Taekwondo's core goes beyond technique

[SageGhost83]

Kwan era propagandist often make claims like “ we practice real TKD…real TKD is Karate…any changes made to the system past 1955 were done solely for nationalistic purposes and did nothing but water down the art and turn it into a useless joke.” It’s falsehoods like this that lead some modern TKDist to hastily reject the information Exile points to.

Ah, but TKD *was* derived from karate - the original katas were the same and a lot of the kibon is STILL the same. Most of the founders held high ranks within karate, too. The forms *were* changed for nationalistic purposes, the koreans wanted a martial art that they could call their own, and anything Japanese was openly rejected. Ever wonder why the new forms are all named in reference to the Korean flag? As much as I hate to admit it, and as much as you hate to accept it, a lot of changes were made soley for nationalistic purposes - that is the nature of the animal that we are dealing with here. The changes didn't necessarily water down the art and turn it into a useless joke, however, a lot of the original, far deadlier apps were lost when they decided to toss the original forms in favor of the new, more 'Korean' forms. They are not falsehoods. Like I said earlier, they are backed up by hard evidence. If modern TKDists hastily reject them, then they are living in denial. Did you ever wonder why TKD was originally referred to as "Korean Karate"? There is definitely a reason for that.

 

[SageGhost83]

Oh come on people you know TKD is 10,000 years old with all the tradition of any Art. Sorry I knew that would get everyone attention, here is a bit of info. that we must all face we do not know and we will never know the whole truth the Koreans GM and government will not allow it. We must all look into the future and make TKD history ourself though our students and there actions. When it is all said and done every Art has taken from each other and thus so many simalarities are out there. I for one am tired of the past and looking forward to the future of TKD THE ART I LOVE.

Yes!!! This is the best thing that I have heard on here regarding TKD! It is a young, vibrant art that has a very bright future! It doesn't have to adhere to a rigid past, it is open and free to grow in every way - including shedding the nationalist agenda :lol2:.

 

[terryl965]

Yes!!! This is the best thing that I have heard on here regarding TKD! It is a young, vibrant art that has a very bright future! It doesn't have to adhere to a rigid past, it is open and free to grow in every way - including shedding the nationalist agenda :lol2:.

Well at least somebody agree's let get drunk and past out

 

[SageGhost83]

Well at least somebody agree's let get drunk and past out

I am with you %100 :headbangin:.

 

[terryl965]

I am with you %100 :headbangin:.

Over to Lisa lounge for a few

 

[exile]

I'm coming along with you guys, for a quick nightcap or two before the evening ends... a fine group, and everyone has been making excellent points in response to the OP, from different enough perspectives at times that apparent disagreements arise that I don't think are actually there. I have never thought that TKD needs to be bound to a particular phase of its development—a living MA will change and grow, that's part of what the word 'living' means. But I've been very concerned with defending a realistic, historically defensible view of TKD for two main reasons, one a matter of general principle and the other a matter of practical value in looking at the TKD legacy of formal patterns.

The matter of principle is just this: it's crucial that truth not be relativized to serve nationalist propaganda or the feel-good needs of any one group, no matter how much they were victimized. Allowing that sort of thing does no service to anyone, even to the Koreans themselves. After all, one of the chief complaints of the Koreans and Chinese about the post-war Japanese is that the latter have still yet to acknowledge, in their own history textbooks, what happened to Koreans under the Occupation, what happened to the victims at Nanking and so on... simply because it makes the Japanese feel better not to confront what they did to their subject populations during the war. Sauce for the goose, sauce for the gander. And clearly, there are a number of senior TKDists who have no problem facing the facts about the origins of their art. But that doesn't mean that they support 'freezing' it in the Kwan era either. In my own lineage (Song Moo Kwan) Byung Jik Ro, the founder of the kwan, was very loyal to his Shotokan training, but added a number of technically distinct kicking techniques, according to his biographers, and developed the art in a number of ways that helped make it distinctly Korean, while still showing clearly the hard Shotokan skeleton it's built on. So no contradiction there.

