contain which is incompatible with the known, documented invention of a new Korean MA using pieces of technique already available from TKD (including kicks traceable to karate kicking techniques),named after an earlier leg-wrestling form of contest which had been, according to all reliable sources, virtually extinct by the early 20th century? Would you care to identify just what it was in those YouTube videos that offers dramatically new evidence on the point?
Or was it just that the kicks in what was described in those videos 'looked like' what you learned in your TKD classes? Because if it was the latter, you got no case, none at all, given what the actual historical evidence base which I've given you detailed references to shows.
Given the facts that their Kwan founders received publically acknowledged black belts in Japanese karate systems from prominent instructors, given the fact that early curricula of all the original Kwans incorporated classic Okinawan-derived kata such as the Taikyoku (Kichos) Pinan/Heian set (Pyung-Ahn), Empi (Eunbi), Naihanchi, Bassai (Balsek), Rohai and many others, that the techniques taught in these Kwans were called karate in Korean (tang soo do and kong soo do, the actual names of the arts taught, are the translations into Korean of the two different transliterations of kara-te, 'empty hand'/'China hand'), ... etc. etc. etc..... I'd say that your suspicions are pretty much without any factual foundation whatever. I'd say further that this kinds of evidence makes it pretty clear that the students of the early Kwans regarded their art as Korean karate because, as Gm. Kim Soo points out in his current-issue interview in Black Belt, that's exactly what it was, and they recognized the same techniques they were doing when they saw karate techniques demo'd. Of course, since every one of their first-generation instructors had learned karate from the Okinawan expats whom they studied with in Japan, it would have been a little weird for them to come to any any other conclusion anyway, right? For heaven's sake, my own TKD lineage, Song Moo Kwan, one of the original five, is almost a word-for-word translation into Korean of Shotokan: shoto ('waving pines', taken by Gichin Funakoshi as his nom de plume for the poetry he wrote) +kan ('house, (training) hall') <---> Song ('Pine Tree') + Moo ('martial') + Kwan ('school, training hall'), not surprising given the fact that Byung Jik Ro, who founded it, was a fourth dan under Funakoshi before returning to Seoul at the end of the 1930s.
In and of itself, a suspicion is nothing but a hunch, and has no standing with respect to a factual question; until you can find some solid evidence to support it, a hunch is nothing but an incidental aspect of your biography. It's about you, not the history of TKD (or anything else). We all have hunches, all the time, and most of them probably are incorrect, but whether they're correct or not, they do not signify so far as judging factual issues one way or another. They're useful only in providing us with a starting point, a direction, for pursuing those issues. In this case, there is a lot of historical evidence and argumentation bearing in the questions at hand, evidence your posts make it clear you're unaware of. Maybe it would be better for you to actually look into that evidence a bit before forming such 'suspicions' on the basis of an hour-long television series about a pair of wandering martial arts guys spending a week cramming for an 'exam' on each of a fairly large number of different martial arts, apart from the YouTube videos you mentioned....
CuongNhuka
Senior Master
As has probably been mentioned before, I loved watching Bill get flattened. Let's just hope that this reigns in a new era in the Martial Arts TV show were reality existes. And by that, I mean the stupid American with little training gets used as a mop when he fights the Asian guy who has been training all his life.
Cruentus
Grandmaster
The knockout had more to do with the rules of the game, the player (in this case one talented at this type of game against Bill), and the situation rather then the art, though. The same could have happened in a boxing match, for example.
The Korean Martial Arts are great and I enjoy them very much. Still I wish the history would come out truthfully. People like Exile and I enjoy hearing and knowing the truth rather than reworked history or imagination. Still both of us love the Korean arts even if I have moved on a bit!
You know I'm with you and Exile too. I love the Korean Arts and my GM will set you down and tell you no TKD is not from 500 years ago, it is from the mid fifties and hust accept it. Thae Art is young, so what the Art has alot of great aspect to it. Please lets all work together to bring the truth to the forefront.
It's not 'considered' Taekkyon; it's called taekkyon by those who do it, which is very different. As I mentioned at one point, there is a version of modern Kenpo which is called Shaolin Temple Kenpo. And if you believe that it has any historical connection whatever to what the Shaolin monks were doing in the seventh century or whenever it supposedly was that Bhodidharma taught them the basis of their MA (whatever that was), well, I've got a bridge that I'm forced to sell a considerable sacrifice that I'm sure you'll want to consider purchasing!
Your criterion for deciding a matter of historical fact is what you saw in a brief segment on a one-hour popular entertainment television show??
