Exploring hidden techs.

[clfsean]

If they are teaching self defense, yes, but what the meaning of a movement is in a hyung, very infrequently. Like, I said, I wish they would. I remember one underbelt "helper" was showing a couple of us a move one time where one arm comes up in a fist while the other chops and she said, "Think of it like you are grabbing your opponent with one hand and chopping with the other" and that's how I always think of it now.

I was watching a video of a hyung performed the other day and narrator used the term "groin pull" for a move. I thought to myself, "so that's what that's supposed to be". Maybe out of decorum or fear some of the younger students might try it, it was never referred to as that in class.

... wow ...

 

[Earl Weiss]

I've re-read your last posts a couple of times and I'm confused.

At first I thought you were trying to say that TKD was the descendant of some kid-friendly Japanese MA or maybe that the term 'block' was used as a euphemism to make MAs seem more peaceful. This last post certainly implies that TKD is a deadly serious MA.

BTW, I was told by a friend who was in Vietnam that he always liked being around Korean compounds there since there was virtually zero enemy activity in their vicinity.

Please note that due to the quoting it looks like the post was all mine. The part starting with "Really" is Exiles.

 

[Earl Weiss]

Really? Maybe you should ask the ROK Marines, who used TKD training to lethal effect against a far greater force of Viet Cong and North Koreans at Tra Binh Dong during the Vietnam War, and whose 11th Division received a full grade promotion for every soldier in the ranks. Or the Black Tiger and White Tiger ROK commandos, who used it as a tool in their silent killing repertoire to carry out the assassinations they were tasked with in the Korean and Vietnam Wars respectively. I would think the answer is obvious: because you may not have a weapon available. Does that sound like a reason?

Funny you should mention it. I am well acquainted with a Korean who was involved in such an empty hand altercation. See: http://www.geocities.com/ustfregion5/NamTaeHi.html

I believe some of the exploits are referred to in detail in "A Killing Art" . He relates the empty hand trench warfare that occurred. Still, I really think they spent plenty of time using / training with knives, guns etc.

The "You may not have a weapon available" is great rationale for the average civilian. For any type of combat force, if you do not have a weapon, things have already gone horribly wrong. One of the reason's the military spends little time on empty hand combat training. Empty hand training in the military is used to build mental toughness and esprit de corps. Not increase the efficiency of the soldier.

Silent killing? You are much more efficient with an edged weapon or garrot.

From cavemen to spartans and forward thru history man has learn that weapons, even rudimentary clubs make for a more efficient fighting machine.

So, as with all fighting forces you have limited training type and resources. How much do you want to spendon empty hand training, and how much on weapons training. Does that sound like a reason?

If you were to train a combat force

 

[miguksaram]

Really? Maybe you should ask the ROK Marines, who used TKD training to lethal effect against a far greater force of Viet Cong and North Koreans at Tra Binh Dong during the Vietnam War, and whose 11th Division received a full grade promotion for every soldier in the ranks. Or the Black Tiger and White Tiger ROK commandos, who used it as a tool in their silent killing repertoire to carry out the assassinations they were tasked with in the Korean and Vietnam Wars respectively. I would think the answer is obvious: because you may not have a weapon available. Does that sound like a reason?

Granted they train in unarmed combat, but that is the last resort. Any combat vetran will tell you that they use hand to hand because they're out of bullets. As for the White Tigers, if I remember correctly, they train in what is Tukgongmusul, which was is a hybrid system developed by 4 or 5 military officials back in Vietnam era.

 

[miguksaram]

I believe some of the exploits are referred to in detail in "A Killing Art" . He relates the empty hand trench warfare that occurred. Still, I really think they spent plenty of time using / training with knives, guns etc.

I think what needs to be clear is that the TKD that they were trained in and what was utilized in wartime are two seperate beasts. TKD may have been a core art, but there were other fighting systems that were being taught and utilized as well. Every system wants to claim that they teach military, but the bottomline is though some techniques may be taught, no system has a foot hold as the sole system taught in military unarmed combat training.

