we need to give the Koreans some credit once in a while for putting it all togeather, the history will always be tainted by those who say this is right and this is wrong.
Right and wrong don't come into it, mjd. We know that the katas with the names Pinan, Naihanchi, Bassai, etc., were brought to Japan by Gichin Funakoshi and other expatriate Okinawans. There was no karate in Japan before this happened; the Okinawans taught the Japanese karate, and we know exactly why the Japanese education and defense ministries encouraged training in this Okinawan art. There are deep, detailed histories of the MAs and tremendous documentation, and this is a point which is as well established as anything in history can be. We also know that these kata did not exist in Korea until the Kwan founders went to Japan to study martial arts there, and we know who they studies with. We know that they achieved dan ranks primarily in Shotokan, and also Shudokan and Goju ryu styles in particular cases. We know that when they came back to Korea, they taught these kata that they had learned—under the Korean names hyung/poomsae, which translate Japanese kata `pattern'—in the schools or Kwans they founded, where they taught the art, karate, that they had learned under the names Kong Soo Do/Tang Soo Do, both of which literally translate `karate' under two different transliterations. We know that in some cases they actually named their schools after the Japanese schools they trained in (`Song Moo Kwan' literally translates `Shoto Kan' (= `Pine Tree (Training) House). They taught Okinawan kata they learned in Japan under the Okinawan names (the Pyung-Ahn hyungs are named literally after the Okinawan Pinan katas created by Anko Itosu at the turn of the 20th century for use by Okinawan school children who were learning karate as a result of his successful bid to get the art into the Okinawan public school system). The movements in these kata are
move-for-move identical to these older Okinawan kata, which themselves very likely were built at least partially on Chinese MA patterns.
This whole asia region of Jap..chin...okin... and others has been filed with travel, trading, wars, and yes love.
So what? What does this have to do with the specific history of transmission of a particular set of technical elements from one place to the other. The Europeans brought back yams and tomatos to Europe from the New World; it didn't work the other way round. Exactly what is the point of this last comment of yours?
To say one has not effected the other is simply unreal.
Who is saying that?
Throwing a series of straw men together in a post and thinking you've established some result is, um,
ineffective as a way of making a point, mjd.
And that includes this nonsense that somehow, citing the well-documented history of the diffusion of karate does some disservice to the Koreans. If that were the case, you wouldn't expect to find top Korean MAists themselves presenting exactly this history in their books; but that's exactly what S. Henry Cho, in his classic 1968 textbook
Taekwondo: Secrets of Korean Karate does. The origin of modern Korean striking arts in the karate that travelled from Okinawa to Japan is simply a matter of familiar historical background to Cho, one of the great masters of KMA of a previous generation. Why on earth would you assume that getting the basic facts right demeans or takes credit away from the Koreans??