The second point is very practical: if we understand the sources of TKD in karate, we have a skeleton key to the analysis of the formal patterns that TKD forms are based on and incorporate. I called the process of hyung creation 'mixmastering' of the kata sequences; Kwan Jang, one of our very experienced instructors and practitioners, talks about the way the TKD forms have been 'spliced' together from the original elements supplied by kata such as the Pinan set (I've actually seen, I think, some bits and pieces of the Empi kata in one of the Taegeuks, and did a double-take the first time I noticed it). I myself think the resurgence of bunkai/boon hae focus in both the Japanese and Korean MAs is one of the healthiest, most progressive developments (in both cases) in the past forty or so years. I see them as reassertions of the primacy of self-defense, of practicality and utility, of these wonderful combat systems. The historical sources I keep invoking—and the credit goes to them, the people who've done the careful groundwork and difficult documentary research—have as one of their payoffs the fact that we can appropriate the findings of the current best-case bunkai analyses for our own, because the overwhelming evidence that TKD and TSD share a common root with Shotokan and a couple of other karate styles entails that the combat applications in our TKD/TSD forms are linked to the very practical strategic principles and tactical combat instructions contained in the historical roots of these Korean forms. As the Germans say, the dead are not dead and the past is not past—what turns out to work for the karate ancestor of TKD will work for the formal elements of that ancestral source that live in our own hyungs, inherited, even in rearranged fashion, from Matsumura, Itosu and the other Okinawan masters.

Again, that doesn't confine us to any particular era or block the growth of TKD as a Korean art in its own right, standing on a platform of Okinawan/Japanese origins. And I see no reason why TKD will not continue to evolve, possibly into an American variant in this country at least. That would simply be a continuation of the pattern—from China, to Okinawa, to Japan, to Korea, to here. Onward, into the future....

 

[Steel Tiger]

When I read through this thread yesterday I was, to put it mildly, indignant at the uninformed assault on the discipline that is part of my life. Now, having read it again, I am actually offended.

I don't care that the heart of the matter is TKD, the subject could be anything, what I find offensive is the suggestion that the processes of gaining an understanding of the past that have existed for at least 150 years are somehow less than hearsay and gossip garnered at a late night drinking session (that's what it was for all I know, I have no evidence to the contrary).

History is not about unverified statements. It is about evidence. How do we know the ancient Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia? Because we have the remains of buildings, written materials, and a variety of other evidence of their existence. That is history. It is evidence garnered through research and investigation.

And then there is the implication that works are unscholarly because they don't agree with one's worldview. What? I'm not particularly happy about the vast amount of material written about how interesting the Third Reich was, but I would never say it was unscholarly. People have put a lot of hard work into this reasearch and study and should receive credit for that.

Peer-review. A group of college students joining hands and patting each other on the back is not peer-review. And the implication that this is what is happening is tantamount to calling it a weird system akin to a mates' rates rank farm. I can tell you this is not the case. My thesis was reviewed by three people, one of whom did not even know the subject matter. They were people I did not know chosen for that very reason. Of course a professor's review has more substance than a student's, but scholastic works are not reviewed by students. Peer is this case means someone of the same substantive level of knowledge and experience. I mentioned a person who reviewed my thesis not knowing the subject. That is true, they didn't know about Mesoamerica during the 8th and 9th centuries, their work was in other areas that's all.

The issue of the truth. What is truth? One thing it is not is a nice neat little formula that satifies your every desire and fantasy. History is a pursuit of truth, verifiable through evidence. That truth may be unpleasant, but that does not mean it is not the truth. Australian troops did mutiny on the Western Front in WWI, Australian and American Troops in WWII did take less prisoners than other national forces, Britain was the first modern nation to employ racially motivated concentration camps (during the Boer War). These things are unpleasant but that are part of our various histories. We may not like them but they are not going away. Even when someone decide to rewrite history to suit themselves as Stalin did, it is only a case of what they say, not the truth. Saying something is true and not supporting that statement undermines one's entire position.


Let me finish with a quote that I think is relavent to the study of history,

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth - not going all the way, and not starting. - Siddhartha Gautama

 

[SageGhost83]

When I read through this thread yesterday I was, to put it mildly, indignant at the uninformed assault on the discipline that is part of my life. Now, having read it again, I am actually offended.

I don't care that the heart of the matter is TKD, the subject could be anything, what I find offensive is the suggestion that the processes of gaining an understanding of the past that have existed for at least 150 years are somehow less than hearsay and gossip garnered at a late night drinking session (that's what it was for all I know, I have no evidence to the contrary).