The point is, YM, what you saw cannot possibly provide you with the evidence that would justify that conclusion. If you see something called Taekkyon and it looks like something you did in TKD, those facts by themselves give you no justification for drawing any conclusion whatever about the relationship between the two. First of all, nothing you saw on HW establishes the time depth of taekkyon at all, does it. To do that, you'd need to review the documentary history of the Korean MAs and look at what recorded oral materials there are from earlier time periods that bore on the question. And that is exactly what the MA historians I mentioned in my previous posts have done, reading the available Chinese, Japanese and Korean sources and analyzing the evidence they contain. And as I pointed out, there is virtually no mention of taekkyon earlier that the 19th century; when people talk about 'ancient' taekkyon, they are, as Stanley Henning demonstrates in the paper I cited, confusing the transliteration of taekkyon (which appears in no old records) from that of takkyon, meaning 'push-shoulders', a generic label for unbalancing moves (as vs. striking with the hand or using weapons). And what contemporary records we have are, as Steve Capener documents in the source I cited, unanimous that taekkyon was a folk leg-wrestling contest practiced at village festivals, where it was the basis for much gambling activity, and was actively suppressed by the Japanese early on during their extended occupation of Korea, starting with the last quarter of the 19th c., though it only became official thirty years later. We also know that taekkyon was 'revived' by KMAists during the post-Cold War era who were surrounded by thousands of people doing kicking techniques representing extensions of the Shotokan/Shudokan kicks that the Kwan founders had brought back from Japan with their freshly minted dan ranks in those JMAs. And then, surprise surpise, we find devotees of this newly-hatched `taekkyon' doing the same kinds of kicks as the premier KMA of the time, heavily sponsored and promoted by the military dictatorship that ruled Korea for 18 years in the post-Korean War era, and on this basis you form the belief that you're seeing the demonstration of an ancient KMA that TKD descended from?? :lol:
Bears you out?? How do YouTube demos bear that picture out any more than the Human Weapon program bears it out?? Exactly what evidence do those videos contain which is incompatible with the known, documented invention of a new Korean MA using pieces of technique already available from TKD (including kicks traceable to karate kicking techniques),named after an earlier leg-wrestling form of contest which had been, according to all reliable sources, virtually extinct by the early 20th century? Would you care to identify just what it was in those YouTube videos that offers dramatically new evidence on the point?
Or was it just that the kicks in what was described in those videos 'looked like' what you learned in your TKD classes? Because if it was the latter, you got no case, none at all, given what the actual historical evidence base which I've given you detailed references to shows.
Given the facts that their Kwan founders received publically acknowledged black belts in Japanese karate systems from prominent instructors, given the fact that early curricula of all the original Kwans incorporated classic Okinawan-derived kata such as the Taikyoku (Kichos) Pinan/Heian set (Pyung-Ahn), Empi (Eunbi), Naihanchi, Bassai (Balsek), Rohai and many others, that the techniques taught in these Kwans were called karate in Korean (tang soo do and kong soo do, the actual names of the arts taught, are the translations into Korean of the two different transliterations of kara-te, 'empty hand'/'China hand'), ... etc. etc. etc..... I'd say that your suspicions are pretty much without any factual foundation whatever. I'd say further that this kinds of evidence makes it pretty clear that the students of the early Kwans regarded their art as Korean karate because, as Gm. Kim Soo points out in his current-issue interview in Black Belt, that's exactly what it was, and they recognized the same techniques they were doing when they saw karate techniques demo'd. Of course, since every one of their first-generation instructors had learned karate from the Okinawan expats whom they studied with in Japan, it would have been a little weird for them to come to any any other conclusion anyway, right? For heaven's sake, my own TKD lineage, Song Moo Kwan, one of the original five, is almost a word-for-word translation into Korean of Shotokan: shoto ('waving pines', taken by Gichin Funakoshi as his nom de plume for the poetry he wrote) +kan ('house, (training) hall') <---> Song ('Pine Tree') + Moo ('martial') + Kwan ('school, training hall'), not surprising given the fact that Byung Jik Ro, who founded it, was a fourth dan under Funakoshi before returning to Seoul at the end of the 1930s.
In and of itself, a suspicion is nothing but a hunch, and has no standing with respect to a factual question; until you can find some solid evidence to support it, a hunch is nothing but an incidental aspect of your biography. It's about you, not the history of TKD (or anything else). We all have hunches, all the time, and most of them probably are incorrect, but whether they're correct or not, they do not signify so far as judging factual issues one way or another. They're useful only in providing us with a starting point, a direction, for pursuing those issues. In this case, there is a lot of historical evidence and argumentation bearing in the questions at hand, evidence your posts make it clear you're unaware of. Maybe it would be better for you to actually look into that evidence a bit before forming such 'suspicions' on the basis of an hour-long television series about a pair of wandering martial arts guys spending a week cramming for an 'exam' on each of a fairly large number of different martial arts, apart from the YouTube videos you mentioned....
Great post as always and you have really hit on alot of points here. in February we need to set down and talk for like 10 days.
...in February we need to set down and talk for like 10 days.
Terry, I'm really looking forward to doing that!!
Terry, I'm really looking forward to doing that!!
