TKD Past To Present

[Brad Dunne]

http://www.taekwondo-4self-mastery.com/taekwondo-forms-origin.html

Thought folks would enjoy browsing thru.......It's a fairly large web site, lots of interesting information...........

 

[exile]

http://www.taekwondo-4self-mastery.com/taekwondo-forms-origin.html

Thought folks would enjoy browsing thru.......It's a fairly large web site, lots of interesting information...........

I dunno, Brad. I looked at the Taekkyon section and as usual, it's long on claims of ancient lineage, and radically short on any documentation whatever for the claims. The problem with all such text is that, as Stan Henning documents in his important 2000 article in Journal of Asian Martial Arts on 'Traditional Korean Martial Arts', all supposedly ancient references to taekkyon are actually erroneous (or cynically manipulated) pointers to takkyon, translating 'push-shoulders' and probably referring generically to unbalancing techniques. The only thing we actually have which we know is called taekkyon was a late 18th c. on folk contest/betting game of very limited distribution played mostly at village fairs and festivals. Steve Capener's detailed research on taekkyon (available here) makes clear just how marginal any last surviving vestige of the Korean civil and then Japanese military suppression of taekkyon in the late 19th century actually was. Now, people like Henning and Capener name names, cite older sources, people who were there around the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th c., looking for taekkyon and not being able to find any (just as Gm. Kim Soo, in his January 2008 Black Belt interview reports having experienced himself back in the early 1950s). You'd think that if the people running this site had any kind of historical integrity, they would address the severe problems that claims for 'ancient' taekkyon face in the public, peer reviewed work of the current generations of MA historians who've been scrutinizing—in depth—the relationship between modern and ancient Korean MAs. But the most we have is their acknowledgement that

Because Taekyun was not popular or very well practiced in developing Korea, it has [not?? (subsequent context seems to indicate negation was intended)—exile]] been able to keep very exact and specific records. The fathers of modern Korean martial arts Master Choi-Hong Hi of Ohdokwan and the International Taekwondo Federation said that his Taekyun instructor was a Han-Il Dong. Grandmaster Hwang Kee the founder of Moodukkwan and Choi-Young Sool who was the root of Hapkido claimed to have studied Taekyun, but the men they claim to have studied with are not in the preserved Taekyun linage. Weather they did study “Taekyun” or not will continue to remain one of the great mysteries of Taekwondo History.​

That's progress of a sort—once upon a time, all you heard when you indicated that taekkyon was essentially extinct by the time TKD got into high gear on the basis of the Shotokan/Shudokan training that four of the original five Kwan founders brought back from Japan was, 'Well, we all know that Gen. Choi studied taekkyon, so....'. But as the above makes clear, even that much of the story is beginning to wilt under critical examination.

The thing is, when you see something like the taekkyon discussion at this site, you start wondering just how much else that they have up there has been investigated carefully. In counterpoise to this sort of thing, I much favor the kind of site Dave Beck has up, which also looks at the history of TKD but from a more detached angle (here).

 

[foot2face]

The site is OK. It has some good information on it, but it seem to me that a lot of the content may be an attempt to cut the difference between the propaganda spewed by the interested parties; that being the KKW/WTF, the ITF and Kwan era practitioners. Its more fair than most sources but perhaps not entirely accurate.

 

[YoungMan]

But if Taekkyon no longer existed by the time Tae Kwon Do came on the scene, how is that there is a Korean TK Association, videos on Youtube, TK tournaments in Korea etc.? You can't have something from nothing.
Not to mention, as I stated previously, the fact that many of the techniques and steps that my organization did/do are eerily similar to what I've seen TK students do.
I've got a feeling that TK wasn't as dead as people make it out to be. One article stated that the author went to Korea around the 1920's and found no trace of TK. The Japanese had banned it under pain of death. You think you're going to easily find something you would be punished for doing? The anecdotal evidence I was told was that Taekkyon went underground so that the Japanese wouldn't see it.
In other words, how would the techniques exist today if the art died as people claim?
I don't think Taekkyon was as dead as some make it out.