History is not about unverified statements. It is about evidence. How do we know the ancient Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia? Because we have the remains of buildings, written materials, and a variety of other evidence of their existence. That is history. It is evidence garnered through research and investigation.

And then there is the implication that works are unscholarly because they don't agree with one's worldview. What? I'm not particularly happy about the vast amount of material written about how interesting the Third Reich was, but I would never say it was unscholarly. People have put a lot of hard work into this reasearch and study and should receive credit for that.

Peer-review. A group of college students joining hands and patting each other on the back is not peer-review. And the implication that this is what is happening is tantamount to calling it a weird system akin to a mates' rates rank farm. I can tell you this is not the case. My thesis was reviewed by three people, one of whom did not even know the subject matter. They were people I did not know chosen for that very reason. Of course a professor's review has more substance than a student's, but scholastic works are not reviewed by students. Peer is this case means someone of the same substantive level of knowledge and experience. I mentioned a person who reviewed my thesis not knowing the subject. That is true, they didn't know about Mesoamerica during the 8th and 9th centuries, their work was in other areas that's all.

The issue of the truth. What is truth? One thing it is not is a nice neat little formula that satifies your every desire and fantasy. History is a pursuit of truth, verifiable through evidence. That truth may be unpleasant, but that does not mean it is not the truth. Australian troops did mutiny on the Western Front in WWI, Australian and American Troops in WWII did take less prisoners than other national forces, Britain was the first modern nation to employ racially motivated concentration camps (during the Boer War). These things are unpleasant but that are part of our various histories. We may not like them but they are not going away. Even when someone decide to rewrite history to suit themselves as Stalin did, it is only a case of what they say, not the truth. Saying something is true and not supporting that statement undermines one's entire position.


Let me finish with a quote that I think is relavent to the study of history,

Amen to that! That is exactly how I feel about it, as well. We cannot write off the cold, hard facts just because they are uncomfortable or they expose the bogus stories concerning our art and KMA in general. Accepting such lies on the basis of "well my instructor said so" when we clearly have hard evidence that proves such lies are nothing but bullcrap, is an insult to Taekwondo itself, and it is insult to our collective intelligence. Our art has a bad enough reputation as it is (4 year old black belts and Mcdojangs, anyone?). Spewing forth nationalist lies and propaganda then accepting them as gospel truths will only disgrace our art even further. I think that I am going to have another drink, I will be sure to toast to the hope that maybe one day these lies will be universally struck down and we can all train without having to deal with the nationalist nonsense. Cheers!

 

[exile]

When I read through this thread yesterday I was, to put it mildly, indignant at the uninformed assault on the discipline that is part of my life. Now, having read it again, I am actually offended.

I don't care that the heart of the matter is TKD, the subject could be anything, what I find offensive is the suggestion that the processes of gaining an understanding of the past that have existed for at least 150 years are somehow less than hearsay and gossip garnered at a late night drinking session (that's what it was for all I know, I have no evidence to the contrary).

History is not about unverified statements. It is about evidence. How do we know the ancient Sumerians lived in Mesopotamia? Because we have the remains of buildings, written materials, and a variety of other evidence of their existence. That is history. It is evidence garnered through research and investigation.

And then there is the implication that works are unscholarly because they don't agree with one's worldview. What? I'm not particularly happy about the vast amount of material written about how interesting the Third Reich was, but I would never say it was unscholarly. People have put a lot of hard work into this reasearch and study and should receive credit for that.

Peer-review. A group of college students joining hands and patting each other on the back is not peer-review. And the implication that this is what is happening is tantamount to calling it a weird system akin to a mates' rates rank farm. I can tell you this is not the case. My thesis was reviewed by three people, one of whom did not even know the subject matter. They were people I did not know chosen for that very reason. Of course a professor's review has more substance than a student's, but scholastic works are not reviewed by students. Peer is this case means someone of the same substantive level of knowledge and experience. I mentioned a person who reviewed my thesis not knowing the subject. That is true, they didn't know about Mesoamerica during the 8th and 9th centuries, their work was in other areas that's all.