 

[exile]

I've re-read your last posts a couple of times and I'm confused.

At first I thought you were trying to say that TKD was the descendant of some kid-friendly Japanese MA or maybe that the term 'block' was used as a euphemism to make MAs seem more peaceful. This last post certainly implies that TKD is a deadly serious MA.

It's both, K (in much the same way as Karate is), but the history is a little complex. Itosu' karate was diluted specifically for kids, but the karate that Funakoshi taught in Japan incorporated that same dilution, partly because of the kihon-based methods that GF had to develop for mass instruction, and partly because of the reluctance, discussed at length in Gennosuke Higaki's excellent book Hidden Karate: the True Bunkai for the Pinan Katas and Naihanchi, of the Okinawan expats to teach the Japanese the deeper applications. Higaki's own instructor, Shozan Kubota, studied privately with GF as well as taking his university classes in karate, and GF kept slipping up and showing him stuff about applications that, as he said, he wasn't supposed to be telling him. Simon O'Neil (SJON on MT) has a nice outline of the background knowledge of the first generations of karate students, both Japanese and Korean, in his own book The Taegeuk Cipher, and it's clear that there was a progressive diminution in combat knowledge of karate applications over several generations, in the direction of Itosu's children's-karate version.

The original kwan founders, with the exception of Hwang Kee, all got their MA training in Japan under karate instructors. They studied in the thirties, during the first 'dilution' stage, so some of the more combat-oriented techniques were trained. My own suspicion is that they ramped up that aspect in response to the absolutely chaotic conditions in Korea in the last days of the Occupation and in the immediate post-Occupation era—and so, when the Korean War broke out, the fact that Gen. Choi had been one of the first-generation kwan pioneers and a high-ranking military officer, and had himself gone to Japan to learn karate with the specific intention of using it to defend himself, meant that karate started life in Korea under much more combat realistic intentions than in Japan, where it was viewed as just a kind of martial calisthenics and physical indoctrination in group discipline. The military dimension of TKD set it apart from all other empty-handed TMAs—and it makes sense, eh?, for a population whose access to weapons had been suppressed, on pain of severe punishment, for at least half a century, to think of their empty handed fighting technique in a very different way, a much more urgent way, than the Japanese would.

The problem is that Itosu's original model was always there for anyone who wanted to dilute the combat content of TKD still further, and that's what happened in Korea when the military government and, especially, the Korean CIA began to repackage TKD by first enforcing—by imprisonment, kidnapping, and murder—homogenization of the kwans, and then recruiting one of the KCIA's senior agents, Un-young Kim, to transform TKD into a martial, ultimately Olympic sport, as part of an overall program of the ROK's Cold War confrontation with the North and the protection of the Park regime's horrible human rights record—right up there with Stalin's (or, for that matter, the North's) from scrutiny. The latter story is documented in Alex Gillis' brilliant book A Killing Art: the Untold History of Taekwondo, the most heavily documented history of any MA I've ever come across. So both are true: Itosu's camouflaged civilian fighting techiques were taught in diluted form in Japan, but taken by the first generation of modern Korean MAists back to Korea where it was turned into a 'killing art' by practitioners like Choi and Nam Tae-hi, and then defanged and deprived of blood by the infinitely corrupt, deceitful and ambitious KCIA-agent turned sport entrepreneur UYK.

BTW, I was told by a friend who was in Vietnam that he always liked being around Korean compounds there since there was virtually zero enemy activity in their vicinity.

The VC field command specifically ordered their fighters to avoid Korean troops unless they had overwhelming numerical superiority (and even then, it didn't help, as at Tra Binh Dong, where the Koreans were outnumbered something like 5 to one and still managed to inflict catastrophic damage on the communist forces, with relatively light casualties to themselves, fighting hand-to-hand in smoke-filled trenches); Stuart Anslow's book reproduces the documentation for that directive. Whatever you might think of the VC, they weren't stupid...