 

[WMKS Shogun]

But if Taekkyon no longer existed by the time Tae Kwon Do came on the scene, how is that there is a Korean TK Association, videos on Youtube, TK tournaments in Korea etc.? You can't have something from nothing.
Not to mention, as I stated previously, the fact that many of the techniques and steps that my organization did/do are eerily similar to what I've seen TK students do.
I've got a feeling that TK wasn't as dead as people make it out to be. One article stated that the author went to Korea around the 1920's and found no trace of TK. The Japanese had banned it under pain of death. You think you're going to easily find something you would be punished for doing? The anecdotal evidence I was told was that Taekkyon went underground so that the Japanese wouldn't see it.
In other words, how would the techniques exist today if the art died as people claim?
I don't think Taekkyon was as dead as some make it out.

There were probably a few Taekkyon practitioners left after the liberation, but my guess is the influence is not as strong as it has been made out to be. The fact is that the then newly liberated Korea needed something to rally behind and since most of the martial arts schools were practicing what was basically Shotokan Karate (Song Mu Kwan, if memory serves me correctly, is the Korean way of saying Shotokan-Ryu, if not, I know one of the Kwans' name directly translates). Thus, when they created TaeSooDo and later changed the name to Tae Kwon Do, they were attempting to draw on the name and 'Korean-ness' of the folk art of the past.
As far as Taekkyon today, it may not have been created from nothing, but it COULD be a re-creation of Taekkyon of old based on stories and memories of the older generation, but with little actual direct connection to those who trained in it in the past. I am no expert, only putting forth the other side of the coin. The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.

 

[dancingalone]

But if Taekkyon no longer existed by the time Tae Kwon Do came on the scene, how is that there is a Korean TK Association, videos on Youtube, TK tournaments in Korea etc.? You can't have something from nothing.
Not to mention, as I stated previously, the fact that many of the techniques and steps that my organization did/do are eerily similar to what I've seen TK students do.
I've got a feeling that TK wasn't as dead as people make it out to be. One article stated that the author went to Korea around the 1920's and found no trace of TK. The Japanese had banned it under pain of death. You think you're going to easily find something you would be punished for doing? The anecdotal evidence I was told was that Taekkyon went underground so that the Japanese wouldn't see it.
In other words, how would the techniques exist today if the art died as people claim?
I don't think Taekkyon was as dead as some make it out.

Exile has answered this point you make numerous times in various threads; many of his posts even address you directly. What is called taekkyon today is likely a recreation of TKD, hence the similarity in kicking techniques. Today's taekkyon is the CHILD of tae kwon do, not its parent.

 

[YoungMan]

But again, if Japanese karate doesn't do those techniques (or not in that fashion anyway), there where did they come from?
For example, the circular kicking (spinning heel kick/back roundhouse, wheel kick), high kicks, jumping kicks, jump spinning. It is well known that Shotokan and the other styles did not do those techniques that way, if at all. Anecdotal evidence says those are Taekkyon kicks. If modern Tae Kwon Do was based on Shotokan technique (and certainly a part of it was undoubtably influenced by it), but Shotokan and other Japanese styles do not execute kicks like that, where did the Masters get that knowledge from?
My only explanation is that Taekkyon survived more than people think it did, albeit in clannish form. In other words, if you weren't a member of a family that practiced it, you weren't going to learn. Just a theory of mine. And again, if the punishment for practicing is severe, you can bet that it will not be easy to find. I would imagine a Westerner in a country that has traditionally distrusted foreigners is not going to easily find something like that.

 

[dancingalone]

But again, if Japanese karate doesn't do those techniques (or not in that fashion anyway), there where did they come from?
For example, the circular kicking (spinning heel kick/back roundhouse, wheel kick), high kicks, jumping kicks, jump spinning.

