What's a unique thing about each Kwan?

[IcemanSK]

Hi Iceman,

Sorry if that post came across as authoritative, as that wasn't my intent... I imagine that Ji Do Kwan is taught differently across different schools. Some may very well teach self defense that uses techniques from Judo, Jujutsu and / or Hapkido. I was only speaking from my (limited) personal experience.

Regards...

I only spoke out of my experience with a JiDo Kwan master from Illinois. I was not his student, but I tested in front of him. You have actual experience in a JDK school. Therefore, I'll defer to your experience. You are right, tho: schools do vary.

 

[exile]

Please explain to me where I went wrong.

I'll be more than happy to, f2f. This is going to take some time. But I think some quite important points, very much on-topic and germane to the reason we're having this thread in the first place, come up, so I think it's worth going into some detail about where you went wrong.

From my perspective the quote starts with you making reference to Terry’s comments on the blending of the kwans (I should point out that he made no mention of it being forced by Korean uber-agencies, which strikes me as ironic since you criticized me for attributing you with a position you did not have and then commenting on it) and continues with you expressing your belief that the blending has resulted in a loss of diversity in the art.

Let's start with the obvious:

• in citing Terry, I did not attribute to him statements he never made and then claim that he was wrong on the basis of those statements. You, on the other hand, did exactly that with my post (something, I have to note in passing, that I pointed out to you in detail in the post you're responding to and that you have not addressed at all.) Now, as it happens, Terry is someone I regard as a friend, with whom I've discussed this matter both in other threads going back for more than a year, and in person. So my comments reflect what I think is at least a general perspective we share about this `blending', based on actual conversation (Terry, please chime in here and tell me if I'm mistaken in thinking that!).

• You, by contrast, have no idea at all of what my views are apart from what I post on MartialTalk, and there is nothing in my posts here to support the interpretation you've assigned to my comments. Yes, I expressed my belief, but as I've just said, it's one that I have some reason to believe Terry shares. And at no time have I challenged, criticized or attacked anyone's point of view or statements based on something I assumed without any justification about those statements.​

So, so far, where you went wrong before in was in attributing certain views to me that I do not hold, and then arguing that I was mistaken in holding those views. And where you're going wrong now is in equating these two quite different situations I've just contrasted, while continuing to avoid acknowledging that you had no basis for attributing the views to me you did, in spite of the fact that I pointed out exactly where the disconnection lies between my comments on the one hand and your `restatements' of those comments.

I would hope you can see the difference between what I did and what you did.

I simply related my difference of opinion (which I believe is the real reason why you criticized my post, how dare someone disagree with you) and gave a few examples as to why.

First of all, you actually have the situation backwards in your comment here: I didn't criticize your post because you disagree with me; rather, I criticized your post because there is excellent evidence against your position, leading me to disagree with your position and therefore to criticize your post on the basis of the evidence which undermines your position. We'll get to that evidence directly. Meanwhile, you might note that plenty of people have disagreed with me and I've expressed my appreciation for their point of view and the knoweldge that backed it up; for a very recent example, see the exchange of posts between me and Victor Smith that begins with my post here. Compare his response to your own for some hints as to why the conversation in the two threads developed in such different ways.

Second: no—you didn't `simply relate [your] difference of opinion'. The fact, which you keep neglecting to address and which I have to keep coming back to, is that you attributed a view to me which was nowhere either explicit or implicit in my post, as I pointed out. Your `examples' of `difference of opinion' were based on both on beliefs you incorrectly attributed to me, present nowhere in anything I said, and on certain historical claims you've made, claims that we can now proceed to.

(BTW, For convenience, I'm going to number the relevant parts of the rest of your post; there are several different kinds of mistakes in them, so it'll be convenient to separate them out.

(i)

You are correct, every one of those techniques was “already present in the original curricula of a number of the kwans,” but as Mr. McLain stated, the Kwans were known to have a preference towards certain techniques and their use.

It was not uncommon for older style to reserve a particular technique for a particular application

First of all, would you care to provide some actual documentation for this statement? Very, very little is known about how the Kwans provided combat interpretations for various moves, either isolated kihon techs or bunkai for whole hyungs; that problem is one of the outstanding issues in TKD's relatively short history. So can you provide a citation—some reason for a disinterested observer to believe what you're saying here? Can to identify exactly who has written about the technical treatment of specific movements in Kwan era TKD and how these were applied as combat moves? Where is your evidence, for example, that other kwans didn't know about the same `application', but simply tended to practice a different one, because of some individual preference of the founder of that kwan? For that matter, on what are you basing the idea that the notion of multiple applications, either of kihon elements or of hyung subsequences, was part of Kwan era TKD at all?

