The attitudes of the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910) saw martial arts fade from importance and become sanctioned for the military only, and something of a half remembered folksy thing by the 19th century. Add to this the effect of 30-40 years of Japanese domination and determination to obliterate any possibility of revolt and you end up with, well, nothing. Nothing but old memories of old men about things they saw in their youth.
This is so important... and so little known. Capener makes much of it in his essay, approvingly, because he actually disapproves of the way in which TKD arose, as the Korean development of karate. He argues that the whole culture of Korea was inhospitable to
budo/justsu attitudes towards martial arts, that the superficial similarity between the Three Kingdoms warfare era and the Japanese castle era samurai culture has led people to believe that the two are basically expressions of the same kind of Asian feudal combat ethic, whereas, he argues, the combat psychology of the Japanese was never an important component of Korean culture, and therefore TKD is best construed culturally not as a combat system but as a martial sport. To me, this seems like a projection of Capener's own thinking; he's a technical advisor to the WTF and very committed to the Olympic definition of TKD. The Korean and Vietnamese war showed how tough and combat-effective both the RoK military and TKD were. But the fact is, at the time that the Japanese occupation began, civil combat systems had been moribund in Korea, under the stifling weight of Confucian atttudes, for something like half a millenium.
One thing I find intriguing in all this is the appearance of revival arts like Muye24ban and Muye24gi. These are based on the old manuals Muyejebo and Muyedobotongji. I know there is some contention over these manuals, and I have my own opinion, but they do represent an early stage of martial art development in Korea. The mere fact that these arts have started to appear indicates that people in Korea are questioning the official line on Korean martial arts continuity. Very interesting.
Stanley Henning and Manuel Adrogués, who did the definitive assessments of the key Korean martial ms., the
Muyedobotongji, identify it as an essentially word for work copy of an earlier Chinese ms., written by a Han general 250 years earlier,
The New Manual of Effective Discipline, and Androgués in particular notes that the empty-hand combat system illustrated (in the few pages devoted to it) can be fairly securely identified with Long Fist Chuan Fa. This reflects the enormous, probably almost suffocating influence of Chinese thinking on Korean thought (including military thought) over many centuries, and I think it's Henning who noted that in the early 19th century a kind of cultural reaction set in against Chinese influences in Korea. But in reaction to the horrible abuse the Koreans underwent at the hands of the Japanese, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if there were a serious revival of interest in the earlier Chinese combat systems that, as Androgués charts brilliantly in his 2003
JAMA article on ancient Korean military manuals, were essentially copied and presented as the content of Korean combat strategy and skill sets, culminating in the
Muyedobotongji.
... That pretty much sums it all up. No matter how much evidence you present, there are those who are still going to believe the lies. They have not only drank the Kool-Aid, they have pulled the Kool-Aid man into a back alley and had their way with him. It is a shame, really. The good thing is that the Koreans themselves have enough common sense to look at the facts and see that something isn't quite right with the propaganda stories, so there is some hope after all. It was called Korean Karate BECAUSE THAT IS WHAT IT WAS!!! IT USED THE SAME EXACT KATAS AS SHOTOKAN AND IT EVEN APED THE UNI'S!!! THE CHANGES WERE *MODERN* CHANGES THAT WERE MADE FOR NATIONALIST PURPOSES AND TO TRY TO FURTHER DISTANCE THE STYLE FROM ITS JAPANESE ROOTS. THE KICKS WERE ORGINALLY LOW - THEY WERE RAISED OVER TIME FOR DEMO AND COMPETITION PURPOSES!!! SPORT KARATE HAS ALSO UNDERGONE SUCH TYPES OF EVOLUTIONS TO REFLECT THE TRENDS IN ITS COMPETITIONS!!! WE HAVE THE EVIDENCE!!! IT IS PROVEN BY MEN FAR MORE QUALIFIED IN THE FEILD OF HISTORY THAN ALL OF US PUT TOGETHER!!! WE HAVE THE SMOKING GUN PEOPLE!!!
WHY DO WE STILL INSIST ON BELIEVING IN THE NONSENSE AND THE LIES WHEN EVEN THE KOREAN PEOPLE THEMSELVES ARE DOUBTING THEM??? IT IS NO SHAME TO ADMIT THAT YOU DRANK THE KOOL-AID. I HAVE DONE IT, WE HAVE ALL DONE IT AT SOME POINT - IT IS PART OF THE LARGER LEARNING PROCESS!!!
