Not reading ALL in this thread, or the original thread that started this one, so I guess I am commenting out of ignorance of the thread, somewhat.
Kevin... let me suggest that you actually consult the evidence that's been produced on the subject, rather than arguing that since you find it hard to believe X, it follows that 'not X' must be true. The world is full of things we find hard to believe, but which the facts more or less force us to accept. That's the reason people study the history of things, rather than assume that what they find plausible is therefore true.
Think of it this way: what you've said constitutes evidence for facts about your belief-system. It doesn't constitute evidence of any kind for the historical
accuracy of your belief system. So you need to provide some kind of evidence for those beliefs, if you want others to find them plausible. Do you actually have any new evidence to add the the mix? As vs., say, the arguments and evidence presented in the sources given
here?
And is the logic of your reasoning any different from the following bit of argumentation?
- There is fighting and combat in all human societies;
- there have been Jewish settlements in the Middle East for thousands of years;
- therefore, it must be the case that Krav Maga represents the development of (or at least contains technical components of) a 5,000 year old MA first practiced by the ancient Israelites.
So now, in light of (what I
hope is) the self-evident absurdity of that kind of conclusion, could you identify precisely
what aspects of 'ChungDoKwan, Chang Hun, JiDoKwan and OhDoKwan' suggest some deep substratum of 'lost' Korean MAs distinct from the Okinawan/Shotokan sources—sources which (as Stuart Anslow documents in his recent book on the Chang Hon hyungs) Gen. Choi, notwithstanding his later claims, identified in a 1960s interview in
Combat magazine as crucial to the formation of Taekwondo?
The role of Gen. Choi as an early drum-beater for 'ancient' TKD makes it worth noting that—as Gm. Kim Byung-Soo observed in the January issue of
Black Belt, in an interview with one of our members, Rob McLain—General Choi taught the same Japanese kata and curriculum elements that the other Kwan founders did, and that's no surprise, given that his entire MA training,
to the extent that it can be verified, was confined to Shotokan karate (please,
please consult Robert Young's detailed, carefully researched and fully documented examination of the history and disappearance of 'taekyon' in Korea for some idea of just how unreliable Gen. Choi's invocation of taekyon in his earlier training turns out to be; Steve Capener's article, though apparently completely independent of Young's, supports exactly the same conclusions here. The person Choi identifies as his taekyon instructor turns out to be, very likely, an imaginary friend...)
The point is, there's contemporary evidence, and there's good evidence that by the time the Japanese began actively suppressing the MAs in Korea, the MAs they were suppressing largely consisted of the
imported Japanese MAs judo and jiujitsu. If, in the face of the savage and thorough enforcement the Japanese imposed on the proscription of
any MA training in Korea between the beginning of the Occupation and the mid 1930s, the best you can suggest is that there 'must have been' people training... training
something we don't know about, and doing so in total secrecy... something that no one at the time or currently can identify in any way that stands up to serious scrutiny... but which somehow crept into the form of the Kwan curricula... then I think you're going to find that you have a very, very tough sell on your hands.
I should also note that Gen. Choi isn't particularly important here
except insofar as he was one of the very loudest voices—later on, of course—denying that the Okinawan/Japanese MAs, which he and every other one of the original Kwan founders studied in Japan (except Hwang Kee) had studied to one or another dan levels, had anything to do with TKD. (And HK admitted, in his last book, after a good chunk of a lifetime claiming Chinese origins for what he taught, that he had learned much of his technique, especially those rooted in the seminal Pinan katas, from Japanese textbooks. As John Hancock, in his important article
'Quest for the truth', points out
On pages 15 and 16 of [HK's The History of Moo Duk Kwan (1995)], it clearly states that Hwang Kee's knowledge and understanding of the majority of the forms taught within tang soo do, including the pyong ahn hyung, came from reading and studying Japanese books on Okinawan karate. Hwang discovered those books in the library of the train station where he worked in Seoul in 1939. We can only speculate as to which books those were, but I would venture that Funakoshi's Ryukyu Kempo Karate (1922) was among them.)
Choi's whole significance here is that he was very important in starting the nationalist 'party line', still aggressively pursued by the TKD directorate in Korea, that TKD is the product of 'ancient' indigenous Korean arts.
Given these tiresomely well-documented facts about the training of all the Kwan founders, the specific reason that we need to posit an ancient/old/etc. stratum to the very clearly O/J sources of the TKD techs in
all known lineages, in order to make sense of the technique set of Kwan-era TKD and later, is that .... ....?
Again, we're not talking here about what TKD became. We're talking about where it started. Take karate itself: by the time Okinawan karate was exported to Japan, it was very, very different, so far as we can tell, from its Chinese/indigenous antecedents, the raw materials. That's how the life of MAs evolves, and there's no reason to suppose that the development of TKD/TSD, the Korean expressions of karate, worked any differently. There are styles that are much closer to the common O/J rootstock of the modern Korean striking arts, and styles that are further away. But all the converging lines of evidence point to that O/J rootstock (Simon O'Neil alludes in one or two places in his
Combat TKD monograph to a small role played by elements of chuan fa, but doesn't develop the discussion in any detail....)