The issue of the truth. What is truth? One thing it is not is a nice neat little formula that satifies your every desire and fantasy. History is a pursuit of truth, verifiable through evidence. That truth may be unpleasant, but that does not mean it is not the truth. Australian troops did mutiny on the Western Front in WWI, Australian and American Troops in WWII did take less prisoners than other national forces, Britain was the first modern nation to employ racially motivated concentration camps (during the Boer War). These things are unpleasant but that are part of our various histories. We may not like them but they are not going away. Even when someone decide to rewrite history to suit themselves as Stalin did, it is only a case of what they say, not the truth. Saying something is true and not supporting that statement undermines one's entire position.


Let me finish with a quote that I think is relavent to the study of history,

There are two mistakes one can make along the road to truth - not going all the way, and not starting. - Siddhartha Gautama

There are so many good points in here, ST, that there's no room for me to emphasize them all. But I think they cover the ground represented by the OP pretty thoroughly. I have to say, when I first saw the OP, I was struck by (i) how wide of the mark it was in so many different ways (it's one thing to miss the bullseye, another to not even be in the same postal code as the target) and (ii) how effectively it made my own case for me. As I say, there too many things to get down to specifics on, but the point I've bolded above is well worth following up.

I had to laugh when I read the comment about peer review in the OP, and I confess that my first thought was, hoo boy, have you ever put your foot in it... because the peer reviewers for Journal of Asian Martial Arts are among the top professional MA/cultural historians of their areas in the scholarly world. The current editorial board, from which the referees for JAMA submissions are chosen, includes the following:

• Dakin Burdick, Ph.D.; responsible for Korean martial arts. Instructor at Indiana University (Bloomington, i.e., main campus). He holds a fourth dan in TKD, a third dan in Hapkido, a 2nd dan in iado and recently revised and updated the martial arts entries for Encyclopaedia Britannica. (note: Burdick was not a member of the editorial board when his seminal paper was published in the 1997 JAMA).
  
  
• Paul Cote, MS, Ph.D.; responsible for China and Okinawa. Instructor at Georgetown University. He is ranked Yondan (4th Dan) in Isshin-ryu Karate and Kobudo by the IWKA; certified as an Instructor (Shidoin) by both the IWKA and OIKA when he was promoted to Sandan (3rd Dan). He has also practiced and researched the Northern Chinese internal martial arts of xing-yi quan, bagua zhang, and taiji quan for the past 20 years.
  
  
• Barbara Davis, MA; responsible for China/Taijiquan, author of The Taijiquan Classics: an Annotated Translation; editor, The Taijiquan Journal.
  
  
• Karl Friday, Ph.D; responsible for Japanese martial arts. Professor of history at the University of Georgia and is the author of Hired Swords: The Rise of Private Warrior Power in Early Japan (1992), Legacies of the Sword: The Kashima-Shinryu and Samurai Martial Culture (1997),and Samurai, Warfare and the State in Early Medieval Japan (2003). He has spent a number of years living, training, and doing research in Japan; he presently holds the menkyo kaiden license and is a certified shihan in Kashima-Shinryu.
  
  
• Michael Maliszewski, Ph.D.; responsible for Medicine/Cross-cultural studies. Instructor at Harvard Medical School.
  
  
• Willy Pieter, Ph.D.; responsible for Korean MAs/Sports Science. Instructor at the Science University of Malaysia.

And on and on... and on; this is a representative sample, only a third of the full board, and anyone who wants to cavil about the credentials of the rest of the editorial board members is free to find the complete list in the current issue and discover for himself that the rest of the board is just as academically (and martially) qualified as the few I've chosen. Every submission is vetted by at least two members of the board. Looking back at the OP, and then at the scholarly training, research profile and martial credentials of the JAMA board, and then back at the OP's insinuations... well, as I say, I guess I have to consider myself fortunate that my original points have been made for me.

But I'm very comforted by the rationality and respect for historicity that all the people responding to the OP have shown. The followup posts reacting to the OP confirm what I've believed all along: that, in the end, the MT membership is interested primarily in what the best evidence shows, and discounts irrelevant speculations about personalities.

And as f2f, Terry and others have noted, acknowledging the past in no way traps us in the past.

I think that I am going to have another drink, I will be sure to toast to the hope that maybe one day these lies will be universally struck down and we can all train without having to deal with the nationalist nonsense. Cheers!

Cheers, SG—I'm joining you in that one!