I think that the testimony of a number of eminent Korean grandmasters, cited in Robert Young's groundbreaking
JAMA paper in 1993, breaking ranks with their partisan fellows (and acknowledging what was at the time regarded as a shameful secret—the Japanese sources of TKD) is particularly important. One of the lessons that Korean MAists have had to learn, in bitter resignation, during the past sixty years is that if you break ranks, you will be punished; just ask the shade of Hwang Kee, or the TKD kwan founders who resisted Gen. Choi early on, or people such as Gm. Kim Byung-Soo, who continued to resist; and Gen. Choi himself eventually got chewed up in the jaws of the Korean TKD directorate that he had been so important in creating. Nonetheless, what Gm. Kim suggest in his January
Black Belt interview—
today the truth is coming out. Still some people try to make up some mysterious stories - claim their art is 2000 years old or from a monk in the mountains or something. But, if people are educated about history and lineage, they cannot be fooled. I believe Korea, like many other countries, had some type of martial arts being practiced before the 20th century. But after the Japanese occupation of Korea (1909-1945), indigenous martial arts were gone and influences from other places (Japan, Okinawa, China) were being taught.
This is the same as if someone’s father is a farmer, but tells everyone his father is a doctor. You should show respect for your father and let people know who he is, not make up some strange story. The same is for martial arts lineage. Your direct instructor is your martial arts father; his teacher is your grandfather, etc. This is your family line in the martial arts. It doesn’t matter where the art comes from. Martial art belongs to the people that practice and preserve it, not to “this country or that country.”
Gm. Kim didn't wait to come to the U.S. before presenting this perspective on TKD; he was doing it even as a young student, comparing the techs he was learning to those he was able to read about and observe in Shotokan and Shudokan karate. He took on some serious risks in doing so, too. But I think, as time goes on, people will feel less pressure from this kind of 'political correctness' to defend these romantic fabrications that get passed off for MA history...
The thing is, you can understand Koreans doing something like that. But what I find really,
really strange is when Westerners, coming out of cultures which do
not have that institutionalized, accepted distinction between 'official truth' (
tatemae in Japanese) and independently discovered, verified truth (
honne) do the same thing. As Karel Van Wolferen, in
The Enigma of Japanese Power (MacMillan 1989), observes in chapter 9 of his detailed study, in Japanese culture, individuals who go out of their way to ferret out facts and check official doctrine against these facts are referred to, contemptuously, as
rikkutsuppoi, 'reason freaks', and there is a similar hostility in many echelons of Korean society as well. What's really bizarre is finding the same thing in the comparatively open world of martial arts in the U.S. Which brings us, of course, back to the thread OP here.... :wink1:
And speaking of the OP, I have to note that the pattern exhibited in that post, attacking the messenger with everything but a factual argument, and offering hostile but virtually completely undefended judgments of the individual reporting the data (as vs. challenging the data, or arguing with the interpretation in terms of counterevidence, or anything consistent with the simple basics of sound historical debate) is nothing new for the OP. If circumstances warrant, I would
love to go back to a prior post of the OPer,
here, responding to Steve Capener's extremely well-documented survey of the historical origins of TKD, arguments which already rested on a strong basis of support in Young's 1993
JAMA paper, subsequently strongly corroborated in the followup work of Burdick in 1997 and 2000, and note the same pattern as in the OP: lots and lots of attacks on the professional competence of the author, based on a fundamental confusion between MA rank on the one hand and control of historical data, with a conspicuous lack of anything resembling an actual counterargument based on either new empirical findings or plausible reassessment of older documentation—in other words, mistaking belt level for knowledge of history, who cannot offer a single even mildly plausible factual challenging to the emerging picture of modern TKD as the Korean development of Shotokan and Shudokan karate, plain and simple. The 'discussion' of Capener's findings about taekyon (including the devastating interview testimony and autobiographical writing of the last living practitioner of that 19th c. traditional folk foot game, Song-Duk Ki, that Capener uncovered) is particularly telling... oh yes, there's a
lot to be said about the way in which the OPer approached the documented historical material in Capener's article! What's really interesting in this case is that that every single solitary careful investigation of TKD martial history has wound up coming to the same conclusion—one that's supremely embarrassing for the romantic nationalist fables that Gen. Choi and others in the Korean TKD directorate began pumping up the volume on the post-Korean-War era. The more you look at the evidence base, the more transparently weak these claims are now showing themselves to be. And yet we have people who enthusiastically champion those claims, without even making a pretense of constructing a serious response to the by now massive evidence that TKD originated as Korean karate, emerging out of a background which shows not even the faintest trait of an indigenous MA tradition. This lack of a continuous Korean tradition is something that demands explanation—there are some very interesting suggestions in the continuation of this thread below—but the kind of response, including a wholesale ducking of publically attested contemporary evidence, documentary information and all the rest of it (to the point of raising major doubts as to the responders' awareness that a serious historical critical literature on the KMAs actually
exists) in favor of repeated assertions of personal convictions (as though the strength of those convictions carried any weight in and of itself)... this I find, well,
fascinating... :EG:
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