Good post by taekkyunbunny. So there are four competing taekkyun federations? THAT is Korean tradition, sure enough!
RE: Kicks
It is a bit of a mystery where the TKD kicks came from - or, to put it another way, where the heavy emphasis on kicking in modern KMA came from.
As noted by Taekkyunbunny, although Song Duk-ki was alive and available, he was in no way part of the creation of TKD, which basically came about due to a government unification of the kwans (MA schools) teaching Japanese karate, mainly in Seoul. I am not sure, though, whether he was ostracized - after all he practiced a different art to them, and one that was legitimately Korean, rather than their Japanese material - or whether the kwan people simply did not know about him. In Korea in the 1950s and 60s, communications and information dissemination were all very poor, and AFAIK, Song only started teaching taekkyun widely in the 1980s, though some pioneers did learn form him earlier. Some interesting photos of Song here: The Mt Inwhang archery range - about half a mile form where I am typing this - now also has a space for taekkyun practice:
http://kimsookarate.com/gallery-old-day ... uk-ki.htmlAnd certainly, people in the kwans knew ABOUT taekkyun, even if they had not learned it themselves.
For example, the Moo Duk Kwan founder recalls how, in his youth, he saw a guy at a country fair fighting off a whole group of people. When he asked him what he did, the guys said it was taekkyun. Hwang was fascinated, but was never able to find a teacher of it (yet more evidence of its rarity).
Choi Hong-hi CLAIMs to have learned it from a calligraphy teacher in the north but this is dubious for two reasons. One: Why would a calligraphy teacher learn taekkyun, an art of bumpkins if not of thugs? Two: There is no evidence that I can see of taekkyun in Choi's TKD, which looks like kick-heavy Shotokan.)
My guess would be that the Koreans who founded TKD were looking for a differentiator, as it was clear by the early 1960s, that TKD had split from karate (there were, according to some editing I recently did for the WTF, at least two unification meetings between karate and TKD). One way to make it different was to emphasize the leg techniques, which (I am assuming here) people knew had been the main feature of the near-vanished taekkyun. When the Koreans wisely adopted the full-contact style with body armour, as opposed to the non-contact karate style, they then had a test-lab to road-test various techniques. Given that they were fighting full contact, they perhaps gravitated toward the most obviously powerful techniques - kicks.
RANT I am pretty disgusted by the complete fabrication of TKD's "history" in the 1960s by Korean instructors, associations and the government. Calling them blatant liars would not putting it too strongly. Alas, much colonial-era history here is similarly mistaught, yet Koreans (from the president on down) insist on lecturing Japan (which does indeed, suffer from these issues as well) on the so-called "correct history." ENDS RANT
And it is very debatable whether pre-colonial Korean martial arts were as kick-centric as we might suppose.
The most important KMA, on which the Confucian military exams were based, was archery.
Also popular - more so than taekkyun, which barely survived into the modern era - was ssirreum, a Korean rassling style.
Then there was 'pak-jigi" which was essentially a head-butting contest, which a lot of older-generation people will still remember: I am not sure if it was an art, per se, or just a couple of bumpkins smashing their head together. Anyway, it certainly existed - IIRC, even Smith and Draeger referenced it in one of their works.
But for better and/or for worse, the defining technique of KMA in the modern age is the kick - and the high kick at that. Taekkyun uses as many low kicks and foot sweeps as high kicks, and hapkido also has a range of low kicks - but even among taekkun and hapkido peeps, it seems to be the high kicks that people prefer to practice/emphasize.
FWIW.
RANT
I am pretty disgusted by the complete fabrication of TKD's "history" in the 1960s by Korean instructors, associations and the government. Calling them blatant liars would not putting it too strongly. Alas, much colonial-era history here is similarly mistaught, yet Koreans (from the president on down) insist on lecturing Japan (which does indeed, suffer from these issues as well) on the so-called "correct history."
ENDS RANT