This was from the website
www.bwmac.com (a private Chung Do Kwan Tae Kwon Do school affiliated with Yun Taek Chong)
"Lee, Won Kuk was born April 13, 1907. As a young man he had an interest in the martial arts but the occupying Japaneses government banned any martial art practice or instruction. It is probable that he did practice in secret as a teenager because he told this author that when he first started training he and his first teachers would not exchange names due to possible consequences if someone got caught."
Further evidence that Won Kuk Lee did, indeed, practice Tae Kyon in Korea before he left for Japan.
This isn't evidence for anything, YM. Would you mind pointing out even one mention of `taekyon' in the passage you quoted?? As I think I pointed out several times, the MAs that were taught in Korea until the Japanese military really began to put the hammer down in the early 20th century were judo and jiujutsu. Where do you get the idea that LWK
ever studied taekyon, based on that quote?
All martial arts had to be practiced in secret from the 20s on in Korea, because
none of them were allowed—any of the chuan fa derivatives from China, jiujutsu, any of it. Until you can somehow manage to unearth a mention of taekyon in that passage that's somehow invisible on my screen, there is just as good a case for Long Fist chuan fa as for taekyon so far as what LWK studied.
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:
Young's paper is loaded with testimony from current Korean TKD masters as well to the effect that there was no significant influence of the dying taekyon under Japanese occupation on the robust Korean development of the Shotokan/Shudokan karate that became TKD (e.g., Hwang Kee's comment in his 1970 bo0k that
'Taekyon is not related to the current taekwondo' (p.41). I won't bother citing any more his paper, or reprising Henning's or Capener's work, or Gm. Kim Pyung Soo's personal testimony. Judging by how much heed you've taken of any of this work—often conducted
in Korea, with surviving practitioners of various KMAs and what surviving historical mss. still exist that have bearing on the history of the KMAs—there would be little point to my doing so. But if you are going to persist in trying to make a case, let me at least suggest that you provide arguments which have some
bearing on the point at issue, and which make at least some passing
reference to taekyon—unlike the quote in your last post.
. Why is it so hard to accept the fact that Taekwondo came from Japanese Karate? Is the nationalism/racism so strong that people are even willing to ignore or flat out deny the true history which has been proven through actual facts? I mean seriously...Taekwondo came from japanese/okinawan karate and there is no way around that. It has been proven by scholars, GM Kim Soo has put forth the truth, and it is readily apparent to anyone who is familiar with both styles. Shotokan is my mother style. I currently practice WTF Taekwondo, and the influence is there and it is unmistakable - just look at the basic blocks. Heck, the original forms were japanese/okinawan forms. That alone is the smoking gun to Taekwondo's true history.
