TSD/TKD relationship

[Brad Dunne]

When I look at the given/listed history of TKD, particularly the kwans and inparticular Han Moo Kwan, TSD is referenced as what was taught but TKD is in text next to it, in (parens). My question is, when do you feel that the real seperation (training aspects) happened, which allowed/affirmed a difinative distinction between the disciplines?

 

[Brad Dunne]

%think% :idunno:

 

[Makalakumu]

I would say that as soon as TKD became a part of Korean nationalism, then the divide began. The old hyung were replaced and many new kicks were imported and expounded. Lots of new ways of doing things appeared.

 

[exile]

Don't forget also the role played by Gen. Choi. During the Korean War and after, he made some very aggressive moves against the other kwan founders, using his clout in the ROK military (and later in the Park military dictatorship after the 1961 coup, which Choi had supported enthusiastically). In work by Dakin Burdick in JAMA (1997) and in our own Robert McLain's interview with Gm. Kim Pyung-Soo (available in our own MT Martial Arts magazine), there is documentation of at least the following actions:

(i) during the war, Gen. Choi offered other Kwan founders, senior instructors and senior students the following choice: a soft assignment well behind the front lines, if they switched to his organization, or an assignment to an active sector at the (horrifically dangerous) front, if they declined;
(ii) retesting of all black belts by Choi's Korean Taesudo Association (with the strong backing of the Park regime) to establish `national standards';
(iii) an attempt by the KTA to have the Moo Duk Kwan's charter from the Korean Ministry of Education revoked—a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court of Korea, which ruled in Gm. Hwang Kee's favor.

In addition, according to a letter from Robert Shipley to Black Belt magazine in 1975, Hwang Kee's house was `partially burned by "persons unknown" ' in 1973, and Gm. Kee left for the U.S. the following year.

I don't think it's unfair to say that it was largely a result of Gen. Choi's attempt to impose a monopoly on control of the KMA, using his enormous influence and authority, that resulted in the imposed `unity' that led to the disappearance of effective Kwan identity in most cases, and the separation of MDW (and hence TSD) from the KTA and later government-based central Korean MA organizations.

But I also believe that the split was further ramped up by the fact that HK viewed the tangsoodo/kongsudo practices in the original and later kwans as a set of fighting skills, whereas the WTF, in the aftermath of Choi's fall, saw it as a way to enhance Korea's status not in terms of military survival—the version of TKD that Gen. Choi promoted was, after all, a very direct, linear, brutally effective combat skill set designed to incapacitate and kill enemy soldiers in H2H fighting as quickly as possible—but in international sports competition, in the aftermath of the military demand on the ROK armed forces in Korea and later in Vietnam. TKD, in the hands of the WTF, aimed at Olympic glory and got it; my impression is, TSD continued (and continues) Gm. HK's focus on the Okinawan/Japanese fighting skills that the kwan founders learned, and returned to teach, before the war. (There are a lot of TKD practitioners out there, many on this board I suspect, whose view of their art is far closer to the main TSD line than the WTF/KKW line, but that's a differen story... )

 

[zDom]

One of the things GM Ed Sell said to my friend, Tim Wall, when Wall joined his organization was,

"Why do you guys wear Tang Soo Do uniforms?"

I am finding all sorts of things in Moo Sul Kwan TKD that seem to indicate roots in TSD.

 

[exile]

One of the things GM Ed Sell said to my friend, Tim Wall, when Wall joined his organization was,

"Why do you guys wear Tang Soo Do uniforms?"

I am finding all sorts of things in Moo Sul Kwan TKD that seem to indicate roots in TSD.

Wouldn't surprise me one bit. I don't know the history of MSK TKD—have you got a pointer to any source on that that I could read up on, zD?—but it's likely that a lot of TKD schools, though they went with Choi and then the WTF, maintained attitudes not that different from Gm. Kee's, and their training and curricula would be much closer to what the old Kwans were doing. Any school like that would have many things in common with current TSD, without actually descending directly from G. Kee's kwan. I've seen TSD classes which look very similar in many ways to the way we train at my school. The closer a school is to the WTF/KKW line, the less like TSD it's going to look, and conversely, the less a TKD school follows that line, the more like TSD it's probably going to appear...