My take on the history of TKD, and General Choi's role in it, is this: he was absolutely crucial to the development of TKD in its first phase in Korea,
not as an individual personality, but rather as an embodiment of the military (therefore state-centralized) dynamics which led to the condition of TKD in Korea and, by extension, the West. The Korean War was a nasty, brutal war for the American and other foreign forces who fought in it, but it was a horrific catastrophe for the Koreans themselves, threatening their physical survival just at the point when they should have been rebuilding their society and economy in the aftermath of the Japanese defeat, the way the European countries were able to do—in no small part because of a Marshall Plan the Koreans had no part in—after the destruction of Nazi Germany. The role of General Choi Hong Hi is pivotal in relating the apocalyptic crisis of the Korean War to the subsequent career of the Korean martial arts and the formation of the institutional arrangements conveniently labelled 'Taekwondo'. Gen. Choi, trained in Shotkan karate as a second dan belt under Gichin Funakoshi, had attained the status of colonel in the Korean army before the outbreak of the Korean War and had already begun the training of Korean soldiers in karate (=
kong soo do in Korean transliteration). During the course of the war, as Simon O'Neil mentions in passing in his
Combat TKD newsletter 9, `several military units trained in the art, including elite special operations groups, fought with great distinction'. The Black Tiger commandos were particularly celebrated in the South—and feared in the North—for their ferocity in combat using the H2H training they had received as special tactical units responsible to Choi, and their success—along with that of the RoK Marines at the battle of Tra Binh Dong (for discussion, documentation/citations, see
here)—in turn gave Choi a prestige that led to his promotion to the rank of General.
In the aftermath of the war, with Korean society in a state of chaos, poverty and despair that probably very few North Americans can visualize, the performance of the military in preserving the ROK from the intensity of the North Korean attack, backed with Russian and Chinese support, gave the army a special cachet and status which fed directly into Gen. Choi's ability to determine the priority of MA training for the armed forces, and, as an inevitable spinoff, the availablity of MA training for the civilian population as well. R. McLain's interview with Gm. Kim in the January 2008
Black Belt ('Korean Martial Arts History', pp.101–105) makes it clear that Choi was not above an extremely heavy-handed kind of blackmail in promoting his own Oh Do Kwan interpretation of Kong Soo Do on the Korean MA world: most of the KSD instructors were doing their national service in the military, and, according to Gm. Kim, you had a choice of adopting Gen. Choi's system and getting a soft posting well behind enemy lines, or sticking to your own kwan system and winding up at the hellishly dangerous front.
In the aftermath of the war, as Burdick (`People and events of Taekwando's Formative Years',
Journal of Asian Martial Arts 6:1 (1997); see also the later, slightly different version at
http://www.budosportcapelle.nl/gesch.html) describes in detail, Choi was able to parlay his enormous prestige to successfully challenge Hwang Kee, Moo Duk Kwan founder, for leadership of the KMA community. The very possibility of such a challenge, implying that there indeed exists a position of exclusive dominance, is of course what needs to be explained, but it seems to me very likely that it was the war itself, and Choi's exploitation of his military status to impose his own view of KSD as a standard, which created the competitive scenario in which he himself emerged victorious. The military coup against Syngman Rhee in 1961, and the acendency of Gen. Park's regime for eighteen years following, gave Gen. Choi—an enthusiastic supporter of the coup—additional clout in the ROK, enabling him to use the Korean Taesudo Association as an effective weapon against the holdouts to kwan `unification', which in effect can now be seen as a code word for Oh Do Kwan control over MA training and curriculum in South Korea. The principal holdout was, of course, the Moo Duk Kwan, and Choi brought some formidable weapons to bear against it, as Burdick reports:
Many instructors rejoined the KTA in 1962 when the KTA decided to retest all black belts to establish national standards, an action that seemed ominous, given the obvious suport of the Park government...
