Ok history buffs, how about a recommendation

[kozushi]

I agree.

And, if the Muye is just as obscure in Korean/Chinese as it is in English then I too think there is no real way of ever fully deciphering it.

Nothing wrong about borrowing and adapting from other cultures! If TKD comes from Shotokan, then so what?

[isshinryu5toforever]

The muye is much more readable in Korean, because it's a mixed character book. It contains hanja and Korean characters, but it takes a serious historian to read it in context. Even then, you can't take enough out of it to recreate an entire system.

As far as the revisionist history goes, there's a reason for that. The occupation was extremely brutal. The Koreans were basically forced into slave labor, and the Japanese weren't very benevolent masters: forced sexual slavery, executions, etc. They basically attempted a cultural genocide by forcing Koreans to learn to speak and write Japanese only. They forced to some to change their names. There are a lot of stories from the colonial period. Very few of them are good.

There's a reason we don't teach young children that Christopher Columbus cut off the hands of natives who wouldn't bring him gold or that the entire Thanksgiving meal between the Pilgrims and Native Americans is a giant myth. It doesn't jive well with our sense of national identity. Korea has done the same thing, but with much more recent history, so it has been dubbed less forgivable.

[kozushi]

Actually, I'm a history teacher, and in my opinion, what we call "history" would be better termed "legend."

[isshinryu5toforever]

Haha, I agree.

[kozushi]

Trust me, Canada's "history" is full of a lot more @#$% than Korea's is.