 

[TaeKwonDoKevin]

Hi all....Here are my 2 cents worth for FREE!
I tend to agree with Last Fearner......
I have 30 years in TaeKwonDo. I have also studied Karate.
Now, I too have thought about this TaeKwonDo history.........
Not reading ALL in this thread, or the original thread that started this one, so I guess I am commenting out of ignorance of the thread, somewhat.
1st - Most all of the Asian countries had a type of Martial Art...correct? Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, VietNam and the list goes on.
Why is it so hard to believe that Korea did NOT have some sort of fighting style? All of it's neighbors had something that evolved into a distinct Art.
Yes, modern TaeKwonDo has some (most) roots in the Japanese & Okinawan Arts. But I find it very hard to believe that none (not one technique) of the pre-Japanese occupation fighting styles survived in Korea.
The facts are, People and Nations always find a way to keep and hide their heritage whenever they are being occupied.
Do I believe all of the stories that TaeKwonDo is 2000 years old, of course not. But I do believe that some of the "old" arts survived and were handed down.
I have studied 3 different "styles" of TaeKwonDo. Without a doubt, GM Duk Sung Son's Chung Do Kwan is greatly influenced by Japan's Arts. They were even teaching the Pinan katas.
But ChungDoKwan, Chang Hun, JiDoKwan and OhDoKwan are very different Arts......in tech, and many aspects.
There are some "experts" that will not even acknowledge Gen. Choi's accomplishments in the TaeKwonDo world.
So who do we listen to?
Those are my thoughts......
Take care,
-Kevin

 

[terryl965]

Ok Kevin here is some of my background a 5th in Okinawa Karate and a 4th in TKD study over sea's while my father was in the Marines teaching Judo and Karate for 38 years. You are right they had a fighting system before they where occupied that is a given but it was not Tae Kwon Do so it could not be TKD it was called something elsem who cares what but it was not TKD. When General Choi and others trained they where mainly Okinawa Karate and some of Korea's past arts, but again not TKD. Tae Kwon Do was formed when the general help covence many of the Kwons to come together and they officially named it Tae Kwon Do, so TKD has only been around 50 years so it can not have that rich heritage as other Arts, but it can have hertitage from other Arts mix in with it. Now we can call the older style of fighting TKD but that would be a lie plan and simple.

Sorry TKD just does not have those deep roots, but that does not mean Korea does not have techs that are not deep.

 

[exile]

Not reading ALL in this thread, or the original thread that started this one, so I guess I am commenting out of ignorance of the thread, somewhat.

Kevin... let me suggest that you actually consult the evidence that's been produced on the subject, rather than arguing that since you find it hard to believe X, it follows that 'not X' must be true. The world is full of things we find hard to believe, but which the facts more or less force us to accept. That's the reason people study the history of things, rather than assume that what they find plausible is therefore true.

Think of it this way: what you've said constitutes evidence for facts about your belief-system. It doesn't constitute evidence of any kind for the historical accuracy of your belief system. So you need to provide some kind of evidence for those beliefs, if you want others to find them plausible. Do you actually have any new evidence to add the the mix? As vs., say, the arguments and evidence presented in the sources given here?

And is the logic of your reasoning any different from the following bit of argumentation?

• There is fighting and combat in all human societies;
• there have been Jewish settlements in the Middle East for thousands of years;
• therefore, it must be the case that Krav Maga represents the development of (or at least contains technical components of) a 5,000 year old MA first practiced by the ancient Israelites.

So now, in light of (what I hope is) the self-evident absurdity of that kind of conclusion, could you identify precisely what aspects of 'ChungDoKwan, Chang Hun, JiDoKwan and OhDoKwan' suggest some deep substratum of 'lost' Korean MAs distinct from the Okinawan/Shotokan sources—sources which (as Stuart Anslow documents in his recent book on the Chang Hon hyungs) Gen. Choi, notwithstanding his later claims, identified in a 1960s interview in Combat magazine as crucial to the formation of Taekwondo?

The role of Gen. Choi as an early drum-beater for 'ancient' TKD makes it worth noting that—as Gm. Kim Byung-Soo observed in the January issue of Black Belt, in an interview with one of our members, Rob McLain—General Choi taught the same Japanese kata and curriculum elements that the other Kwan founders did, and that's no surprise, given that his entire MA training, to the extent that it can be verified, was confined to Shotokan karate (please, please consult Robert Young's detailed, carefully researched and fully documented examination of the history and disappearance of 'taekyon' in Korea for some idea of just how unreliable Gen. Choi's invocation of taekyon in his earlier training turns out to be; Steve Capener's article, though apparently completely independent of Young's, supports exactly the same conclusions here. The person Choi identifies as his taekyon instructor turns out to be, very likely, an imaginary friend...)