It's true that Japanese karate does not emphasize flashy kicking, but I find it hard to believe it was completely unknown to either the Japanese or the Okinawans. The human body has been the same for thousands of years after all.

Anyway, look at various Northern Chinese styles. Many of them display high kicking in their sets. I imagine the Koreans found inspiration for reinventing Korean karate into a kicking art from a variety of sources, Chinese or otherwise. Certainly kung fu probably played a role along with karate.

The Taekkyon link has been disproven well enough to my satisfaction, however, and by others much more scholarly than myself. I don't think it does Korean martial arts any favors to keep trudging out the old propaganda.

 

[exile]

It's true that Japanese karate does not emphasize flashy kicking, but I find it hard to believe it was completely unknown to either the Japanese or the Okinawans. The human body has been the same for thousands of years after all.

Anyway, look at various Northern Chinese styles. Many of them display high kicking in their sets. I imagine the Koreans found inspiration for reinventing Korean karate into a kicking art from a variety of sources, Chinese or otherwise. Certainly kung fu probably played a role along with karate.

The Taekkyon link has been disproven well enough to my satisfaction, however, and by others much more scholarly than myself. I don't think it does Korean martial arts any favors to keep trudging out the old propaganda.

Guys, my internet connection is very spotty at the moment—back at my mother's place in NY because of a severe accident she's had, running off a transient wireless node connection that someone must have running next door, so I'll make this quick.

(i) YoungMan: d.a. and the previous posters have made exactly the points I think need to be made and you really need to consider how well the points they're making speak to what evidence there is bearing on taekkyon.

(ii) this is something I have mentioned in the past: there's good evidence both that Koreans have historically been fond of kicking, regardless of whether it's been codified in a home-grown MA or not, and that Chinese MAs have played, historically, a huge role in Korean MAs. You may not be aware of it, but the Muy Dubu Ton Ji, the great manual of 'classical Korean MAs', as it's often described, is an almost literal translation of a book written 250 years earlier by a Chinese General, whose title is usually translated as the New Book of Effective Discipline—right down to the illustrations. The Chinese MAs were, until the late 18th c., the ideal military technology in the view of Korean military strategists and battle planners. The empty-handed techs in it turn out, according to Manuel Adrogues, a third-dan TKDist and professional MA historian, turn out—on the basis of the illustrations and descriptions—to be Long Fist chuan fa. If high kicks were present in Chinese combat techs, you can be pretty sure that they were going to be present in whatever the Koreans were doing at any given time.

These two factors—that the Koreans seem to have always enjoyed kicking (a trait that they share, not coincidentally, with many native northern Siberian and Innuit groups) and that many varieties of Chinese MAs have included such techs in their repertoire over what have probably been long periods of time—make it unnecessary, in the face of the documented witness by Koreans themselves that Taekkyon was difficult to impossible to find any trace of, at a time when business was booming in the Kwan-era precursers to TKD, to assume that Taekkyon existed as a coherent resource for the explosively growning MA that became TKD, much less that it played any kind of important role in its growth.

BTW, I should point out that this take on Taekkyon is really independent of whether you're a Kwan-era 'fundamentalist' or not. Capener, the most severe (and best-documented) critic of the Taekkyonist perspective, is a technical advisor to the KTA and a long-time supporter of TKD strictly as a martial sport—the extreme wing of the WTF, in other words. In the article I cited from him, he actually expresses considerable disdain for the hard-style Kwan era SD version of TKD. Check out the link I gave, read what he has to say and you'll see: he's no friend at all of the Kwan-era version of the art.

