As a person from a CMA background may I ask why the ROK government sought to make TKD the biggest martial art in the world. Was it some sort of jealously over the popularity of Japanese arts? Was it a desire to set Korea on the world stage? This began well before TKD became an Olympic sport, so can anyone tell me why?
Steel Tiger, I wasn't there and can only guess, but it's an educated guess. Korea has had an odd combination of national feelings of inferiority, possibly brought about by being brutally treated by Japan and being stuck between Japan and China coupled with a strong sense of nationalism further modified by partition into one modern state and the closest approximation I can imagine to Hell. Part of the nation building had to be freeing the Hermit Kingdom from feelings of being less than the Japanese. Having a martial art that was also in the Olympics, was styled in a uniquely Korean fashion and which had more adherents worldwide was - just my best guess - a significant part of that.
I think Todd's got a lot of the answer to this question, ST. But it's something that didn't happen overnight. If you look at the development of TKD, you see certainn distinct phases:
(i) Kwan era 1: the earliest phase. The lads have come back from Tokyo and elsewhere with their dans in Shotokan or Shudokan karate, and are trying to make a go of it in the MA business. Things are very, very tough in Korea, there is a lot of street gang activity, people are desperate. It's a good time to be teaching MA, except that the Japanese occupation is reaching a high point of brutality as preparations for the war go into high gear. Kwans run into trouble early and have to close as the war goes on and starts looking bad for the Japanese.
(ii) Kwan era 2: TKD is still essentially Japanese karate, diluted wrt Okinawan, and probably trained via kihon line drills rather than the kata basis of old Okinawan practice (the way Matsumura and Itosu trained their own students). But practice probably involve full, hard contact; it's still way more brutal and realistic than it has become in our own time. More kwans are founded, and there are serious rivalries involved.
(iii) Korean War era: Gen. Choi uses his position in the Korean military to impose a particular training routine on the Korean military forces: they are all to train in H2H using his `military'-style TKD (nicely described in some detail by Simon John O'Neil in one of his
Combat-TKD newsletters. This is the `blasting through' style, a kind of ultra-Shotokan, designed specifically to
kill your opponent if you're an infantryman separated from his weapon or out of ammo. This was the battlefield style that made the White Tiger and later Black Tiger commandos and the much-ROK Marines the terror of both the North Korean and the VC/N. Vietnamese combat units and proved itself most publically at the Battle of Tra Binh Dong.
(iv) The Park dictatorship era: the high point of Gen. Choi's control over KMA. As a good friend of the dictatorship, Gen. Choi was rewarded by being allowed to, in essence, control the teaching of all MAs in Korea through various ROK sports ministries with licensing power. The pressure comes down through the military bureaucracy for a uniform system of combat and a standard curriculum, and we begin to see the Kwans dissolving into essentially social clubs, the military now in effect assuming a monopoly over training practice.
(v) The post-Choi era: after Gen. Choi's fall from grace, the structural situation is the same as before: the ROK government has—
uniquely among governments in Asia— a monopoly over MA training in the country. As things normalize and the fear of war recedes, the government decides that the interest of the state and nation is better served by bringing TKD to world attention as a major, ultimately Olympic sport. This means that `military'-style TKD needs to be replaced by something people can do without killing each other....
... and the rest is, as they say, history.
This is a rough model, I know; it's just a kind of initial categorizing of events that seem connected in a certain way and I hope to be able to refine my understanding of what went on significantly as more info comes out (along the lines of Robert McLain's great interview with GM. Kim in our own MT Magazine, well worth a read... several reads, actually). The crucial issue that I see is that unlike any other Asian country, the government of S. Korea imposed a unity for military reasons on MA training that it then was able to redirect to another purpose when that seemed more in the national interest. You have to be in control of the MA business in the first place to do that—and as a result of the Korean war and the fact that Choi was both a MAist and a high ranking military officer, they were able to do that.
I know, I know, it's still a very incomplete picture. But you gotta start somewhere....
Saying that, sport arts CAN be brought back up to combat level given the right additives, and some teachers I have read about on here seem to be doing just that.
Yes... but it's much harder to do that, as we know, than it is to train a MA for combat when it
hasn't been watered down... still, you have to play the cards you've been dealt.
Exile's point that parents don't want to have their children taught deadly moves is correct, to me the main reason for this, having seen, heard and felt my daughter and her friends training, is the fact that children are so unpredictable and have to learn consequences before they can learn to damage others. Some parents don't want to take the responsibility of teaching the child consequences, and in todays society they aren't learning from their play as much. If they steal or vandalise they don't get a smack off the victim any more, their parents get fined.
This has a lot to do with it, definitely. Everyone is very concerned now about kids and violence, and teaching a child how to go about crippling or otherwise permanently damaging another child—which a genuinely combat-oriented TKD/karate/etc. training approach can easily achieve—is going to be very problematic for parent who themselves have little acquaintance first-hand with violence. Whatever people say, they probably don't really want their children to learn systematically brutal methods... lawsuits and all the rest are so unpleasant, and also, we just don't want to think of our children that way...
