Real Tae Kwon Do

[Twin Fist]

"if you are not doing KKW TKD, you are not doing TKD" isnt a fact.

WOW!!! You have been doing TKD since 1959? You ROCK!!...BTW...I love how you keep using that single phrase, that I posted without ever putting up my follow up. Nice spinning. I know I know...I'm a horrible person for putting up facts. BTW..have you ever spoken to GM Rhee on his whole take on it? I would be interested in hearing his thoughts about it all.

 

[miguksaram]

"if you are not doing KKW TKD, you are not doing TKD" isnt a fact.

Again...why not put up my follow up to that comment where I corrected myself on the statement that I made?

Also, you didn't answer my question. Did you ever speak with GM Rhee about his thoughts on this?

 

[BrandonLucas]

Isn't all of this in-fighting what we're supposed to be preventing?

 

[miguksaram]

"if you are not doing KKW TKD, you are not doing TKD" isnt a fact.

Here was my follow up to that statement since you keep bringing it into record, let's set the record straight on my views

Ok, allow me to take another shot of this sans cold medicine, because after reading what I wrote, it doesn't make sense to me either. (Not to say what I'm about to write is going to be better).

All the kwans existed prior to the building of KKW and prior to the development of taekwondo. Do we agree on this?

Kwan leaders got together to work towards developing a unified art called taekwondo. Prior to 1961 none of them called what they were learning or teaching taekwondo. Would you say this is correct?

After they banded together they formed the KTA to which they worked to developing a formalized system for dan promotions (1962). To which this was the standard used:

2nd Dan forms: Balhan Hyung Dae, Chul Ki E Dan Hyung (Chul Ki #2), Naebojin E Dan Hyung (Naebojin #2), Kima E Dan Hyung (Kima #2), Choong Moo Hyung.

3rd Dan forms: Ship Su Hyung, Pal Sae Hyung, Yon Bi Hyung, Dan Kwon Kyung, No Pae Hyung, Ge Baek Hyung, Ul Ji Hyung.

4th Dan forms: Chul Ki Sam Dan Hyung (Chul Ki #3), Naebojin Sam Dan Hyung (Naebojin #3), Kima Sam Dan Hyung (Kima #3), Ja Un Hyung, Jin Soo Hyun, Am Hak Hyung, Jin Dong Hyung, Sam Il Hyung, Jang Kwon Hyung.

5th Dan forms: Kong Sang Kun Hyung, Kwan Kong Hyung, Oh Ship Sa Hyung, Ship Sam Hyung, Ban Wol Hyung, Pal Ki Kwon Hyung.

The kwans did exist still but were now rectifying their curriculums to meet the requirements that was set by the board. Now let's fast forward 10 years to 1971. It was at this time they talked about restructuring teaching methods as well as allowing members to transfer from one kwan to another (not a popular idea). So yes, the kwans still exisited and yes they had their own teaching methods along with a standard curriculum agreed upon earlier. Slightly prior to that KKW was built. This main purpose was to be a centralized dojang for educational training and testing for dan ranks and "to promote Taekwondo as a means of general exercise for the benefit of public health as well as to spread Taekwondo as a symbol of Korea and its traditions." (Modern History of TKD).

In 1976 the KTA worked in unifying the Kwans. Prior to this they already unified 40 Kwans into 9 Kwans. In 1978 all kwans agreed to the elimination of the Kwan concept and band together as one Taekwondo. Since 1972 they already had a standardized teminology and poomse curriculum so this was the final step in making one TKD.

So this is what I mean by saying if you were not following the standards set forth by the KKW, that you were not doing TKD. These were the standards agreed upon by the kwan leaders to be the core curriuculum of their concept of TKD. I figured since they were the leaders and our masters/teachers then their concept would be the correct one since they were the ones who had a say in the development.

If you adhere to the original teachings of GM Yoon, Byung-in as he taught them back in 1946, then I'm sorry, but that is not taekwondo. That is karate, that is what he learned, that is what he taught. If you studied Chang Moo Kwan (or any kwan method) as it was taught after 1962, then yes, that is taekwondo and I apologize for saying otherwise. I hope this better explains my point of view.

 

[miguksaram]

Isn't all of this in-fighting what we're supposed to be preventing?

I am not fighting with anyone, I'm debating. I don't get heated or upset at my screen at all. I don't consider anyone an enemy on this forum. In fact if TF was in my area, I'd take him to go have a beer...or coffee...or whatever he would like to drink if he was willing. Though I am only good for one or two rounds.