 

[SageGhost83]

From what I understand, Taekwondo was originally Korean Shotokan Karate (Song Mu Kwan was the literal translation, I think) due to the fact that all of the Korean masters were trained in Shotokan karate during the occupation and brought back what they learned from japan and started teaching it. I see what Youngman is saying about the high kicks, but I don't think that they are from Taekkyon. The Taekkyon link has been disproven by people who are more qualified than all of us put together. I think the Northern Chinese theory is a very sound one. All of the spinning and jumping reminds me a lot of some of the stuff that I have seen in traditional kung fu demos, and Korea has imported a lot of military methods from China throughout its history. I am still waiting for someone to mention Shippalgi as a starting point of Taekwondo, but they are probably manufacturing that story as we speak . Why is it so hard to accept the fact that Taekwondo came from Japanese Karate? Is the nationalism/racism so strong that people are even willing to ignore or flat out deny the true history which has been proven through actual facts? I mean seriously...Taekwondo came from japanese/okinawan karate and there is no way around that. It has been proven by scholars, GM Kim Soo has put forth the truth, and it is readily apparent to anyone who is familiar with both styles. Shotokan is my mother style. I currently practice WTF Taekwondo, and the influence is there and it is unmistakable - just look at the basic blocks. Heck, the original forms were japanese/okinawan forms. That alone is the smoking gun to Taekwondo's true history.

 

[arnisador]

Yes, I don't know why it's so hard to believe this for some people. The commonly accepted story is that the modern hard striking styles of martial arts spread as follows:
India-->China (legend)
(southern) China-->Okinawa (fact)
Okinawa-->Japan (fact)
Japan-->Korea (fact, disputed in Korea)
Of course nothing is truly as simple and clean as this, but it certainly captures the main ideas. But Koreans' unwillingness to believe the truth that is right before their eyes is based on nationalism, not historical accuracy.

 

[zDom]

But again, if Japanese karate doesn't do those techniques (or not in that fashion anyway), there where did they come from?
For example, the circular kicking (spinning heel kick/back roundhouse, wheel kick), high kicks, jumping kicks, jump spinning. It is well known that Shotokan and the other styles did not do those techniques that way, if at all. Anecdotal evidence says those are Taekkyon kicks. If modern Tae Kwon Do was based on Shotokan technique (and certainly a part of it was undoubtably influenced by it), but Shotokan and other Japanese styles do not execute kicks like that, where did the Masters get that knowledge from?

From hapkido.

They were introduced into hapkido by Kim Moo Woong (alternate spelling, Kim Mu Hyun) and Ji Han Jae who went to a temple to develop hapkido kicking.

Presumably, these kicking techniques could have included elements the temple's monks got from both the Chinese and indigenous kicking techniques.

Interestingly, the best kicking captured on film in "kung fu" movies was actually done by hapkido masters

 

[YoungMan]

This was from the website www.bwmac.com (a private Chung Do Kwan Tae Kwon Do school affiliated with Yun Taek Chong)

"Lee, Won Kuk was born April 13, 1907. As a young man he had an interest in the martial arts but the occupying Japaneses government banned any martial art practice or instruction. It is probable that he did practice in secret as a teenager because he told this author that when he first started training he and his first teachers would not exchange names due to possible consequences if someone got caught."

Further evidence that Won Kuk Lee did, indeed, practice Tae Kyon in Korea before he left for Japan.

 

[exile]

This was from the website www.bwmac.com (a private Chung Do Kwan Tae Kwon Do school affiliated with Yun Taek Chong)

"Lee, Won Kuk was born April 13, 1907. As a young man he had an interest in the martial arts but the occupying Japaneses government banned any martial art practice or instruction. It is probable that he did practice in secret as a teenager because he told this author that when he first started training he and his first teachers would not exchange names due to possible consequences if someone got caught."

Further evidence that Won Kuk Lee did, indeed, practice Tae Kyon in Korea before he left for Japan.

This isn't evidence for anything, YM. Would you mind pointing out even one mention of `taekyon' in the passage you quoted?? As I think I pointed out several times, the MAs that were taught in Korea until the Japanese military really began to put the hammer down in the early 20th century were judo and jiujutsu. Where do you get the idea that LWK ever studied taekyon, based on that quote? All martial arts had to be practiced in secret from the 20s on in Korea, because none of them were allowed—any of the chuan fa derivatives from China, jiujutsu, any of it. Until you can somehow manage to unearth a mention of taekyon in that passage that's somehow invisible on my screen, there is just as good a case for Long Fist chuan fa as for taekyon so far as what LWK studied.

