Hey Terry a book, that is great! As to the history of TKD I think I would have a small chapter outlining Korean Martial Arts before the last Japanese Occupation and then the resurgence once the occupation was over. You could talk about the founding of the various Training Halls and how they eventually came under the name of Tae Kwon Do and then you could explain how they eventually turned into the WTF. Honest, factual and to the point. Very few books have done that and yours would be one of the first. If you need any help let me know as my library on Korean arts is pretty large.
The tricky part hereĀand one that I think is absolutely crucialĀis answering the questions,
what was the technical content of the fighting systems taught by the kwans? What was the form of the curriculum through which that technical content was communicated to students? A huge amount hinges on this. All of the original kwan founders studied karate in Japan under Okinawan masters, becoming proficient at the Dan level in all cases I know about. What they taught to their students in the kwans they founded presumably would be extremely heavily influenced by just what they learned from Funakoshi or his senior students, or Kanken and his senior students, or some of the other masters of the time (mostly it seems to have been Shotokan and Shudokan that the kwan founders studies). Because of well-documented changes in karate as practiced in mid-to-late 19th c. Okinawa on the one hand and early 20c. on the other, we don't know exactly how much of the combat content encoded in kata were taught to the kwan founders, even though we have many surviving kata, clearly quite old or based (like the Pinan/Heian series) on quite old forms; Funakoshi suggests that the content of karate had become diluted at that point, and there's good reason to believe that's true.
But what's still hazy is just how much was lost and how much survived in the instruction that the kwan founders received. That's our baseline for the early content of the kwan-era curricula. The problem is, there's very little documentation that we have (or at least, that I've encountered) laying out just what that baseline consists of. Clearly it was quite different from the current KKW curriculum, influenced as heavily as it has been over the past decade or two by WTF sparring standards (my view, at least).
That's why the content of the kwan era curricula is so importantĀit basically tells us where contemporary TKD
came from. How much that was taught there came from indigenous Korean MA systems (to the extent that it makes sense to talk about purely Korean MAs, given the work of Steve Henning and others on the Chinese origins of early fighting systems in Korea)? If we knew what the early kwan curricula looked like, we could tell. Master McLain has posted some extremely valuable information here and in our MT magazine, with highly suggestive and crucial comments from his own Gm. about this question; we need much more information of this kind before we can even begin to provide a detailed picture of kwan training in the 1940s and 50s.
This would be a good place for people who know about this period to start pooling their information. I think a lot of questions about the direction and content of TKD as a combat system could begin to get at least partial answers if we had a better idea of what the resources are in the movements and skill we were, and continue to be, taught, and my feeling is that a detailed understanding of TKD history would unlock many myseries about those resources...
