karate history

[isshinryu5toforever]

The only reason I decided to even mention Taekkyon is the fact that it was a village game, and Oyama was born in Gimje. I have been to Gimje, it's still not huge. They grow some great rice though.

The Japanese occupied Korea, but in an area that remote, on the west coast, their presence wouldn't have been huge. It's possible that he saw Taekkyon because of this, but I doubt he practiced it. Taekkyon was pretty much gone after the occupation, but it had been in decline loooong before the occupation period. It became a gambling game over time, and the aristocracy didn't like it, so they looked down on its practice. From what I've read, it didn't have a lot of practitioners even when the Japanese came to Korea. The same goes for other KMAs. They just weren't popular with the aristocracy, so they didn't stick around. There was a resurgence in the popularity of martial arts at the end of the occupation period, and they gave it a nationalistic makeover post-occupation.

Oh, and to verify that, Oyama never did claim to study Taekkyon. That kind of link to Korea's MA past just wasn't that important to him.

[bushido_man96]

I think that many of the higher kicks began to develop out of the basic, lower level kicks learned in Karate, and then they just started being done higher. As for the spinning kicks and jumping kicks, I'm not sure I would jump on the Taekkyon bandwagon. The main issue I have is that Korea has done such a job in fabricating the history of TKD, and the newly revived Taekkyon, that I take any Korean MA history with a grain of salt.

[isshinryu5toforever]

The high side kick and front kick, that would seem to be the case. The spinning kicks though, who knows. The revisionist history of Taekkyon as a combat martial art they used to fight the Japanese, that's crazy. The actual history of Taekkyon as a village game/sport though, that makes sense, and it can be verified. I would have to dig through a bunch of books, but I found it somewhere. It was written by a non-Korean, so it's not as ridiculous.

Korean folk games weren't very friendly. They had a rock throwing "game" that villages would use to settle disputes. It sometimes resulted in death, and was banned by one of the kings for this reason.