Hi Terry---really, my comment was just an aside in this thread; I'm responding to your query, but I don't want the orignal question that started the thread to be derailed. All I was getting at is that the core techniques of TKD, as reflected in the poomsae, are essentially the same as those of the karate styles that the original kwan founders brought back from Japan with them. Lee Won Kuk (Chung Do Kwan founder), Ro Pyong Chik (Song Moo Kwan) ,Yoon Pyung In, (Chang Moo Kwan founder), General Choi Hong Hi (Oh Do Kwan founder and main propagator of TKD as a military combat system) and others learned Karate in Japan and brought it back to Korea; Hwang Kee (Moo Duk Kwan founder) build his hyungs around Itosu's katas, especially the Pinan forms, and so on. S. Henry Cho's 1968 classic manual simply identifies Taekwondo as Korean karate---the local adaptation in Korea of the fighting strategies and techniques that grew out of the Okinawan synthesis of Chinese combat systems with local fighting methods, travelled to Japan with Funakoshi and others, and then to Korea where it developed its own local character---but still, as Cho insists, essentially Karate. It's become something of a cliche that there are Korean striking arts which actually identify themselves as karate by the names their founder gave them---Tang Soo Do and Kong Soo Do (differing by how Japanese `kara' is translated), and so on. We even have two different Moo Duk Kwan martial arts, one calling itself TKD and one calling itself by one of those Korean translations of `karate', but so far as I know---I could be very wrong on this, IGWS---they are technically essentially the same, at least the way Richard Chun presents MDK in his books. I know there are people who disagree with this assessment of TKD; my comment was just based on the content of the TKD hyungs, which, even after the Pinans were replaced by the Palgwes and the Palgwes by the Taegeuks in the colored belt series, still contain huge chunks of the original Okinawan/Japanese technique sequences---and, as Simon O'Neil strongly argues, have essentially parallel bunkai (or whatever the appropriate Korean translation of this word in this sense would be).
That's really all I was getting at---that there is a very strong case to be made that the core technical content of TKD puts it in comfortably in family of closely related fighting systems that go by the name karate, but that there are Korean variants, distinct from Okinawan (which has its own notable variants), and Japanese (same again). I myself was curious to know what was the particular aspect of the difference between TKD and Okinawan karate that the guy you mentioned in your first post picked up on?
Does this get at what you were asking?
