All right, let's get back to this.
Exile,
I have watched repeated footage of Taekkyon practitioners on Youtube (I don't live in Korea so it's the closest I can get), and all of them do the things you claim Taekkyon doesn't do (high kicks, jumping, jump spinning etc.).Maybe it is you, with your "research", who is mistaken. Don't ask me how Taekwondo, with its supposed Shotokan roots, got a hold of these techniques. Maybe the truth isn't as cut and dried as you'd like to think. I just know what my eyes saw. Maybe Taekkyon wasn't as dead as people thought. If it were dead, it wouldn't be on Youtube showing techniques I see in modern Taekwondo.
According to Song Duk Ki, the man declared a Living Cultural Asset in 1987 by the Korean government for essentially
single-handedly preserving the old 19th century folk game of taekkyon—
as he himself identifies it explicitly in his book (see the page references given in the link I gave you)—there were only three or four people in all at the time of his one-man performance in front of Syngman Rhee in 1958 who knew taekyon.
He couldn't find anyone to demonstrate with. There were a grand total of ten or so earlier in the 20th century. At the time of the Rhee demonstration, there were hundreds of TKD dojangs in Korea, and kicks had been getting steadily higher from the early days of the post-Occupation. On the basis of
what? A village folk competition (this is from SDK himself, remember?) in which, according to SDK's chief student and Chairman of the Taekyon Research Association Lee Yong-bak (quoted in Young 1993 from a recorded personal interview with LYB), the primary kicking techs in
traditional taekyon were low attacks on the opponent's knees and feet)?? And if, between 1958 and the middle of the first decade of the 2ist century, we suddenly see an influx of techniques that look very much like that of the dominant Korean MAs, huge even at a time when taekkyon was on the verge of extinction, and now probably the most practiced MA in the world, you are going to say that the presence of those high, spinning TKD-like kicks in taekkyon is—contrary to what the last practitioners of traditional taekyon say about it—the
source those high kicks in a MA that grew explosively on Korean soil after the Kwan founders returned from Japan?
Think again about what those modern taekyon videos you're looking at contain. There are four possibilities that are each compatible with the kicks those videos display:
(i) TKD got its kicks from modern taekyon;
(ii) modern taekyon got its kicks from TKD;
(iii) both modern taekyon and TKD independently invented those kicks;
(iv) modern taekyon and TKD got their high kicks from some third source, possibly different in each of the two cases.
All four possibilities are combatible with what you're seeing on those videos. So the fact that they're on those videos cannot by itself determine which of (i)–(iv) is correct. We need additional facts. In the link I posted, and in the brief, incomplete summary I gave a couple of paragraphs back, the documented facts are almost impossible to square with (i), given what the taekyon pioneers from the early 20th century themselves say about their art, in their own books and personal interviews. (iii) is possible, but given the enormous prestige and influence of TKD and the relatively marginal status of taekyon on the current KMA scene, just how plausible is that? And in the case of (iv), we have no candidates, none, for the mysteriously missing sources of the kicks in both taekyon and TKD independently. (ii) has all the facts, and all the plausibility, going for it. So why on earth would you conclude that (i), which has to contradict the testimony of the taekyon pioneers themselves, must be the answer?? And I also cannot figure out why you put the word
research in scare quotes, when what I've cited is the currently best-vetted assembly of facts, and careful informed analysis of them, in the whole KMA historical literature, and hinges largely on the testimony of Song Duk-ki himself, and his own senior students.
As for Koryo, it reflects how the Koreans perceive self defense and their approach to technique.[It is not a "mistranslation" of Empi and not intended to be.
YM... I'm just shaking my head, and, I have to say, your credibility just took a major hit. I never said that Empi and Koryo were related in any way. I said that the
Eunbi hyung was derived from the Okinawan Kata
Empi, that its name is a literal transliteration, and that hyung itself is virtually identical to Empi except that in Eunbi the abdominal knee strikes of Empi have been converted to high kicks
without any concomittant changes in the rest of the Empi-->Eunbi translation. Got that? And the reason I brought that up was because the same translation rule that applied to the original Okinawan Empi to produce Eunbi seems to have been applied in the
judging practice in the Koryo performances that Terry was complaining about. Do you understand? I said, I think quite clearly, that in effect
the judges are doing the same thing in evaluating the Koryo standard that was done by the Kwan instructors to the Empi standard when this was incorporated into the TKD hyung set as Eunbi. Do you see how totally off the mark your version of what I was saying was, sheerly in terms of what I had actually said, on the one hand, and what you turned that into, on the other?
It is what it is. You seriously think techniques in the form would not have been changed had they been thought ineffective? Give the Koreans a little credit. It is not supposed to be a "translation" of a Japanese form. It is a Korean form with its own merits and weaknesses, as is any form. It also undergoes changes to make it better.
Now do you see how absurd this whole passage reads? Eunbi is, completely, a translation of an originally Okinawan form, Empi, whose name was retained subject to the usual pronunciation changes; we learn it in my Song Moo Kwan lineage because a
lot of Okinawan forms were incorporated, and passed down via the Shotokan connection—Byung Jik Ro was a fourth dan under Funakoshi—into the SMK that BJR founded. We do the Pinans, we do Rohai and several other classic kata in their TKDified versions. Of
course Koryo isn't a translation analogue of Empi, or any other kata.
Who ever said it was???
And now maybe you should note something about what Terry's actual complaint was: he was objecting because his students are penalized by the judges for performing Koryo according to the WTF standard, because the
judges want to see high kicks. The WTF hasn't changed the standard. The KKW hasn't changed the standard.
The judges simply want to see high kicks instead of mid kicks even though the latter are in the description standard for the Koryo hyung. Do you see? Application, bunkai, boon hae,
none of that is relevant; the judges want to see high kicking even though the specs themselves do not sanction those kicks as high kicks!
I'm just baffled at the number of ways you've managed to misconstrue what Terry was saying, what I was saying...
) that I was saying that Koryo was the Koreanization of Empi (whereas you can clearly see, I think, that I was saying that Eunbi is the descendent). And Eunbi does not have side kicks, at least the version I learned. So what you're asking YM for would have to apply instead to Koryo: 'what is the SD function of the high side kicks, as Terry described it, in the judges' preferences for Koryo performance?'