 

[seasoned]

In and of itself, in Okinawan GoJu, all blocks are strikes. This was not taught until BB for fear it would alter the structure of the original technique, the block. The principles are the same pertaining to power and movement, it’s just that the focus is different. This, in a nut shell is how it is with regard to techniques. You learn the obvious, only to find out that the principles fit into a large array of all aspects of self defense, and so it is, with an art form. Within kata there are many hidden movements so as to keep there intent away from prying eyes. It is also true with many arts that hid their movements into dance forms. Some times what you see isn’t what you get. :asian:

 

[seasoned]

In and of itself, in Okinawan GoJu, all blocks are strikes. This was not taught until BB for fear it would alter the structure of the original technique, the block. The principles are the same pertaining to power and movement, it’s just that the focus is different. This, in a nut shell is how it is with regard to techniques. You learn the obvious, only to find out that the principles fit into a large array of all aspects of self defense, and so it is, with an art form. Within kata there are many hidden movements so as to keep there intent away from prying eyes. It is also true with many arts that hid their movements into dance forms. Some times what you see isn’t what you get. :asian:

Sorry for the assumption that Okinawan GoJu and TKD would view kata the same, but it only makes sense, I guess. :shrug:

 

[MSUTKD]

90% of "history" in martial arts, IMHO, should be considered historical fiction; books like, "A Killing Art", are propaganda and myth. Hidden techniques are the same; those of us who trained in the late 70’s and 80’s learned very “simple” explanations to our forms but now the cult of “boonhae/bunkai” is in vogue. Don’t spend too much time looking for “secrets”, train hard and never quit and you will learn the real secrets.

 

[seasoned]

90% of "history" in martial arts, IMHO, should be considered historical fiction; books like, "A Killing Art", are propaganda and myth. Hidden techniques are the same; those of us who trained in the late 70’s and 80’s learned very “simple” explanations to our forms but now the cult of “boonhae/bunkai” is in vogue. Don’t spend too much time looking for “secrets”, train hard and never quit and you will learn the real secrets.

My sentiments exactly, the harder one trains and the more diligent we are to techniques, all will be reveled, in time.

 

[dancingalone]

I question the assumption as to why anyone training for combat would want to train in unarmed combat.

Well, this is one of those missing bits from taekwondo, where it lost a bit in translation from one of its parents. Within Okinawan karate, kobudo is taught hand-in-hand with the unarmed techniques. The two reinforce each other and the various forms are supposed to teach you that the movements in armed and unarmed fighting are actually very similar if not always the same.

It's not exactly training with a handgun, but within the context of the working class fighting art it was, karate is indeed a fighting system with multiple ranges, weapons included.

 

[exile]

90% of "history" in martial arts, IMHO, should be considered historical fiction; books like, "A Killing Art", are propaganda and myth.

Would you care to identify just where you get support for the 'propaganda and myth' claim from? The core of Gillis' history are the many volumes of Korea-gate congressional investigations carried out by the US Congress in the 1970s, with extensive documentation; interviews with Nam Tae-hi, Jhoon Rhee and others with significant cross-referencing and independent checking; and American FBI and CIA sources. You want to identify Gillis' argument, with its complete citations, 400+ footnotes pointing to particular sources, and so on as propaganda and myth? Then defend the point. Be specific—tell us exactly what is propaganda and myth in the book, i.e., unsupported pseudohistory with no reliable documentary basis. Be my guest, MSTKD—I'm all attention.

Hidden techniques are the same; those of us who trained in the late 70’s and 80’s learned very “simple” explanations to our forms but now the cult of “boonhae/bunkai” is in vogue. Don’t spend too much time looking for “secrets”, train hard and never quit and you will learn the real secrets.

Let me get this straight: you guys learned very simple explanations, therefore the analysis of boohae/bunkai is a cult??. How about some evidence for 'cult'hood? Cults operate as closed groups, with doctrine handed down unquestioned from the source. Abernethy's group, the British Combat Association, is a 'cult'? They don't get together, pressure test their ideas and explain their results? Lawrence Kane and Kris Wilder's work is 'cult-think'? Or Gavin Mulholland's or Rick Clark's? Our own members' Stuart Anslow's work and Simon O' Neil's work is 'cult'think? Maybe we should ask them, since they're both active members of this site, just how they carry out their analysis and subject it to experimental testing, eh?