The point is, there's contemporary evidence, and there's good evidence that by the time the Japanese began actively suppressing the MAs in Korea, the MAs they were suppressing largely consisted of the imported Japanese MAs judo and jiujitsu. If, in the face of the savage and thorough enforcement the Japanese imposed on the proscription of any MA training in Korea between the beginning of the Occupation and the mid 1930s, the best you can suggest is that there 'must have been' people training... training something we don't know about, and doing so in total secrecy... something that no one at the time or currently can identify in any way that stands up to serious scrutiny... but which somehow crept into the form of the Kwan curricula... then I think you're going to find that you have a very, very tough sell on your hands.

I should also note that Gen. Choi isn't particularly important here except insofar as he was one of the very loudest voices—later on, of course—denying that the Okinawan/Japanese MAs, which he and every other one of the original Kwan founders studied in Japan (except Hwang Kee) had studied to one or another dan levels, had anything to do with TKD. (And HK admitted, in his last book, after a good chunk of a lifetime claiming Chinese origins for what he taught, that he had learned much of his technique, especially those rooted in the seminal Pinan katas, from Japanese textbooks. As John Hancock, in his important article 'Quest for the truth', points out

On pages 15 and 16 of [HK's The History of Moo Duk Kwan (1995)], it clearly states that Hwang Kee's knowledge and understanding of the majority of the forms taught within tang soo do, including the pyong ahn hyung, came from reading and studying Japanese books on Okinawan karate. Hwang discovered those books in the library of the train station where he worked in Seoul in 1939. We can only speculate as to which books those were, but I would venture that Funakoshi's Ryukyu Kempo Karate (1922) was among them.)​

Choi's whole significance here is that he was very important in starting the nationalist 'party line', still aggressively pursued by the TKD directorate in Korea, that TKD is the product of 'ancient' indigenous Korean arts.

Given these tiresomely well-documented facts about the training of all the Kwan founders, the specific reason that we need to posit an ancient/old/etc. stratum to the very clearly O/J sources of the TKD techs in all known lineages, in order to make sense of the technique set of Kwan-era TKD and later, is that .... ....?

Again, we're not talking here about what TKD became. We're talking about where it started. Take karate itself: by the time Okinawan karate was exported to Japan, it was very, very different, so far as we can tell, from its Chinese/indigenous antecedents, the raw materials. That's how the life of MAs evolves, and there's no reason to suppose that the development of TKD/TSD, the Korean expressions of karate, worked any differently. There are styles that are much closer to the common O/J rootstock of the modern Korean striking arts, and styles that are further away. But all the converging lines of evidence point to that O/J rootstock (Simon O'Neil alludes in one or two places in his Combat TKD monograph to a small role played by elements of chuan fa, but doesn't develop the discussion in any detail....)

 

[SageGhost83]

Hi all....Here are my 2 cents worth for FREE!
I tend to agree with Last Fearner......
I have 30 years in TaeKwonDo. I have also studied Karate.
Now, I too have thought about this TaeKwonDo history.........
Not reading ALL in this thread, or the original thread that started this one, so I guess I am commenting out of ignorance of the thread, somewhat.
1st - Most all of the Asian countries had a type of Martial Art...correct? Thailand, Indonesia, Philippines, VietNam and the list goes on.
Why is it so hard to believe that Korea did NOT have some sort of fighting style? All of it's neighbors had something that evolved into a distinct Art.
Yes, modern TaeKwonDo has some (most) roots in the Japanese & Okinawan Arts. But I find it very hard to believe that none (not one technique) of the pre-Japanese occupation fighting styles survived in Korea.
The facts are, People and Nations always find a way to keep and hide their heritage whenever they are being occupied.
Do I believe all of the stories that TaeKwonDo is 2000 years old, of course not. But I do believe that some of the "old" arts survived and were handed down.
I have studied 3 different "styles" of TaeKwonDo. Without a doubt, GM Duk Sung Son's Chung Do Kwan is greatly influenced by Japan's Arts. They were even teaching the Pinan katas.
But ChungDoKwan, Chang Hun, JiDoKwan and OhDoKwan are very different Arts......in tech, and many aspects.
There are some "experts" that will not even acknowledge Gen. Choi's accomplishments in the TaeKwonDo world.
So who do we listen to?
Those are my thoughts......
Take care,
-Kevin

