I once took Tae Kwon Do for a while, and I noticed right away that all of your forms look really different! But, if Tae Kwon Do and Kuk Sool Won ™ are both Korean, why do they look so different?
A. That is a great question, and it is mostly based on an extremely persistent misunderstanding. In point of fact, Tae Kwon Do is not really a traditional Korean martial art at all but is, in fact, more similar to Japanese karate. The reason for this is that after the Japanese “annexation” of Korea in the early 1900’s the practice of most Korean arts (including martial arts) was forbidden by the occupiers, while the practice of Japanese martial arts was encouraged. Because of this there resulted an entire generation of Koreans trained in Japanese martial arts. At the end of World War II when the Japanese were thrown out of the country, many Korean martial arts masters got together to form “kwans” (or “schools”) and, in the spirit of nationalism, “glossed over” the fact that the styles were really Japanese – basically, forms and patterns based on the Japanese Heian kata with some Korean kicking thrown in for “spice.” A prominent Tae Kwon Do master (who is also a history professor at Ric
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