You are throwing around the words propaganda, myth and cult pretty freely, MSTKU, for someone whose post doesn't contain a single actual fact (other than that thinking about alternative, nonobvious applications was something you never did when you started training). Maybe you should supply a few, if you're going to make claims like that? As I say, I'm all attention.

 

[exile]

I believe some of the exploits are referred to in detail in "A Killing Art" . He relates the empty hand trench warfare that occurred. Still, I really think they spent plenty of time using / training with knives, guns etc.

No one would deny that, I don't think

The "You may not have a weapon available" is great rationale for the average civilian. For any type of combat force, if you do not have a weapon, things have already gone horribly wrong. One of the reason's the military spends little time on empty hand combat training. Empty hand training in the military is used to build mental toughness and esprit de corps. Not increase the efficiency of the soldier.

But TKD originated as the Korean branch of karate, which was from the outset oriented to civilian combat. And that's my point: civilians normally do not have weapons available.

Silent killing? You are much more efficient with an edged weapon or garrot.

Of course you are. The point is, you are also not going to send your forward recon operatives into such situation if they are untrained to use every possible weapon, including their own bodies, are you?

From cavemen to spartans and forward thru history man has learn that weapons, even rudimentary clubs make for a more efficient fighting machine.

So, as with all fighting forces you have limited training type and resources. How much do you want to spendon empty hand training, and how much on weapons training. Does that sound like a reason?

It does not sound like a reason to for a civilian to avoid learning unarmed combat techniques, given that (i) s/he is unlikely to have a weapon, and (ii) that the military use of unarmed combat techniques, even as a last resort, demonstrates that these techniques can be effective under the most severe combat circumstances. Which was the point of my post. In response to which, you argue that having a weapon is more effective than not having a weapon. This is otherwise known as a non-sequitur.

By the way, EW, I notice that suddenly the thread has become about the use of unarmed combat techs in the military, rather than hidden combat-useful techniques in karate and its offshoots. Again, a bit off-topic, eh? Read over the OP. Then read over all this stuff you're posting about the preferability of armed to unarmed combat. Think it's still relevant to Terry's question?

The question is concealed techniques, yes? Maybe we should stick to the question? If you want to discuss the military applicability of unarmed combat systems, maybe you should consider a thread devoted to that quite different topic, rather than one concerned with the technical content of kata and hyungs?

 

[Earl Weiss]

. So why should we start from the assumption that material which was specifically labeled for a diluted, kid-friendly version karate should be interpreted in the same way for adults training for survival in unarmed combat?

<<<<<<<<

I question the assumption as to why anyone training for combat would want to train in unarmed combat.

OK lets refocus on Hidden techniques. I question your premise that the assumption should start for adults training in unarmed combat.

Why not start from the assumption that the techniques should be analyzed from the standpoint of BOTH armed an unarmed combat? Yes, I think that this is very relevant to the question.

If you want to claim that I redirected the thread improperly, keep in mind it was the premise you brought up that took me in that direction.

 

[exile]

OK lets refocus on Hidden techniques. I question your premise that the assumption should start for adults training in unarmed combat.

Why not start from the assumption that the techniques should be analyzed from the standpoint of BOTH armed an unarmed combat?

If you want to claim that I redirected the thread improperly, keep in mind it was the premise you brought up that took me in that direction.

The thread has nothing to do with armed combat, EW. The relevant phrase for what you're doing is thread hijacking. The problem we're looking at, at Terry's initiative, is a simple one: are there concealed techniques to be found in the unarmed combat systems he's asking about?

And btw: there was no premise, of any kind, in my posts that related to armed combat. So I've no idea what could have motivated you to go in that direction, apart from your own inclination to do so. In any case, the topic has nothing to do with armed combat. As I say, if that's what you want to talk about, maybe you should start your own thread on it.

