Korean Taekkyon

[windwalker]

back in the 70s, had an Army sergeant, who learned

Tang Soo Do Moo Duk Kwan and Hapkido

from the ROKs in nam, White Horse div.

It was pretty funny, he started training 25 grunt gis, after the first week of training only 5 where left.
as I remember it was some pretty brutal training. interesting in that he combined the Hapkido, for some
pretty effective take downs, after the initial encounter.

[KEND]

In the preceding posts there seems to be a general tendency to regard the Korean MA's as post WW2, with techniques copied from Shotokan and other Japanese MA's. Shotokan dates from 1939, it in turn probably came from Okinawan karate which came from the 18thcentury copying of Chinese MA's. Korea has a history of martial conflict from its founding around 50 BC. It had Military exams in 1408, probably the greatest admiral of all time, Yi Sun Shin in the 16th century. It seems unlikely that there was no developed MA, at least in the military sense, so the Korean instructors may have had a point. The Japanese systems with kata etc were well constructed its possible that they were used as a format, in fact the Chinese MA's often lack a formal structure. I make no claim to being a historian but as someone once said, a punch is a punch, a kick is a kick, the arts are not rocket science.

[Interloper]

Most of the contemporary Japanese MAs were solidified from former combat or koryu arts in the late 19th- and early 20th centuries. I think that the occupation of Korea was a time when those arts - judo and jujutsu (yudo, yusool), aikido and akikjujutsu (hapkido, hapkiyusool), etc. were either brought into Korea, or learned by Koreans living in Japan.

The early TKD I trained in (and the tang soo do I observed back then, too) really was nearly identical to Shotokan, which was Gichin Funikoshi's re-working (to fit Jigoro Kano's suggestion for creating a physical regimen that supported the post-Edo move toward right-wing nationalism) of the Okinawan karate he trained in his youth, and which dates back much further to perhaps Chinese origins. As time went on, it was evident that Koreans were tweaking that stuff and adding things that seemed inspired by Chinese MA kicking, but which I suspect passed through the filters of Korean culture during the times that China exerted a powerful influence on Korean culture and government.

These east Asian countries probably passed a lot of stuff around and reworked it to suit themselves along the way.

[Doc Stier]

I agree that traditional Korean martial arts have a long developmental history which clearly pre-dates the Japanese Occupation of Korea from 1910 to 1945. I certainly did not mean to imply, as some have, that all Korean fighting arts are totally based upon Shotokan Karate or any other Japanese martial art style. I was simply saying that most of the Korean masters I had contact with didn't want the general public to view what they taught as nothing more than Korean karate, even if that's essentially what it was. National pride and all.

Anyone who has practiced both Japanese and Korean methods can validate the similarities and differences in martial spirit, fighting strategy, the overall variety of techniques, and significant differences in the technical execution of shared techniques, especially kicking techniques in particular. Nonetheless, the Japanese colonial presence in Korea did have an impact on the development of the major modern Kwan styles taught as Taekwondo since 1965. This is witnessed by ample evidence which validates that the founders of these modern styles all studied Japanese or Okinawan karate styles, and used those styles as the basis for establishing their respective Taekwondo Kwans.

Nonetheless, much older Korean martial/military arts obviously existed prior to any Chinese, Okinawan or Japanese influences, since Korea has a long national history of military defense and warfare against foreign adversaries, as well as numerous military struggles for internal political power and control of the nation. However, much debate remains in regard to what these styles really were and what they actually consisted of. This debate definitely includes whether or not methods such as Taekkyon or Hwarangdo adequately represent these older fighting methods. I have yet to see any conclusive research which supports such claims by contemporary teachers and practitioners.

[wayne hansen]

The founders of Hapkido and tang soo do learnt there arts in japan and china

[Doc Stier]

It has been my understanding that it was more often the case that political refugees and military invaders from China and Japan were responsible for introducing their martial arts into Korea.

[Andy_S]

KEND and Doc:

Hwarangdo is an offshoot of Hapkido (and is named as such in Korea).

Taekkyeon. OTOH, is legit: There are images of it (photos and paintings) from the 19th century. Anyone looking at taekkyeon, even a layman, can see how different it is to most CMA and JMA.

Ancient Korean MA certainly existed during Shilla, Goguryeo, Baekjae and Goryeo. However, this is ancient history. During the Joseon Era (1992-1910 - a VERY long dynasty by any standard of history) there was not much. Contemporary illustrations from the 1590s show that the Koreans were great archers - this was what was tested in the military exams - but there is very, very little info or emphasis in illustrations on H2H combat or weapons.

Moreover, there are very, VERY few traditional or antique weapons in Korea/Korean museums today (compared to anywhere in Europe, for example).

Today's MA-learning Koreans hate to acknowledge it, but Joseon really was not a martial society in any way, shape or form.

[taekkyunbunny]

Taekkyun is not precursor to TKD, however, many kicks were derived from Taekkyun.
TaeKwonDo's name was named after Taek kyun, along w/ few of its kicks.

I know many people either questions either if this was a game or a real martial art, but I'm not gonna get into that or try to prove one or the other, believe what you think, but it was both, depends on the setting.

Before Japan invaded Korea, Taekkyun was already quiet difficult to find.

Basically during Choson era, I am lazy to look up exact dates.
People who did taekkyun (commoners) had competitions and lot of social issues came w/ it. Basically it was fight for a bet.
For example: 2 people would fight and they would bet something or someone even of other party.
So one guy would bid that if I win I get your wife, one guy would want the other party's house etc.
After the fight, one guy would lose something big in life. The government banned it due to these issues.
The government banned these competitions. I am not sure about taekkyun as a whole.
These facts are documented, b/c King ordered the ban. Don't know the exact name of the king etc. You can do your search to confirm the facts if you have that much interest. Its hard to find information on this subject.