You have 30 years in TKD, that is very impressive, but that does not make you a historian - and the issue here is history. You are right about Korea having its own martial arts. I'll do you one better - seeing as how they defeated the Japanese in the Imjin wars and the Mongols, and they gave the Chinese fits, then their indigenous styles must have been pretty damn good. However, Taekwondo is not one of those styles and neither does it draw from those styles. The earliest versions of Taekwondo were indeed carbon copies of japanese karate. They used the original techniques and the original katas of Japanese karate, and the style was in fact, referred to as Korean Karate. Of course, the style has evolved and has been changed around to reflect the tastes and preferences of its new home and its masters. What we practice today is based in those modern changes, not in alleged ancient Korean martial arts. The original forms were replaced with new forms that were based more in Korean nationalism than anything else (Taeguk, Korean flag). If Korean syles survived and were handed down, and they were truly indigenous Korean martial arts, then why didn't the government snap them up and use them exclusively within the nationalist propaganda machine? Given the political climate within Korea, why didn't somebody come forth and say "yes, we do have our own arts, and here is X art that was practiced and passed down to me from X time in the past? As for our beloved TKD, all that you have to do is trace the style back to its modern roots and look at it in its original form and you will see that it started out as nothing more than a Korean version of Shotokan Karate, complete with the same exact uniforms (karate-style gi), the same exact kihon (basic blocks), and the same exact katas. It is better to think of TKD as a modern KMA with roots in war-torn Korea/Japan/Okinawa. I would love to find out about old, indigenous Korean martial arts, but TKD is not one of them. Perhaps Ssireum or Shippalgi may be a better source for ancient Korean martial arts because TKD definitely isn't. The long, romanticised past just isn't there for TKD. Why is this so hard to accept? Ours is not an art of the past, it is an art of the future. Bartender! I'll have Two White Zombies Chasing A Blue Motorcycle, Please!

 

[SageGhost83]

There are some "experts" that will not even acknowledge Gen. Choi's accomplishments in the TaeKwonDo world.
So who do we listen to?

If by accomplishments you mean threatening to put people on the front line of the Korean war unless they renounce their training and practice what he was teaching, then yeah, I can see why they wouldn't be in such a hurry to celebrate such an egregious, A-hole "accomplishment". Didn't GM Kim Soo come clean and expose a number of the general's lies? Then there was that whole North Korea Fiasco which arguably led to the whole ITF-WTF split in the first place. Hmmm, maybe those "experts" know what they are talking about and do not subscribe to the knee-jerk romanticism? I respect general Choi because, if nothing else, he made a lot of noise to get TKD noticed in other parts of the world. However, I won't prop him up on a pedastool, either. The founding of our art was a group effort and all of the Kwans chipped in, so he doesn't deserve any special treatment apart from the treatment that the other Kwan leaders are given.

 

[SageGhost83]

Oh, and we should listen to the people who have actually done the research and have the hard evidence to back up the facts that they present. Several authors have already been listed in this thread, so there is no need for me to repeat them.

 

[tellner]

LF and TKDK are pretty much saying the same thing, to wit:

"I don't care what the research says. I don't care what the facts are. TKD must be just like the Korean government tells me it is because I like it, and I'm personally invested in it."

I'm really sorry to say this, but it just isn't so. No matter how many times LF says "The research isn't complete" he has yet to come up with anything resembling evidence for his position other than he wants it to be true. In fact, he's been remarkably coy about what his actual position is.

FL, where does TKD come from? What are its antecedents? Why were the original forms, uniform, techniques and backgrounds of the founders all straight Japanese Karate? If you mention cave paintings and Tae Kyon what do you have to weigh against the best research we have which debunks them? What earlier Korean martial arts went into TKD? Do any of them exist today, and if so where and in what form?

 

[Cirdan]

The "ancient art" story of TKD is only slightly more likely to be true than that it is really based on the mating rituals of pink flying extradimensional hippos visiting our world.

Come on, take the red pill.