 

[K31]

Are there any references that break down hyungs, particularly the Palgwe, for their application? Not necessarily "hidden" application but what they represent? (MA-application wise, not the earth, wind and fire meaning)

 

[exile]

Are there any references that break down hyungs, particularly the Palgwe, for their application? Not necessarily "hidden" application but what they represent? (MA-application wise, not the earth, wind and fire meaning)

No, which is a big disappointment to me. I've been experimenting with various bunkai for some subcomponents of some of the Palgwes for a while, and what I'd really like is someone who's been doing this for a long time, with the necessary facilities to pressure-test proposed apps with fellow instructors and students to see what works and what doesn't (something that all of the bunkai analysts I know do as a matter of course, MSTKD's 'cult' label notwithstanding ), so I could get a sense of where I'm on course and where I'm missing leads. We've had the Ch'ang Hon and the Taegeuk hyungs given close attention by Stuart and Simon, and I think Simon has said somewhere or other that his next book project will include coverage of the Palgwes, but it sounds as if it's down the road a bit.

 

[StuartA]

90% of "history" in martial arts, IMHO, should be considered historical fiction;

Im not sure about 90% but a fair bit is 'wishful thinking' to be sure however, people, such as Alex Gillis and Dr Kimm & others are slowly seperating the myths from the facts.

books like, "A Killing Art", are propaganda and myth.

Have you actually read the book or are you just going by the title/cover?

Hidden techniques are the same; those of us who trained in the late 70&#8217;s and 80&#8217;s learned very &#8220;simple&#8221; explanations to our forms but now the cult of &#8220;boonhae/bunkai&#8221; is in vogue.

Its not 'in vogue'.. its simply a new way of looking at old things to make them better. A cult is a group who accept things as they are and never question them.. this is the exact opposite! Andjust because what you learnt was 'simple' it doesnt mean theres not more to it all. The history of TKD/Karate quite clearly shows different!

Don&#8217;t spend too much time looking for &#8220;secrets&#8221;, train hard and never quit and you will learn the real secrets.

If one is training hard, then studying their art is part of that.. its not looking for secrets, its making your own art better and more productive than it was previously. Going back to my first remark, have you in fact read any of the books on the subject at all.. by any of the authors Exile mentions? (Out of interest)

Stuart
Boon hae Cultist :uhyeah:

 

[Earl Weiss]

The thread has nothing to do with armed combat, EW. The relevant phrase for what you're doing is thread hijacking. The problem we're looking at, at Terry's initiative, is a simple one: are there concealed techniques to be found in the unarmed combat systems he's asking about?

And btw: there was no premise, of any kind, in my posts that related to armed combat. So I've no idea what could have motivated you to go in that direction, apart from your own inclination to do so. In any case, the topic has nothing to do with armed combat. As I say, if that's what you want to talk about, maybe you should start your own thread on it.

OK, I guess I am not making my point clear. If the techniques found in the patterns of unarmed combat systems have hidden techniques, why should those hidden techniques be limited solely to weaponless techniques?

If you start from the premise that "Martial" has to do with combat and warfare, then from the beginning of time combat and warfare used weapons. Weapon arts also have patterns. As the sytems developed, the weapons were stripped from some systems. However, I submit that some of the pattern motions now stripped of their weapons were originaly used for that purpose.

So, my question is do you (Generic "You" as well as specificaly directed to Exile) accept or reject the proposition that techniques purportedly hidden in empty hand patterns are exclusively empty hand techniques, or may they have been weapons techniques?

I do not recall that the OP had any such weaponless limitation in the query.

Mr. Anslow; Any thoughts?

 

[Earl Weiss]

Are there any references that break down hyungs, particularly the Palgwe, for their application? Not necessarily "hidden" application but what they represent? (MA-application wise, not the earth, wind and fire meaning)

For General Choi's Hyungs / Tuls, his encyclopedia provides applications for virtualy every move.

IMNSHO those applications are not stated to be the exclusive application, and I believe his ,materials indicate quite the opposite. His classroom teaching most definitely did.

However, knowing the textbook application provides an invaluable training tool for angle, distance and level (height) of the technique.