'Korean karate': candor and denial

[exile]

As for GM Kims interview, I've read it over and over and GM Kim says Gen Choi brought up the Korean history but doesn't say that General Choi associated that to TKD.

I think further comment is superfluous, at this point...

Now can we please get back to the issue??

For example, here's a hypothesis, picking up on Errant's idea and some of the earlier posts... the advocates of a given Korean MA style will insist on linking it to a mythical ancient past to a degree of shamelessness corresponding to their location in the Korean MA institutional hierarchy.

This would I think apply correctly to both the top-dog KKW/WTF TKD (in his 1997 JAMA paper, referenced directly, Dakin Burdick cites a typically hair-raising abuse of the archæological material to this effect on the WTF website) and to TSD, banished from the realm with Hwang Kee as a consequence of his institutional quarrel with Gen. Choi; readers who want to see some of the not-very-nice details can find them in Burdick's 1997 article 'People and Events of Taekwondo's formative years', in Journal of Asian Martial Arts 6.1). The interesting test case here would be the official ITF line (or lines, given the fragmentation in the organization). I need to check on this.... more later.

OK—from their website:

On April 11th, 1955, the name Taekwon-Do was officially adopted for the martial art General Choi Hong Hi had developed using elements of the ancient Korean martial art of Taek Kyon and of Shotokan karate, a martial art he had learned while studying in Japan.​

So: more of the stuff about the `ancient' (= early 19th century) `Korean' (though in fact played in Japan as well, according to Stuart Culin's 1895 monograph on Korean games) `martial art' (though Son Duk Ki himself, in his book, identifies it as a village competition game, just as Culin characterized it more than a century ago when it was still being played, though it was already disappearing fast). But they also identify TKD as 'the martial art General Choi... had developed'. So, like the General, still having it both ways: ancient Korean roots, and his own personal invention, both.

I'm not sure how the hypothesis I've suggested above should be evaluated with respect to this particular origin myth... any thoughts?

 

[tellner]

tkd, whilst your opinions are as valid as anyone elses in a Net debate,

With all due respect I have to disagree.

His right to an opinion is undeniable. But when one opinion is supported by careful research, consistent logic and marshaled facts and the other is supported by wishful thinking and appeals to authority they do not have equal validity.

 

[jim777]

Regarding Jhoon Rhee's hyung I dont know anything about them unfortunately. Its not possible its another way of writing/pronouncing Dosan? Chang Hon forms have a Dosan, but according to Gen. Choi it is the pseudonym of the patriot Ahn Chong Ho (1876-1938) who devoted his entire life to furthering the education of Korea and its independence movement. Of course Choi didnt develop the form (but he may have named them, I dont know about this factor). Hold on, I'm gonna look in KBM's Chun Kuhn Do book, as there may be a reference to this Ahn Chong Ho...

I believe this is exactly the case. I have the Jhoon Rhee books (in front of me as I type), and his "To-San" is in fact the Dosan of the Chang H'on forms. The book by GM Rhee is "Tan-Gun and To-San of Tae Kwon Do Hyung", and they are the forms usually spelled Dangun and Dosan nowadays. GM Rhee notes about the pattern To-San "the name of the pattern commemorates the psuedonym of a great Korean patriot and educator An Ch'ang Ho (1876-1938)" on p67 of the book.

jim

 

[FieldDiscipline]

I believe this is exactly the case. I have the Jhoon Rhee books (in front of me as I type), and his "To-San" is in fact the Dosan of the Chang H'on forms. The book by GM Rhee is "Tan-Gun and To-San of Tae Kwon Do Hyung", and they are the forms usually spelled Dangun and Dosan nowadays. GM Rhee notes about the pattern To-San "the name of the pattern commemorates the psuedonym of a great Korean patriot and educator An Ch'ang Ho (1876-1938)" on p67 of the book.

jim

Nice one, thanks Jim. Back to the drawing board there I'm afraid then Exile.

 

[exile]

Nice one, thanks Jim. Back to the drawing board there I'm afraid then Exile.

Yeah, it's been looking that way... I suspect that the overlap in names is just coincidental, alas. What I find incredibly maddening and frustrating is the fact that the search protocols on Google make it so damned hard to find something called Tosan or To-San, without bringing San Francisco or whatever else into it. Putting " " around it doesn't help either. I'm sure there's information about it out there if one could follow the right search strategy, but this bloody punctuation blindness that afflicts Google makes it all but impossible to use in this kind of search...:angry:

 

[Tez3]

I tried google (UK one) got these.
http://groups.wfu.edu/Karate-Club/tosan.html

http://www.questia.com/googleSchola...KtLpCV3m5zfTms2Tq!1928075767?docId=5002423374

then this but you need to log in and get a pass word to access it.
http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/korean_studies/v025/25.1pak.pdf

I don't know if any of that any good at all.

