April 26, 2009, This e-mail address is being protected from spambots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it

A member of MartialTalk.com recently told me about a great essay by Eric Madis, a senior martial arts instructor in the U.S. who trained in Tae Kwon Do, Tang Soo Do and Aikido. Madis “links the origins of taekwondo to twentieth-century Shotokan, Shudokan, and Shito-ryu karate and shows how the revised history was developed to support South Korean nationalism.”

He’s got that right! Madis has done his homework in a concise hard-hitting essay that reviews the kwans one by one. (The essay contains a good bibliography and is in Martial Arts in the Modern World, edited by Thomas A. Green and Joseph R. Svinth (Praeger, 2000). Unfortunately, the piece isn’t online.)

The only thing missing in the Madis essay is Taekkyun (or T’aekkyon), Korea’s old dance-game of fancy leg movements. Although TKD is embedded in 1930s Karate, General Choi Hong-Hi and, later, the World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) did insert Taekkyon. Choi called it “Foot Technique Sparring” (“Jokgi Daeryon,” in Korean) in his 1972 book. The Koreans made Karate their own in the 1960s.

Madis is brilliant at summarizing things though. For example, he notes that Yabu Kentsu (1866-1937), an officer in the Japanese army “introduced many procedures still practiced in karate schools worldwide, including the Korean styles.” They are:

- Bowing when entering the gym.
- Lining by rank.
- Meditation.
- Sequenced training (warm-ups, basics, forms, sparring).
- Answering an instructor with loud acknowledgments.
- Closing and opening a class with formalities.

I suppose that’s the “martial” in “martial art.”

By the way, MartialTalk.com contains excellent forums (with 12,000 members and 1.1-million posts.) What I like about the site is the relative lack of insanity. Many members are actually courteous to each other.