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To someone with a very suspicious mind, more time on his hands to watch You Tube than is healthy, a superficially broad martial arts experience, and a desire to stir up hornet's nests of artifical contraversey, watching a typical Korean martial arts demonstration, with few exceptions, conveys a remarkably simmilar impression to watching a typical Japanese martial arts exhibition, over and above the usual arguements invloving the limits to the variety of ways the human body can move in hand-to-hand and melee combat. As a matter of fact, as noted in the Sword-Buyers-Guide.com message forum, and other places such as Martial Arts Planet, several websites give conflictig claims for the reason, with the most extreme being that not only do Korean Martial Arts completely owe their existance to Japanese models, but the very concept of a an actual seperate Korean culture does not predate the end of WWII.

I am not that someone with that suspicious mind, let alone anyone who buys that particular arguement about Korean Martial Arts in the slightest. To be sure, the Japanese began their rule of Korea at the begining of the Twentieth Century by burning as many native history books and martial arts texts as they could get their hands on, and several noted Korean martial artists of the mid-Twentieth Century tried to reconstuct their arts by turning first to Japanese arts as a framework upon which to build. This can be seen for example in the way Tae Kwon Do bears a rather closer resemblence to the harder styles of Karate than it does to preserved art of Taekkyon, which doring the Choson Dynasty had been by royal fiat reduced from a martial art learned by royal body guards to a folk dance with no martial merit (except for flexibility) whatsoever, as if one of the French kings of the House of Bourbon had demanded that Savate be reformuated as ballet.* Not only that, but even in the indisputedly Korean martial arts text known as the Muye Dobo Tongji, the meelee weapons most frequently seen (For the forms Dan Do, Jedok Gum, Wae Gum, Bon Kuk Gum, Ssang Gum, and Ssang Soo Do) are what many even with relatively good education would conclude are Japanese Katana/Tachi and (for Ssang Soo Do) Nodachi. This is entirely understandable, but not entirely accurate. The original weapons from the Choson Dynasty period vary from Japanese swords in subtle but important ways. First of all, Korean swords of that period (though not Korean swords made nowadays) usually feature the hilt and guard permenantly fixed to the blade, which is anathema to how the Japanese understood swordmaking even in the Gempei and Onnin Wars and Sengokujidai. Second of all, Korean Paedo and Samgakdo feature very odd blade geometry by Japanese standards. Still, those aren't details that show up very well in forms demonstrations on You Tube.

Part of the problem is that Korean swords and even polearms were previously that much more distinctive before the Choson Dynasty, and especially before the Mongol conquest. The Hwanwuldaegum, for instance, was a straight, single (for cavalry) or double edged (for infantry) weapon featuring the ring pommel that gives it its name and a blade and handle long enough for two hands, but a light weight and balance that can accomodate one hand perfectly, similar in concept, if not execution, to European longswords. A polearm called the Gumjiang featured at least five feet of wooden poleshaft and up to three feet of double-edged steel, similar to a Swedish staff-sword, a French partisan, or an Itallian Speido. and these were only two examples.

How would it have changed the Korean, and thereby the world martial arts scene if in 1949, a readable martial arts text from Korea's United Silla or Koryo Dynasties were to be discovered in an abandoned Buddhist temple by monks fleeing south from the Communists, and every attempt to discredit it through materials, radioisotope, or metatextual analysis only served to embarass the doubters?

* This is not an isolated incident by the Choson Dynasty. Even today, many modern Koreans say that the only good things to come out of the Choson Dynasty were Gochujang, Hangul, and the Muye Dobo Tongji, and those things happened in fits of inadvertance.
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