 

[exile]

Hey, Tez, thanks for your efforts and legwork here. The Tosan alluded to in these vids/texts is a TKD hyung of the Joon Rhee flavor, named after a Korean patriot; but what FieldDiscipline was talking about is some kind of Korean MA, presumably indigenous, that Bok Man Kim is said to have studied, and we're trying to get a fix on what it is... without much luck so far, because it's almost impossible to Google it without the Google syntax protocol interpreting it as the English preposition to followed by the San of San Francisco or whatever. The likelihood is that the overlap with the hyung name, coming as it does from a Korean family name, is purely coincidental. So it looks like a dead end, and I've no idea (other than FD asking BMK himself, indirectly) how to go about getting more information...

 

[JT_the_Ninja]

You could try typing it as "dosan." Might also be spelled that way. A couple of the youtube vids seem to have it spelled that way, although I'm not one to say whether or not it's the same form without watching them all, since I don't know it.

 

[exile]

You could try typing it as "dosan." Might also be spelled that way. A couple of the youtube vids seem to have it spelled that way, although I'm not one to say whether or not it's the same form without watching them all, since I don't know it.

The problem is, we don't seem to be able to find any discussions of the KMA To-San/Dosan/?, as vs. the hyung name. And if you type in Dosan—even with no space!—you still get hits like '...TaekwonDO in SAN Clemente...' ...it's hopeless!

 

[cdunn]

The problem is, we don't seem to be able to find any discussions of the KMA To-San/Dosan/?, as vs. the hyung name. And if you type in Dosan—even with no space!—you still get hits like '...TaekwonDO in SAN Clemente...' ...it's hopeless!

Prefix a word with - to apply the NOT modifier. For example "Dosan martial art -Francisco -Jose -Clemente -Juan -Diego -Antonio -Marcos" is reaping a great deal of information about the hyung, but not very much about the martial art. If you have to, use the 'Advanced Search' link on the google main page as a force multiplier for your google-fu techniques. I also suggest finger tip pushups.

Also, returning to original topic, I would expect that the relative lack of denial about the roots of the MDK-TSD come from a handful of factors that are unique to the MDK among the Kwans.

First, the final admission of Hwang Kee as to the source of his hyung, and the retention of those hyung. When I can walk into a Shito ryu or Shotokan dojo and do Naihanchi or Pinan with them step for step and stay 80+% in sync with them, we have to wonder if the roots are the same.

Second, the rejection of unification under Choi's banner, plus the Kwan Jang Nim's staunch resistance of the political factors combined with the diaspora of early dan without (much of) a governing body left very little way to shove something like the Taeguk or the Palgwe through to confuse the first.

Finally, I know I was straight up told when I started that it was a syncretic art, part Karate, part taekkyon, part kung fu. When it's just one part of many, who cares? The synthesized product is wholly the Kwan Jang Nim's.

 

[exile]

Prefix a word with - to apply the NOT modifier. For example "Dosan martial art -Francisco -Jose -Clemente -Juan -Diego -Antonio -Marcos" is reaping a great deal of information about the hyung, but not very much about the martial art. If you have to, use the 'Advanced Search' link on the google main page as a force multiplier for your google-fu techniques. I also suggest finger tip pushups.

Also, returning to original topic, I would expect that the relative lack of denial about the roots of the MDK-TSD come from a handful of factors that are unique to the MDK among the Kwans.

First, the final admission of Hwang Kee as to the source of his hyung, and the retention of those hyung. When I can walk into a Shito ryu or Shotokan dojo and do Naihanchi or Pinan with them step for step and stay 80+% in sync with them, we have to wonder if the roots are the same.

Second, the rejection of unification under Choi's banner, plus the Kwan Jang Nim's staunch resistance of the political factors combined with the diaspora of early dan without (much of) a governing body left very little way to shove something like the Taeguk or the Palgwe through to confuse the first.


Finally, I know I was straight up told when I started that it was a syncretic art, part Karate, part taekkyon, part kung fu. When it's just one part of many, who cares? The synthesized product is wholly the Kwan Jang Nim's.