In other words, What are your sources? Since you readily attribute `ignorance' to other posters who don't accept your premises, you presumably have a source of documentation for all of this that those posters are ignorant of. What is it?

Second, exactly what bearing does this point have on the question of whether the forced unification of the Kwans under Gen. Choi's rather dictatorial grip led to the era of creative experimentation you seem to be attributing to that outcome? Where is the slightest shred of documented historical evidence that the technical repertoire of TKD was in practice expanded beyond that of what any single Kwan practiced? Just what has been the fate of elbow strikes, knee strikes, low kicks, blows to the face and throat, neck twists,and other moves encoded in the TKD hyungs, and explored in the work of Simon O'Neil, Stuart Anslow and others, as a result of the tournament-competitive agenda imposed by the Korean TKD directorate on the art worldwide (through, for example, the WTF's scoring system, the way the original karate-based forms were hastily replaced by new sets, and so on; see below for more on this point)? How does your claim that somehow the technical content of TKD has become more diverse as a result of the `merger' of the Kwans (aka the conglomerate corporate TKD the WTF/KKW, in one avatar or another, has delivered to us for the past several decades) square with this practical reduction of the original technical resources that the Kwan founders brought back from Japan in their Karate training??

(ii)

After the Kwans began to merge their various applications were combined and an understanding was developed where a single technique can have a multitude of uses.

Now, I'm not sure if I'm reading your post correctly, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that you're saying this `multiple application' idea was a discovery that no one had made previously and was a by-product of that merger; after all, if it were already known, you could hardly give credit to the `merger' (=the KTA, WTF/KKW... basically, the government-controlled TKD monopoly in Korea) for `discovering' it. All I can say is, if you think you've gotten flak from me, just try going to the Karate fora and telling the knowledgeable Okinawan karate-style experts there that the idea of a single movement or sequence of movements having multiple applications was a discovery of the Koreans in the forced-unification era of the two decades following the Korean War. As Iain Abernthy points out in his Bunkai-jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata, this idea of multiple applications for single techniques was a very likely brought to Okinawa by the Satsuma samurai in the 17th century and adopted by the aristocratic Okinawan families (with whom their Minamoto-backed overlords intermarried) into the family styles, so that practitioners of `indigenous MAs' in Okinawa were already aware of the virtue of encoding several applications into a single movement, or sequence of movements, a couple of centuries ago! The idea that there are alternative applications for bunkai is implicit in the writings of many of the great karateka; hell, look at this passage on this from Itosu's own writings in 1908:

There are many movements in karate. When you train, you must try to understand the aim of the movement and its application. You have to take into account all possible meanings and applications of the move. Each move can have many applications.​

.

(citation in Abernethy, Bunkai-jutsu: the Practical Application of Karate Kata, pp.44–45.) And you're saying that this `understanding' developed only in the enforced merger era? When the Kwans founders themselves had learned their MAs from karate instructors in Japan who traced their lineage directely to the man who wrote what I've just quoted above?


(iii)

The Tae Geuk poomse are so much than “recycled bits and pieces of the Pinan/Palgwes,” you clearly don’t have a full understanding of them, but why would you, you don’t spend any time studying them just criticizing them.

Again, you are attributing a statement to me I never made—a recurrent pattern in this discussion, I'm afraid. I did not criticize the Taegeuks. I said that they were recycled bits and pieces of earlier forms. I was speaking of their historical origins and expressed no value judgment; you attributed one to me with absolutely no justification. So perhaps we can be a bit more accurate about who said what, eh?

The analysis of the Taegeuks I alluded to is well supported in the de facto monograph that Simon O'Neil, who has probably studied their combat applications in more depth than anyone else, has produced in his series of Combat-TKD newletters, and which he has extended into a full-scale monograph. He explicitly notes that a a large number of the Taegeuk elements are straight out of the Pinans, or the Palgwes. A typical example is the seventh element of the first Taegeuk, Il Jang, which involves a lefthand rising block, followed by a right leg front kick and a simultaneous right lunge punch/right front stance. The sequence is a straight `steal', if you will, from Palgwe Ee Jang's first two moves, repeated several times through the hyung. Over and over again, the Taegeuks give you this same sense of deja-vu, for a very good reason: they recombine either individual techs or whole subsequences from earlier hyung sets or kata.

