ITF-C / Ki haps / Juche / Kodang

StuartA

Black Belt
Joined
Feb 4, 2008
Messages
634
Reaction score
33
Location
London
As many of you may know ITF-Canada (Choi, Jung Hwa ITF) have made a number of changes over the last year or so. The two main ones are:

1. So called re-introducing the ki-haps back into the patterns
2. Renaming pattern Juche and calling it kodang

I have a number of reservations regarding both these changes so was asked to write an article for Combat magazine about them. Not being one to toe the party line, I put on my devils advocate hat and wrote the article. Unfortunatly, some some reason (so far) only the first piece of the article has been published and I keep getting emails asking about the rest, so here it is, for the first time in full.. let me know your thoughts:

 

SJON

Blue Belt
Joined
Oct 10, 2008
Messages
206
Reaction score
6
Location
Spain
Excellent article, Stuart, with the quality and depth of research that we have come to expect.
 

terryl965

<center><font size="2"><B>Martial Talk Ultimate<BR
MTS Alumni
Joined
Apr 9, 2004
Messages
41,259
Reaction score
340
Location
Grand Prairie Texas
Stuart very well written article and for the true people it will be great and for the others they will jsut say how stupid it is. I bow to you for speaking out and knowing what will come.:asian:
 

Kacey

Sr. Grandmaster
MTS Alumni
Joined
Jan 3, 2006
Messages
16,462
Reaction score
227
Location
Denver, CO
I understand - and agree with - the philosophical concerns that lead to the original discussion of renaming Juche. I had just started TKD when Juche was introduced - and, in fact, my instructor was one of the first people to learn it; he was handed a sheet of paper with the moves for Juche on it, and told to learn it, so he could teach it to the rest of the class the next week - which is a whole other story.

When I first learned Juche, I learned the pattern history as written in the book, and it was not particularly offensive; for those who are unfamiliar with it, it goes like this:

[FONT=Verdana, Helvetica, Arial, Sans Serif]"Juche is a philosophical idea that man is the master of everything and decides everything. In other words, the idea that man is the master of the world and his own destiny. It is said that this idea was rooted in Baekdu Mountain which symbolizes the spirit of the Korean people. The diagram represents Baekdu mountain."

Now, just looking at the definition above, there's nothing particularly wrong with it; only upon deeper investigation (which, to my understanding, didn't occur for years, at least not openly) does one find the things that StuartA found and explained in his article... and, in fact, I don't recall hearing any discussion of the concerns until after Gen. Choi's death.

I have no problem with renaming Juche; I have no significant problem with the ICTF's choice to rename it Chang Hon - although since some people refer to the pattern set created by Gen. Choi as the "Ch'ang H'on" tuls, I could see it causing some minor confusion... but you don't learn Juche (whatever you call it) until II Dan, so I can't see that being a major problem. I do, however, have a problem with renaming Juche as Ko-dang - starting with the fact that we learn both. Ko-Dang is considered a revenant pattern by Yom Chi TKD - while it is not "officially" part of the 24 patterns of the Ch'ang H'on tul set, we still learn it just like we do any other tul, and it is a testing requirement, because it is important to the history and development of TKD. To thus rename Juche as Ko-Dang is to make it very difficult to do that - and I have a philosophical problem with erasing history in any form; "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it" applies to this situation as well as it does to many others.

As far as reintroducing the kihaps goes - we can argue til the cows come home over what Gen. Choi did or did not intend, and what he did or did not tell his son; I've heard lots of discussions about things he said to various people that contradicted other things he'd said. The kihaps had long been removed when I started in the 80s, and were, to my understanding, a holdover from Shotokan Karate. If Master Choi feels he needs to do something to set his organization apart from others, I can think of worse things he could do than that - my primary concern, as a student and an instructor, would be the potential effects on competition, but at the color belt level it shouldn't matter, and black belts should be able to add or remove such things as needed.

Interesting article - thanks!
[/FONT]
 

Latest Discussions

Top