Now I have a quotation for you, and it comes from the mouth of Song Duk Ki himself, the man declared a Living National Treasure in the 1980 as the last repository of knowledge of taekyon. Robert Young, in his definitive 1993 article 'The History and Development of Tae Kyon', Journal of Asian Martial Arts, 2.45–69, quotes from SDK's 1983 book as follows:

The first recent demonstration in public occured during a national police martial arts competition on March 26, 1958, the birthday of former President Syngman Rhee. Rhee greatly enjoyed the special demonstration organized by Im Ho and Kim Seong-hwan but felt sorry that tae kyon was dying out in his homeland (Song, 1983:21). A presidential bodyguard who knew Song Duk-ki personally later told him how the president desperately wanted the art to continue for future generations. Song began looking for a more qualified taekyon master, to fulfil Rhee's request, but he could find none. As far as Song knew, only he Kim, and the elderly Im Ho continued to practice tae kyon.​

This was in 1958, YM. During the 30s, and beyond, taekyon was hardly practiced at all; as Song says in his book (p.9), he was one of the very few who had time to train. And by the end of the 1950s, at the culminating phase of Kwan era TKD, there were exactly three practitioners of the art that the acknowledged 'Living National Treasure' master of the art knew about—one of them, Im Ho, quite elderly, in his 80s, and the other two in their sixties—and this while TKD was increasing explosively in prestige, prominence and student clientele on a yearly basis. This statement comes from the memoirs of the major Taekyon practitioner of the century. In contrast, there is not a single shred of documentary evidence that Lee Won-Kuk studied, or practiced, or was influenced in his MA training, or teaching, by tae kyon, or as we should actually call it, given both the Chinese and Korean characters which spell the name, ta(e)k 'push' gyeon 'shoulders'. As both Young and Stan Henning note in their respective Journal of Asian Martial Arts historical studies, there is absolutely no connection between Korean tae 'foot' lexical item and tak/taek 'push'. And if you had gotten around to do the minimal historical research on taekyon, and looked into the two most important historical studied on it available, Young's 1993 JAMA article and Capener's 1995 ms.—I'm not going to repeat the references, I've provided you with them enough times already—you would have noticed, particularly in Young's amply illustrated article, that the taekyon demo looks virtually nothing like TKD of any sort. Just looking at the foot techs, Lee Yong-Bok, Chairman of the Korean Taekyon Research Association, has said in a recorded interview with Young that 'Tae kyon has traditionally emphasized stepping and stamping techniques directed at the opponent's lower legs and feet'. I'll repeat that, YM: stomping and low strikes to the opponents lower legs and feet. I hope you can see the impact of that statement, from one of the outstanding authorities on the activity, on your persistent, undocumented statement that TKD foot techs and (contemporary) taekyon kicks show an affinity that proves the derivation of the first from the second. :lol:

Young's paper is loaded with testimony from current Korean TKD masters as well to the effect that there was no significant influence of the dying taekyon under Japanese occupation on the robust Korean development of the Shotokan/Shudokan karate that became TKD (e.g., Hwang Kee's comment in his 1970 bo0k that 'Taekyon is not related to the current taekwondo' (p.41). I won't bother citing any more his paper, or reprising Henning's or Capener's work, or Gm. Kim Pyung Soo's personal testimony. Judging by how much heed you've taken of any of this work—often conducted in Korea, with surviving practitioners of various KMAs and what surviving historical mss. still exist that have bearing on the history of the KMAs—there would be little point to my doing so. But if you are going to persist in trying to make a case, let me at least suggest that you provide arguments which have some bearing on the point at issue, and which make at least some passing reference to taekyon—unlike the quote in your last post.