If anything these types of things help me read more about my history on both sides so I can figure out what is right or wrong. So again, I don't feel like I am fighting and I hope the feeling is mutual with others. If not...well...seriously...not my problem.

 

[zeeberex]

Brandon, I think a lot has to do with who taught you. Mainsteam TKD is very, very sport oriented. This is disconnect is driven from the top down by the big orgs because old sckool SD based curricula bring no sponsorship dollars. For a student in a typical dojang, there is little perceivedbenefit to paying heed to the older practitioners. Even older tournament champions, because the rule set has evolved such that an older champ's competition style will be old school. For example, my GM is a 1992 Korean national champion who tells us to do everything that Olympic players nowadays don't do, such as keeping your guard up when you spar, guarding your groin when you kick high, effective punching, and lots of it, and to handle yourself more as if you were in an actual fight.

So long as the big orgs are sport focused (read sponsorship dollars focused) and SD is deemphasized, the new school players have little to gain from the old timers. Well, until they find out that they have no SD when they really need it and that the blackbelt they were given when they were twelve was pretty much purchassed to enable them to compete in USAT events.

So in short, being new generation depends more on your lineage and training than your actual time in grade from my perspective.

Daniel

I'm glad you added that last bit, they have nothing to learn until they try to use the sporty stuff in a real situation and get their asses handed to them.

 

[exile]

I am not fighting with anyone, I'm debating. I don't get heated or upset at my screen at all. I don't consider anyone an enemy on this forum. In fact if TF was in my area, I'd take him to go have a beer...or coffee...or whatever he would like to drink if he was willing. Though I am only good for one or two rounds.

If anything these types of things help me read more about my history on both sides so I can figure out what is right or wrong. So again, I don't feel like I am fighting and I hope the feeling is mutual with others. If not...well...seriously...not my problem.

I agree, there shouldn't be any personal animus or demonizing of our conversation partners on this forum. I'm assuming goodwill, intellectual curiosity, open-mindedness and technical knowledge on all sides here. The history of TKD is murky and complex, and there's plenty that reasonable people can disagree about. As long as we can each provide factual evidence and rational argument to support our positions, I see nothing wrong with even intense disagreement.

Right now, what I want to do is question two things that miguksaram brought up:

(1) the degree to which the Kwan unification that gave rise to a number of organizational and curriculum changes in Korea ultimately culminating in the KKW was 'voluntary', in a sense that we would find normal, and

(2) the suitabilty of the typewriter vs. computer analogy that m. raised earlier, bearing in mind that an illustration or comparison can be vivid and effective, but that it may well be based on assuming a certain position as correct which is, in fact, under serious debate. More on this later...

So far as the voluntary nature of the Kwan 'synthesis' that miguksaram alludes to, I believe that there are plenty of grounds for reasonable skepticism. Post-war Korea was run by a series of extremely brutal, heavy-handed military dictators with definite ideas about how the MAs in the ROK should be organized. Surely we haven't forgotten how in 1947 Yun Cae, the director of the dreaded State Police, pressured Lee Won-kuk to 'deliver' the 5,000 or so members of the Chung Do Kwan to the Korean Liberal Party that Rhee had founded. After Lee, in his own words, 'politely declined' the office, guess what happened? If you answered, 'was accused of being a pro-Japanese terrorist', go to the head of the class—it happened, and the followup was that Lee and his wife and a number of CDK senior black belts were arrested and held in detention for three years. No one, I imagine, will be surprised to learn that shortly after his release in 1950, Lee left Korea for Japan. No one following this fairly dramatic exercise in high-profile bullying could mistake the interest Rhee had in 'recruiting' highly trained hand-to-hand combat experts into his own faction—certainly not Lee himself, who is on record as voicing his suspicions about the political use that Rhee hoped to make of such a formidable 'palace guard'.

And this was this same Rhee who in 1954, after watching Gen. Choi's right-hand man Nam Tae-hi break several deep stacks of roofing tiles and give other evidence of his considerable technical expertise, decided that the ROK military as a whole would be trained in the arts he had witnessed and demanded a unified curriculum planned jointly by the Kwan leaders to serve as the basis for mass troop instruction. That was the occasion for the 1955 committee meeting called by (the militarily high ranked and politically favored) Choi to devise both a name and a standardized program of instruction for a unitary Korean MA which both Choi and Song Duk-son claimed to have named 'Takewondo'.