Much obliged, cd. The bolded part is especially to the point. A good deal of the ROK's effort to promote Korean nationalism through its sports/MA operations involved, as Eric Madis shows in his brilliant recent paper, 'The evolution of Taekwondo from Japanese karate', a conscious and deliberate effort to erase the connection between TKD and its karate origins by 'marginalizing dissent, supporting unification with financial and political incentives, and inventing history and traditions' (in Martial Arts in the Modern World, ed. by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth, Westport, Conn./London, UK, 2003). Part of the creation of this spurious `revised history that claimed a 2,000 year, indigenous Korean heritage while obscuring the art's true origins in Japanese karate' was the systematic suppression of the hyungs linking TKD to those origins. Clearly, one of the benefits of exile is that you're no longer under the thumb of any repressive institution or regime you left at home. So in a way, it does make perfect sense to see so much more of that candor I referred to in my original post showing up in TSD, which has become, I'd say, very much an expatriate KMA. The fact that you learned Naihanchi, Bassai and the other forms in the first place—that that was part of your curriculum—was really only possible because of HK's fight to keep the MDK independent of the unification (imposed, as Madis shows, by strongarm carrot-and-stick methods during the Rhee and especially Park military dictatorships) and his eventually, pretty much forced relocation outside the country.

 

[tkd1964]

I've been wondering about this for quite a while: while it's not unusual for Tang Soo Do people to refer to their art as Korean karate, anyone who does that within Taekwondo is almost certainly going to get a line of flak from representatives of the Korean TKD directorate, or what Lenin would have referred to as their 'useful idiots' in the West, that TKD is a purely Korean art, has no substantial debt to Shotokan or other Japanese karate styles, and represents a significantly different fighting system from karate.



You'd think, given HK's own clear, conscious rejection of what he knew to be true—the Japanese origins of his own 'core' hyungs—that TSD culture would have developed the nationalist mythology of TKD's 'ancient Korean' origins to a much greater degree than TKD (after all, Song Moo Kwan is an almost literal translation of Shotokan—how much more candid can you get??) .

Sorry Exile, but I had to say this. Look at the monicre for Tang Soo Do at the top of the page. I just think it's funny. :roflmao:
Sorry, back to being serious now.

Mike

 

[exile]

Sorry Exile, but I had to say this. Look at the monicre for Tang Soo Do at the top of the page. I just think it's funny. :roflmao:
Sorry, back to being serious now.

Mike

Actually, there's a story about that... check with Upnorthkyosa for the scoop. Here's a clue: check out the heading for the Superior Tangsoodo sponsored forum (which is Upnorth's dojang) and, um, compare the two... :wink1:

 

[SageGhost83]

.....Well, I was seriously thinking about chiming in about the whole GM Kim and Gen. Choi thing, but Exile good buddy, you pretty much nailed it again. Being familiar with the formation of our art and the environment that it was forged in is one of the reasons why we just don't go along with the party line in Korea. Yes, it is a cool story, and yes, there are many people who blindly adhere to it because, well, it is cool to be connected to the Korean Samurai-like Hwarang through such a story :wink1::lol:. However, when so much careful, thoroughly researched, painstakingly peer reviewed information has been presented to the contrary, it seems just a tad bit silly to continue defending the party line with little more than appeals to authority.

Well, on to more important issues - I think that the brutal, repressive nature of the government at the time coupled with the almost street gang like nature of the kwan era may explain why Koreans hold the party line - there may have literally been a real life threat of being executed for going against that party line and presenting the truth. So that would make the motivation for continuing to deny the roots of the art and buying into the fabricated origins not just nationalist, but also fear-based. Thankfully, things are changing and the TKD community is slowly, if stubbornly, accepting the truth about our art's origins. The TKD community is also realizing that accepting the truth doesn't make TKD any less awesome :bangahead:.

 

[StuartA]

That's not what the denial in question consists of. If Stuart's recollection is correct, he most definitely did deny his karate links in his final Combat interview. I am attempting to locate microfische records of the journal and expect to be able to turn it up in the next little while, and then we shall see, eh?

If you ever come across these or anyone has the original copies I will try to gain permission to (re)publish them in a future volume. I am gutted I couldnt do it for Vol 1, but alas thats how life transpired. I moved many years ago and boxed them up (all my years of martial art mags - hundreds of them), as I moved into a flat I asked a friend to store them in the loft of his (then new) house, many years later, whilst he was away on business his wife decided to do a clear out. As he hadnt done martial arts for a number of years she must had presumed they were his, taking up space and off they went

That said I do clearly recall the shift of acknowledgement as I found it strange each time I read a new interview.. hence it stuck with me. If I wasnt sure I wouldnt have mentioned it in the book as there are other things I heard that Im not 100% on and hence didnt put them in print.

Maybe, just maybe Combat magazine stores computerized copies of them (the interviews).. I doubt they do after all these years but I will ask if I ever get the chance.

Stuart