Thanks Exile as you know we need to make TKD here in the US, for the US. To do this we need to be able to tell the truth from the lies.
Exactly, Terry. That's the crucial point. The Koreans are perfectly entitled to develop their view of the art that they adopted and adapted from Japanese sources (just as the Japanese did from Okinawan, and the Okinawans in part from China... diffusion and modification are the name of the game in the MAs, eh?) But their national aspirations don't necessarily result in a take on the MAs which people from other countries, with their own histories and concerns, will buy into, and that means that we may well have to exercise the option to part company from current WTF/KKW perspectives on the future of the art. It's not a matter of forcing anyone to go along with this—anyone who wants to continue to travel with the Korean TKD management is just as free and welcome to do so as ever. But if a certain fraction of the TKD community feels the need to adopt a different approach, that too is allowed!
This has happened repeatedly in the history of the KMAs. TSD split off from TKD, in the Choi era; TKD split into KKW and ITF after Choi fell from grace in Korea... enforced unity has never worked in the MAs, and never will.
You guys have provided a lot of info that I didn't know...thank you.
Also, did you guys learn/do u teach to perform tornado kicks the way the showed in the episode? I was taught not to get so much air in the jump b/c of course it makes it slower.
Also, did you guys learn/do u teach to perform tornado kicks the way the showed in the episode? I was taught not to get so much air in the jump b/c of course it makes it slower.
HelloKitty
Green Belt
I found the .torrent file in "the pirate bay".
Ok, I don't have cable tv, so I've not seen the episode. So, is it worth buying on DVD?
No save your money.
Over the last several years, something I have tried to do is cross reference the content of Tae Kyon, since many people say it led to Tae Kwon Do, while just as many people say it didn't.
What I have is consistant proof through video footage and written text that Tae Kyon gave Tae Kwon Do many of the kicking techniques it now uses.
Why do I make that statement?
1. Consistant footage on Youtube (a great resource btw) that shows Taekyon fighters doing the same kicking attacks (many of the same kicking anyway) modern TKD uses. These include: roundhouse, stepping attacks, spinning kicks, jumping kicks, and jump spinning kicks.
2. The footage from Human Weapon that shows Jason and Bill doing leg techniques that agree with the footage I have seen previously.
3. Written text that corroborates the above.
4. The way we did techniques in my organization that seemed to directly reflect this influence.
Now it can be argued that early TKD was very derivative of Shotokan, more or less depending on your Kwan. My argument is that modern TKD directly stems from Taekkyon. I have seen too much proof to believe otherwise.
Now, if the argument is that TKD and Taekkyon either had nothing to do with each other, or TKD and TK influenced each other (possible), my question is Where Did Those Techniques Come From? Japanese karate doesn't teach technique like that. A viewing of Human Weapon-Karate will prove that. And a martial art born out Shotokan would not do that either. If you don't learn kicking like that, how would you know to do it? To me, the only plausible explanation is that TK was either there from the beginning or strongly influenced later on. It is well known that the Chung Do Kwan people consciously wanted to purge TKD of Japanese influence and technique. Fair enough. What do you replace it with? If you purposely implant TKD with TK technique to Koreanize it, then it can be rightly said that modern TKD is a direct descendant of TK. Again, the only other explanation is that TK technique was there from the beginning.
What I have is consistant proof through video footage and written text that Tae Kyon gave Tae Kwon Do many of the kicking techniques it now uses.
Why do I make that statement?
1. Consistant footage on Youtube (a great resource btw) that shows Taekyon fighters doing the same kicking attacks (many of the same kicking anyway) modern TKD uses. These include: roundhouse, stepping attacks, spinning kicks, jumping kicks, and jump spinning kicks.
2. The footage from Human Weapon that shows Jason and Bill doing leg techniques that agree with the footage I have seen previously.
3. Written text that corroborates the above.
4. The way we did techniques in my organization that seemed to directly reflect this influence.
Now it can be argued that early TKD was very derivative of Shotokan, more or less depending on your Kwan. My argument is that modern TKD directly stems from Taekkyon. I have seen too much proof to believe otherwise.
Now, if the argument is that TKD and Taekkyon either had nothing to do with each other, or TKD and TK influenced each other (possible), my question is Where Did Those Techniques Come From? Japanese karate doesn't teach technique like that. A viewing of Human Weapon-Karate will prove that. And a martial art born out Shotokan would not do that either. If you don't learn kicking like that, how would you know to do it? To me, the only plausible explanation is that TK was either there from the beginning or strongly influenced later on. It is well known that the Chung Do Kwan people consciously wanted to purge TKD of Japanese influence and technique. Fair enough. What do you replace it with? If you purposely implant TKD with TK technique to Koreanize it, then it can be rightly said that modern TKD is a direct descendant of TK. Again, the only other explanation is that TK technique was there from the beginning.