Now under Japanese colonial rule, it is hard to find evidence either way about their policy about not practicing Korean indigenous martial arts (Koreans say one thing and Japanese say another), but you can find evidence they try to assimilate Koreans, this further made taekkyun done in public difficult.

So now under those backgrounds there have been 2 cases of taekkyun practicioners that were known.

One is Song Duk Ki.

There was another incident where taekkyun comes out in the news in Hawaii early 1900s among Korean immigrants there.
Supposedly there was a Korean man who got involved in a fight and saved some people from thugs, they asked him what he used. He clearly stated Taekkyun.
There was a news article regarding it. But after that, the person was not traceable (don't know where he went). Nor did any taekkyun practioners come out from Hawaii.

So basically the taekkyun you are seeing lately is due to Song Duk Ki's doing.

Basically the lineage line of Taekkyun known is
Imho (Song Duk Ki's teacher, from what we know he was an aristocrat he was also friends of Song Duk Ki's older brother) -> Song Duk Ki (1893 -1987)

Song Duk Ki's story was that there were actually quiet a few of them learning/practicing taekkyun in his village, and after the N-S Korean War,
when he came back to his village, none of the other taekkyun practitioners came back. Dead from war... who knows, basically his interview said he was the only one that appeared back at the village.

He taught many after that, exactly when he started teaching i am not sure, it is not documented and you can only hear about it from the people who learned from him. And from that the result varies greatly.

There are 4 federations of taekkyun currently, led by different people.
1. The Korea Taekkyon Federation (KTF). The KTF is led by Lee Yongbok, who learned from both Song Duk Ki and Shin Han-seung.
2. The Korea Traditional Taekgyeon Association (KTTA). The KTTA is led by Jeong Gyeong-hwa who was given the title of "living cultural asset" by the Korean Government. He learned from Shin Han-seung and Song Duk Ki.
3. The Kyulyun Taekyun Association (KTK). The KTK is led by Do Ki-hyun who mainly learned from both Song Duk Ki, but also from Shin Han-seung.
4. The World Widae Taekkyeon Organization (WWTO). The WWTO is based in Los Angeles and led by Go Yong-woo who learnt from Song Duk Ki.

Now I will tell you the difference the reality of taekkyun at the moment. What you see on youtube is not how taekkyun supposed to be.
(Now you guys are going to ask me where I am getting this information)
You will only understand the situation if you are in Taekkyun community and have been for a long time. Its actually a mess.
So I want to share with you this information. You will not find this much information in English b/c no one has posted it in English.

Anyways 1, 2, 3 founders were taekwondo practitioners before they bumped into Song, and they only had few weeks even few months of training under Song.

#4 who is in the US and another master are somewhere in Korea had both nearly 15 yrs approximately under Song.
They knew Song before the founders of 1,2,3 appeared b/c they lived in the same village as Song, and records of them training in taekkyun are much earlier than 1, 2, 3.
They don't teach publicly or have federation of schools, yet are active.

1,2,3 are fully aware of existence of 4, yet they don't seemed to be cooperating each other.

In time when 4 appears in public is when you will see the real thing.

So basically TKD doesn't come from Taekkyun. Not directly at least not from Song.
There is no linkage of teacher personally teaching.
I know TKD founder Choi Hong Hi claimed to have learned taekkyun, but we don't know who he learned from.

[allen2saint]

About that, I found it interesting in the Human Weapon episode on Korean arts that some of the guys who were in the TKD demo team/school were also on the Taekkyun demo team/school. It seemed like a group that just did these big performances and changed uniforms.

[edededed]

Interesting background about taekkyon, I do hope to see more of it sometime! It is good that Song Dukki was able to teach some students before he passed away - it's amazing how few people were left to pass it on! Just one person, and if he had not taught it - taekkyun would have disappeared completely. It's almost unthinkable.

[Andy_S]

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.html

And 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

[Interloper]

I trained for years with one of Gen. Choi's direct students. It was a well-known thing that Choi's TKD was a direct knockoff of Shotokan karate that Choi had learned (and earned nidan in) during the Japanese occupation of Korea. Our forms were, in all essence, the Heian/Pinan kata. When I first started training in TKD, many moons ago, we called it "Korean karate," and back then the hand techniques had equal emphasis to kicks, and perhaps even more. And, the kicks were not at all high and flashy as they became in the mid- to late 1980s and on.

So, I'm very doubtful that Choi had learned Taekkyon, from anyone. I suspect he looked at those ancient drawings of the court performers doing some kicks in baggy pantaloons, and decided to include them in his art's history...

[edededed]

I agree that taekwondo was essentially Shotokan + a vague notion of adding high kicks (the notion taken from the perception of taekkyun, a mostly lost art to the TKD founders). I spent 5 years or so practicing Moodukkwan Tangsoodo, which was founded by, I think, the only early "Korean karate" founder that did not learn Shotokan - yet we also learned the same "heian" forms and such.

Pakchigi sounds like a great idea to lose brain matter at a fast rate...

[allen2saint]

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

Read 'A Killing Art: The Untold History of Tae Kwon Do" by Alex Gillis for a pretty disgusting breakdown of it all.

[wayne hansen]

Tang so do comes from Hawang gee
Choi was a student of his
The base was karate then southern shaolin followed by Northern
Finally the 3 internals
They also had some good noi gung