Given the fairly savage methods of ensuring compliance that Rhee's secret police had already brought to bear on the MA community, targetting one of its most highly regarded senior leaders and forcing him in effect to emigrate, I have to say I'm extremely skeptical that anything that happened under the Rhee and Park regimes, with General Choi himself given a largely free hand for much of that period to centralize power and control over the Korean MA world, could be fairly labelled 'voluntary'. With the example of Lee Won-kuk in front of you, would you have insisted on remaining outside of the unification that the ROK's military bosses were so obviously insisting on? We know of one who did—Hwang Kee—and we also know that he was threatened and harassed at every turn, that his home was mysteriously burned down during a period when he was fighting Choi, the ROK's chosen 'unifier', to maintain the independence of the Moo Duk Kwan. As Eric Madis in his terrific state-of-the-art article on the modern history of TKD, 'The evolution of Taekwondo from Japanese Karate' (in Martial Arts in the Modern World, T. Green and J. Svinth, eds., 2003, Praeger Books) notes of an only slightly later period than the famous 'unity' meeting,

In February 1971, the Korean Ministry of Education issued a requirement that all taekwondo schools have private school permits, thereby subjecting them to government regulation... With this, recalcitrant kwan leaders could be punished for retaining Japanese karate-based art names, and for refusing to comply with government standards and policies. Standard punishments included media blacklists, suppression of kwan publications, the inability to renew teaching contracts at educational institutions (particularly military and police academies), problems obtaining passports, threats of imprisonment, and assassination attempts.​

(p. 204). And it was this same year, 1971, that the ROK military dictatorship established the Kukkiwon.

In view of this relentlessly oppressive intervention by a ruthless military state playing hardball as dirty as any of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe during the Iron Curtain era, I think there's a hell of a burden of proof on the claim that anything the kwan leaders did, particular when it involved giving up their own autonomy, was voluntary. Again, this is a historical argument, not a mathematical proof. But I think the description 'voluntary' is going to be pretty hard to defend, against that historical background.

And so far as the typewriter/computer comparison... it really does beg the question, I think, because it's only valid on the assumption that the KKW's TKD had the same objectives as the kwan era's TKD, but used a vastly better conceptual/technical/technological basis—that it was a much better machine for doing the same thing. But that's precisely what's in dispute. Those of us whose allegiance is to an earlier avatar of TKD would say that that version of TKD was primarily oriented toward structured, effective street defense in a dangerous, largely lawless era, while the KKW's objectives are the promotion of a highly specialized athletic application of martial movements based on the earlier TKD, for purposes of point scoring. Put this way, it's clear that the purposes of the two are radically different—and if that's true, then the typewriter/computer analogy really doesn't hold.

 

[zeeberex]

If you have children black belts then your school is not a minority, but very much part of the majority. So I guess you should be telling your instructor he's a knuckle head for having kid black belts.

If they are younger than a given reasonable age, yes, yes you should.

 

[BanannaSmoothie]

If you have children black belts then your school is not a minority, but very much part of the majority. So I guess you should be telling your instructor he's a knuckle head for having kid black belts.

yes, i realize that preteen blackbelts are the status quo, but i was talking about the quality of training that the highschool aged and up recieve. even the kids who i wouldn't belt, still get solid training. they are just promoted at to young of an age.

 

[Twin Fist]

you are right, After you posted your "if it isnt KKW, it isnt TKD" statement, i pretty much put you on ignore.

So I didnt see your follow up.

 

[Daniel Sullivan]

Those of us whose allegiance is to an earlier avatar of TKD would say that that version of TKD was primarily oriented toward structured, effective street defense in a dangerous, largely lawless era, while the KKW's objectives are the promotion of a highly specialized athletic application of martial movements based on the earlier TKD, for purposes of point scoring.

And this highly specialized athletic application is what you see in the majority of taekwondo schools, KKW or not. Hey, it isn't like nobody else noticed that there was much more money to be made with point fighting and sport TKD than there is to be with strict SD. And now, nearly thirty eight years on, the divide between SD and sport is so great that practitioners of one have little, if anything, in common with practitioners of the other.

Top it off with this: most schools aren't good enough to field a competative team in sports or to teach truly effective SD, so they go for a bit of sport and a bit of SD and mostly just fitness and confidence building with lots of programs and clubs to make things profitable. The students really can't defend themselves and they really have no shot of being competative beyond the local level, if even that. And this is the training the vast majority of taekwondo practitioners come from.