So far as the multiple applications `discovery' that you attribute to the merged Kwans under the WTF/KKW directorate, not only does this get the history wrong by something on the order of a century, as I observed earlier, based on familiar facts about the development of karate, but it also mistakenly attributes to the KKW a sophistication in the combat interpretation of the forms it imposes which is nowhere in evidence and has never been in evidence. Let's take this same sequence—lifted, as I noted, right out of Palgwe Ee Jang—and consider O'Neil's observations about the KKW's completely literal-minded `bunkai' for it:

The application is usually described as blocking a head height punch with the rising motion, then countering with a kick and a punch. In fact, this interpretation can be seen at the Kukkiwon website,where its impracticality becomes obvious. Firstly while the rising forearm could certainly be used to deflect a punch, the square-on body position and the retracted right hand leave the defender open to a second attack to the face or body, particularly since nothing is done to anticipate such an elementary followup. Second, although a conterattack using the foot or knee could be effective, a far more practical option would be to use the free right hand to strike or grab instead of attempting a kicking technique which leaves the defender unbalanced and vulnerable, given the range and the fact that the attacker has not in any way been incapacitated by the previous technique. Thirdly, it would be far more effective by punching to the face rather than the midsection, and to use the rear hand rather than the lead​

(Combat-TKD 3, pp. 4–5). O'Neil presents a vastly superior bunkai for this Taegeuk 1 (née Palgwe 2) subsequence in his November 2005 Taekwondo Times article `Kicking in self-defense: a practical reevaluation', pp.54–61. The key point is that, far from sponsoring anything like an in-depth examination of realistic applications for TKD forms based on the Okinawan/Japanese bunkai methods associated with the karate that the Kwan founders studied, the KKW offered, here and elsewhere, the most superficial interpretation imaginable. And this makes sense, given that the TKD directorate's agenda since Gen. Choi's fall has been, first, pursuit, and latterly preservation, of its Olympic status, and the promotion of TKD as a martial sport with only a distant relationship to combat effectiveness for CQ self-defense. This is how the KKW has preserved and developed the combat repertoire of the various Kwans it absorbed and digested?


This point leads to another part of my reply to your question about what's wrong with your post. You again jump to conclusions based on nothing in my actual post. I told you that in our dojang we do not perform the Taeeuks for belt tests; you conclude from this that I do not study the Taegeuks. Another major error of fact: I've studied the Taegeuks for several years, trying to understand their connection with the earlier MA forms they were clearly derived from. The fact that they don't form part of our colored belt syllabus doesn't mean that my instructor doesn't know them well, or their resemblance to these original forms; as a fifth-dan KKW certified teacher, he's well acquainted with them—which doesn't mean that he gives them anything like the same status as the earlier forms whose parts they echo in different combinations. Your assumption that because I don't grade on the Taegeuks I'm unfamiliar with their content has no foundation. But beyond this, I'm also aware of the rather nasty historical background behind the hurried replacement of the Palgwes by the Taegeuks, something that Master McLain's Gm. Kim Pyung Soo has shed considerable light on; I suggest, f2f, that you check out Master McLain's post here, post 3, from RMcL to Simon O'Neil, if you want to get a somewhat more historically accurate idea of just where the Taegeuks came from.

(iv)

Based on this and your numerous other posts, it is obvious that you have a bias against KKW TKD, one that stems from ignorance and arrogance.

Well, let's see...just to give you in summary form the list of problems with your post that you requested: you've ascribed wholesale ideas, opinions and beliefs to me that I have never expressed: you've arrived at conclusions about what I've studied that you cannot possibly justify based on what I've said; you've attributed the multiple-application architecture of TKD techniques to the WTF/KKW when the fact, ascertainable from the writings of major karateka going back to Itosu himself, is that it was Okinawan karate, the ancestor of TKD, which made this approach to forms a trademark; you've identified the origin of the Taegeuks as the result of disinterested, technically informed experimentation to help develop the art, apparently unaware of the sordid motives that actually prompted its hasty construction by committee; and you've provided no documentation or historical support for any of your points. You've made no substantive response to my previous reply to you; instead, you've complained that I criticized your post (though, again, you never address the bases of my criticism, including the false opinions you attribute to me)...and then, after all that, you label me `ignorant and arrogant'??

The fact is, the reason we're having this thread at all is to try to recover some of the fragments of the Kwan era knowledge that have more or less been obliterated by the homogenization of TKD by the Korean TKD directorate. The only access we have to that knowledge comes from the rapidly vanishing cohort of first-generation Kwan students, and from dojangs like my own and others (represented in some cases by owners, instructors and students on MT) which have rejected both the cookie-cutter curriculum that the KKW decrees for its affiliated schools and the promotion of Olympic competition as the inevitable and exclusive line of evolution for TKD, and instead have tried to maintain something of the old-school TKD that developed out of the Shotokan/Shudokan training and combat experience of the Kwan founders. Invoking the WTF/KKW as the preservers of the Kwan-era diversity of TKD practice is roughly on a par with arguing that the Academie Francaise deserves the credit, through an enlightened policy of promoting linguistic diversity, for the survival of French regional dialects.