 

[YoungMan]

I'll admit, early Tae Kwon Do was heavily influenced by Japanese karate. No surprise given that an entire generation of Koreans and their culture were ruled by Japan.
However, as I've pointed out, the modern Korean kicking and techniques our class did when I was coming up bear a remarkable resemblance to what I've seen Tae Kyon students do (high kicks, spinning, jumping etc.). You can't tell me that Tae Kyon did not or does not do those techniques because I've seen video of those guys (from the Korean TK Association) doing them. So somewhere along the line, the Japanese techniques were removed and traditional Korean techniques inserted. You can argue with me all you want, but I'm going by what my eyes saw. Those techniques were not just invented out of thin air, they were brought in from somewhere. If the Hapkido guys discovered them first, fine, but modern Tae Kwon Do is definitely descended from traditional Korean technique, despite what Exile and others say. I've seen too many similarities to believe otherwise.

 

[YoungMan]

And yes, early Tae Kwon Do was called "Korean Karate". But that was a marketing ploy used by some in reference to the fact that people knew Japanese Karate. Who knew, especially in America, what Tang Soo Do was? The Chung Do Kwan people knew almost immediately that a Korean-based name was needed if Tang Soo Do was to have its own identity.
So it wasn't called "Korean Karate" because it was, it was called that for marketing purposes.

 

[exile]

I'll admit, early Tae Kwon Do was heavily influenced by Japanese karate. No surprise given that an entire generation of Koreans and their culture were ruled by Japan.
However, as I've pointed out, the modern Korean kicking and techniques our class did when I was coming up bear a remarkable resemblance to what I've seen Tae Kyon students do (high kicks, spinning, jumping etc.). You can't tell me that Tae Kyon did not or does not do those techniques because I've seen video of those guys (from the Korean TK Association) doing them. So somewhere along the line, the Japanese techniques were removed and traditional Korean techniques inserted. You can argue with me all you want, but I'm going by what my eyes saw. Those techniques were not just invented out of thin air, they were brought in from somewhere. If the Hapkido guys discovered them first, fine, but modern Tae Kwon Do is definitely descended from traditional Korean technique, despite what Exile and others say. I've seen too many similarities to believe otherwise.

YM, when you read Young's and Capener's definitive examinations of the history Taekyon—which I remember pointing you to several weeks back and which you clearly still haven't read—you will note that by the mid-fifties, the guy who was the last living 'master' of taekyon reckoned that there were only three other people in the whole of Korea who were doing taekyon, and this at a time when TKD was exploding. Between then and now, taekkyon grew into an activity that several thousand people practice, compared with the millions in Korea who have trained in it since then. This growth in taekkyon, a tiny minority 'art' which happened, essentially, well after the formation of modern TKD, incorporates high kicks and other TKD/TSD techniques (whereas the 'old' taekyon made extensive use of leg blocks and other things missing from both TKD/TSD and 'nouveau' taekyon), and you're trying to tell us that TKD got these from nouveau taekyon??? And you find this plausible??

Just to remind you of how much of this has already been documented for you, let me reproduce part of an MT post I sent you here, roughly three weeks ago:

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:

And it wasn't surprising that Song-Duk Ki estimated only four practitioners of taekyon left, himself included, is it! Because as Capener reports (and as I cited in a post to you, six weeks ago, which you never seem to have responded to),

Further testimony to the completeness of t'aekkyon 's disappearance from
Korean folk customs is given by Song Tok-ki the Choson's "last t'aekkyon player" who
was invited in 1958 to give a demonstration of t'aekkyon on the occasion of then
President Syngman Rhee's birthday. In spite of searching in "100 directions" he was
unable to locate even one person versed in t'aekkyon with whom he could
demonstrate. This in spite of hundreds of t'aegwondo schools throughout the country.
Song Tok-ki goes on to say that t'aekkyon was never thought of as other than a game
and existed almost exclusively in Seoul where it was played regularly in a few
locations.​

(from Capener, 'Problems in the Identity and Philosphy of T'aegwando and their Historical Causes', available here.)

And after all that information, including testimony from the one 20th century figure whom anyone can identify as a major point of contact with the 19th c. folk sport of taekyon, its 'Living National Treasure', all of which clearly and severely challenges your assumption of the direction of travel in technique between nouveau 'taekyon' and TKD, you still post along these lines...