Because of this, the really believe that they know SD to such an extent that an old timer's advice is unwelcome. After all, they don't attend a sport only school. And they're a black belt! They blow off old timers who's yellow belts could destroy them without ever knowing it. The old timers' students know that they have a sweet deal (and real deal) and aren't going anywhere, so the old timer writes off the young BB and continues on, even less likely to befriend the younger generation. And with good reason.

The young BB either goes on to non MA things or opens his own McDojo and teaches what he was taught. But now, he's beyond question because he's a "master." He never finds out just how lacking his training is.... or he gets killed trying to actually use it to defend himself against a fifteen year old gangbanger armed with a sharpened screwdriver.

Daniel

 

[YoungMan]

There's a difference between having disagreements with certain organizations on training philosophy, and totally blowing them off as worthless when you don't even belong to them as Twin Fist does. Obviously the Kukkiwon has some merit or it wouldn't have lasted this long and have how many millions of members.
I have disagreements with aspects of ITF training, but I don't blow them off. If someone wants to train ITF that's their right if it makes them happy. I certainly wouldn't call them evil. That is a mark of immaturity and lack of wisdom, not befitting someone who claims to practice Taekwondo.

 

[Miles]

the KKW and the WTF

thats the source of all the evil in TKD

the want to re-write history and anyone that follows something PRE KKW is the enemy

You are certainly entitled to your own opinion, no matter how misinformed and extreme it may be.

The KKW is interested in furthering TKD and promoting peace by standardizing instruction and techniques. It publishes written and visual material for those who can't go to Korea and conducts instructor classes for those who can. I don't see how it could possibly considered evil. Was the medical school Dr. Josef Mengele graduated from evil?

The WTF is a sports organization-if you don't care for the game, don't play it. I don't play golf but still don't think the PGA is evil.

TKD in Korea was and continues to be a group effort. As such, no person was given total credit. There are no enemies, just friends we have not met.

Please keep your mind open and see the wonderful art which is TKD, regardless of your flavor/style.

 

[Miles]

My TKD comes from Jhoon Rhee. 1959.

WAY before the KKW was even a glimmer in someone's eye. So yes, MY TKD is in fact the ORIGINAL TKD

Cool! GM Jhoon Rhee was one of the first 16 Chung Do Kwan graduates. His senior, GM Woon Kyu Uhm, has been instrumental in the creation of the Korea TKD Association, and the Kukkiwon. GM Uhm has been President of the Chung Do Kwan since 1959. I would think that GM Rhee would agree that his senior GM Uhm knows TKD.

 

[Miles]

I gotta say, I'm pretty cynical about the way the ROK has basically defined all TKD except its 'current model' as non-TKD—as though it were a brand name that the current management of the Korean TKD directorate owned the rights to. I understand why they want to do it—who wouldn't try, in their situation?—but I see no historical justification whatever for it.

Exile, please point to where "the ROK has basically defined all TKD except its 'current model' as non-TKD."

Just take the name itself. 'Taekwondo' was due, by general agreement, to one of two people: General Choi or Gm. Song Duk Son. And neither of them wound up associated with the KKW.

Neither of whom were involved in the development of the KKW having created their own private organizations by 1972. Since they had their own organizations and felt no need to be associated, they did not. I am
sure if either had desired to be associated, they would have been welcomed.

By what right, one wonders, did the WTF decide that it owned the name?

Exile, please provide the source for your assertion that the WTF decided it owned the name? Was there a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in the US much like the Moo Duk Kwan is alleged to have done?

So far as I can see, there are many different TKDs, including a whole gang of different styles, corresponding to the different Kwan specializations, before the KKW came into existence. And there is Kukki TKD as well. And WTA TKD as well. And ITF TKD. And so on, and on. They're all TKD. Shito-ryu, Shuri-te, Isshin-ryu, Goju-ryu, Wadu-ryu, Kyokuskin, Shotokan, and all the rest... they're all karate, no? Why should TKD be any different? Where is the contradiction in having many different versions of a single overarching idea?

Totally agree! There are many different ways up the mountain. There is no contradiction in having many different versions of a single overarching idea (IMHO)

 

[Miles]

Is there such a thing really, are most of us old timers being looked upon as a dinosour in the Art we love. Why is it in other styles people with thirty forty years of dedication is looked upon has great people but in TKD it is who you know and not what you know. I would like to have a decussion about the oldtimers that have been farwned upon by the youth of TKD.