Hwang Kee remained the most visible opponent of the KTA and, as a result, he was often harassed by KTA supporters. The KTA attempted to have the Muddukwan's charter with the Education Ministry revoked, but Hwang won the case under the Korean Supreme Court. According to Robert Shipley... Hwang's house was also `partially burned by "persons unknown'' as a result of his resistance to the taesudo movement. Hwang moved to the U.S. in May 1974, where he continued to teach tangsudo.'
Given his use of dangerous military assignments to threaten dissenters during the war, the de facto threat by the KTA he controlled to strip oppposing instructors of their belt rank after the war, his efforts to decertify the MDK and the criminal physical harrassment of Hwang Kee documented by Robert Shipley in his communiction to
Black Belt in 1975, it seems fair to say that Gen. Choi was uncompromisingly ruthless in his effort to secure control over all aspects of the KSD scene in Korea; his drive to dominate the karate-based arts was, Burdick reports, sufficiently ambitious that in 1967 he actually tried to persuade Mas Oyama, at that time an icon of Japanese karate, to abandon the style he himself had founded, Kyokushin, and convert to Choi's version of kongsudo, which two years early had become Taekwondo and bore the complete imprint of Choi's vision of the art.
The story of Choi's fall from the dominant position he had gained is by now extremely old news in the KMA world, but in an important sense it was irrelevant. The crucible of the Korean War, if my interpretation of events is correct, created a situation in which one individual practitioner was able to define the Korean MA scene as a place of competition for monopolistic control over technical components of MA practice, something unheard of in any other Asian country. The replacement of ITF-style TKD with WTF-style TKD reflects nothing more than another instance of the kind of rifts and rivalry which
can only develop in a situation where that sort of monopoly is institutionalized. (I hope I won't be misunderstood here: certainly there is a long history of rivalries among Japanese MA schools, going back into the era of the Samurai and the Tokugawa castle lords, and anecdotes about the role of such rivalries in Musahi Miyamoto's life have become legendary; but those rivalries did not represent the policy of a controlling state power seeking to enforce the dominance of a particular school or style. The latter situation was unique to Korea in the postwar era, so far as I can tell, and remains the single most important fact about the emergence of TKD as the `national MA' of Korea). I think Korea was particularly prone to such a top-down state monopolization of MA authority for reasons I've speculated about
here.
The kwan era, representing the independent practice of TKD by martial artists developing and experimenting with the possibilities of Korean karate, represented the normal situation for Asian martial arts during this and subsequent periods. The enforced unity that was imposed on the kong soo do practiced by the kwans was from this point of view an aberration due to the military crisis in Korea caused by the Korean War, which enabled a high-ranking and influential officer to use his powerful position to advance his own agenda for kong soo do in part by suppressing competing approaches through the means documented above. The product of Gen. Choi's efforts was a military version of KSD which emphasized extremely forcible, linear power techniques for the purpose of not merely incapcitating but killing a possibly armed opponent in the shortest possible time, as discussed at length in O'Neil's quasi-monograph.
Subsequent events proved that
while Choi's efforts might have been successful in bringing about a monopolistic approach to MAs that was uniquely Korean, the monopoly he created was owned not by him but by the apparat of the Korean government, which established the WTF to displace Choi's ITF and bring about a sea-change in the technical content of TKD.
That is the crucial point, I think, the key to the way TKD has developed as an ongoing redefinition of Korea's national martial art by what is, effectively, an agency of its national government. As Korea's military crisis receded in the decades following the Korean War, the perception of national interest inevitably changed from ensuring the combat survivability of its troops to enhancing the international image of Korea as a progressive industrial nation, a `tiger' economy worth investing in and entitled to respect as a major regional player. The reinterpretation of TKD as a competitive sport rather than a combat art designed for lethal battlefield effectiveness is a natural development in the post-Cold War era, if you look at it—as the Korean government clearly does—through the cynical lens of realpolitik. For those of us for whom MAs are combat systems first and foremost, and which derive their technical content from their SD use in close quarters, the choice is one we've talked about in other threads, Terry: go along with the dilution of TKD into Korean wushu, or break with the Korean TKD Directorate and reconstruct old-school TKD in the Western context. For me, that one's a no-brainer!