 

[terryl965]

Exile you ask me to chime in so here I am and yes you and I have talk in person and alot on MT. You completely understand my views and the point I was trying to make about why I wish to stay out of this converstation about kwans and the uniques they all brought for the common good.

This has got to be the biggest joke statement I have ever made (common good) in who's mind my TKD as I was tought is a meer shadow of what it was. The states and Korea and all the other countries have made my TKD more of a kiddy show and a sport.

The uniqueness was all but forgotten between the trip from Korea to the landing here in the states.

I do not wish to really get into this but I will if needed. Remember I can explain if need be.

 

[exile]

Exile you ask me to chime in so here I am and yes you and I have talk in person and alot on MT. You completely understand my views and the point I was trying to make about why I wish to stay out of this converstation about kwans and the uniques they all brought for the common good.

This has got to be the biggest joke statement I have ever made (common good) in who's mind my TKD as I was tought is a meer shadow of what it was. The states and Korea and all the other countries have made my TKD more of a kiddy show and a sport.

The uniqueness was all but forgotten between the trip from Korea to the landing here in the states.

I do not wish to really get into this but I will if needed. Remember I can explain if need be.

Terry, thanks very much for the confirmation. The thing I was most concerned about was that I might be misrepresenting your views; I was pretty sure we were on the same page about all this (and I know that your own strong background in Okinawan karate as well as decades of training and teaching TKD give you a rather independent perspective on the karate-based arts). So I'm very glad that we do, as I thought, share the same outlook here. I didn't want to drag you into anything, but I wanted to make it clear I was ready to back down if I'd been presumptuous in attributing views to you you didn't hold... :asian:

 

[terryl965]

Terry, thanks very much for the confirmation. The thing I was most concerned about was that I might be misrepresenting your views; I was pretty sure we were on the same page about all this (and I know that your own strong background in Okinawan karate as well as decades of training and teaching TKD give you a rather independent perspective on the karate-based arts). So I'm very glad that we do, as I thought, share the same outlook here. I didn't want to drag you into anything, but I wanted to make it clear I was ready to back down if I'd been presumptuous in attributing views to you you didn't hold... :asian:

Bob as always you our on top of this as well as many other threads Thank you.
Terry

 

[exile]

Bob as always you our on top of this as well as many other threads Thank you.
Terry

Terry, thank you—your Twin Dragons dojang was one of the ones I had in mind specifically when I mentioned TKD schools which work out their own path, rather than slavishly following the Official Story imposed by TKD Central in Seoul. I was also thinking of matt m.'s and zDom's Moo Sul Kwan and other schools that seem to be trying to revive, or maintain, the old idea of a Kwan (as vs. being just a branch plant of the local WTF subfederation, or a McDojang that goes with whatever yields the biggest $$$). The complete, stand-alone TKD dojang, with a balanced, well-thought-out curriculum based on options for hard-core SD for those who want that, options for competition for those who want that, and options for overall fitness and intense physical training for those who want that, seems to me to be the logical North American model of TKD training for the future. Above all, the independence of the school. I very strongly suspect Iceman, who started this thread, fits very comfortably into this model. At one point, soon I suspect, there will be a very general agreement amongst school owners, instructors and their senior students that the Koreans have a vision of TKD which may suit their needs and national aspirations, but that there is absolutely nothing which entails that North Americans, Europeans or anyone else must buy into that particular national agenda.

I see the original Kwans as a common property, belonging not just to the Koreans (after all, the original five Kwan founders all learned their arts almost completely in other Asian countries), but to anyone who wants to absorb the MA lessons that those pioneers had to teach. That really is the reason why those of us on this thread are pursuing the OP topic, no?—to get a clearer sense of just what our `martial ancestors' knew, and thought important, and trained to accomplish.

They had been strangers in a strange land, almost certainly at times the object of their hosts' notorious ethnic contempt—Japan in the hyper-militaristic, rabidly nationalistic phase leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor would not have been a comfortable place for members of an officially `inferior' people, expatriates from an Occupied country, to be—but they stuck it out and came home with their black belts, some of them very high ranking, from Gichin Funakoshi's and Toyama Kanken's dojos. What we all want to know, I'd bet, is what it was they knew, how they viewed the karate they had learned, how they sought to improve their skill in it and become better at it, possibly by extending the art itself, not just their own abilities. That individual knowledge and perspective has been all but wiped out by the ongoing revisionism of the Korean TKD directorate (anyone remember the `memory hole' from Orwell's 1984?)—but not, I hope, beyond all recall....