OK, now I'll get off my soapbox.

Is there Real TKD? Absolutely.

Terry, like you, I have spent darn near my entire life training in TKD. In a little over a week, I will have been a black belt for 31 years. I am not a dinosaur. I am just a guy who enjoys donning the dobok and kicking people and targets around the mat. I don't know of anyone who has frowned upon me or anyone else who has dedicated their lives to TKD. In fact, I have the pleasure of spending a lot of time working with young Taekwondoin in and outside my own dojang and have met with no disrespect. I have faith in younger people, they just need to be shown the right way.

 

[exile]

Exile, please point to where "the ROK has basically defined all TKD except its 'current model' as non-TKD."

This is a kind of vexed point. I am thinking here of KKW histories of the art which I've read which simply ignore the contributions of Choi and other dissidents—these people, many of them pioneers, are what Orwell's 1984 totalitarian state referred to as 'unpersons'—and refer to TKD as though it were nothing more than the evolutionary outcome of KKW planning from the moment the KKW was organized. See below...

Neither of whom were involved in the development of the KKW having created their own private organizations by 1972. Since they had their own organizations and felt no need to be associated, they did not. I am sure if either had desired to be associated, they would have been welcomed.

Miles, I wasn't referring to association with the KKW. I was referring to the fact that the name of the art, TKD, created by people who have gone their dramatically separate ways from the KKW, is used by the KKW in their histories and descriptions of the current state of the art to characterize only the KKW version of it. I take the grotesquely fabricated 'history' of TKD here, at the official KKW website, to be a typical example; I'm thinking specifically of the presentation of the 'modern' history of TKD (we won't get into the utter ********, discredited by the last two decades of careful historical research by actual historians, as opposed to propaganda by shills for the Korean TKD directorate, that appears in the earlier self-parodying sections on 'ancient' Korean martial arts and their relation TKD, or the invocation of Song-Duk Ki, whose connection to modern TKD are, according to the modern Taekkyon people, zilch. And I can give you plenty of references on this point if you want them). This is by no means the most extreme example of the kind of historicized propaganda I've read coming out of the KKW. And there are many KKW partisans who have, at one time or another, taken the position that TKD properly denotes what the KKW says it does.

Exile, please provide the source for your assertion that the WTF decided it owned the name? Was there a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in the US much like the Moo Duk Kwan is alleged to have done?

No: again, I'm referring to a number of different 'official histories of TKD'—of TKD, not the KKW—that I've read under the KKW imprimatur, which simply omit reference to the existence of any TKD except the KKW variety. There have been many such histories that I've seen, similar to the one I've pointed you to but still worse, and I'll try to dig up a few more of them, but they all constitute a kind of official story in which non-KKW variants have simply been written out of the historical record. To me, this constitutes a kind of denial of the diversity within TKD, as an organizational tactic. Remember, I referred to the ROK in the first instance in the post you're complaining about—that same ROK that has a nasty history of exiling its dissenters: Hwang Kee, Gen. Choi, Kim Soo, Song Duk Son, and many others, using methods of intimidation and pressure along the lines that I alluded to above in the nice summary Madis provides. That policy is of a piece with the monolithic view of TKD as exclusively the KKW/WTF manifestations presented in the KKW site pseudohistory I've linked you to (USA Taekwondo, which so far as doctrinal issues involving politics and history is concerned can fairly be described as one of the WTF's chief sockpuppets in the US, had a particularly choice example, which seems to be unavailable now...)

 

[Twin Fist]

Please keep your mind open and see the wonderful art which is TKD, regardless of your flavor/style.

My mind IS open miles, I am not the one strangled and stifled by KKW orders and proceedures.

 

[Marginal]

Right and the ITF has never rewritten any history of the sort. After all Gen Choi, invented the name while escaping a fight at the local geisha house...of course this was after he was held prisoner in a Japanes prison and honed his deadly skills.

IIRC, by Choi's account, he kept himself clean in prison, sang loudly, and sat really still for long periods of time.

Not quite as exciting as the story about anti cavalry jumpkicking cave painters.

Geeze. Go to a WTF class, og to an ITF class, go wherever and you're all pretty much doing the same stuff.

 

[Twin Fist]

not really

and thats ok, but the problem is, that one extreem (the NON WTF/KKW) can do sport OR SD

the other extreem "for the most part" only does ONE, that being sport.