Taekyun as a Combat Sport

Taekyun has been practiced as a sport in Korea since at least the Joseon Dynasty (1392-1910), when its popularity soared and taekyun matches were first depicted in books. Taekyun is still practiced as a sport to this day, with the most prestigious event being the Taekyun Battle.

Teams of taekyun players gather from all over Korea to compete in the championship, which begins in May and ends in October every year.  I was lucky enough to be in Korea for the finals.

Taekyun Battle 2015 officials, demonstrators, and teams competing for 1st through 4th place.

How The Game is Played

Matches are full contact.  The only protective equipment is a mouth guard and a groin cup, although taekyun shoes have a minimal layer of padding built into the top of them. Beyond that, the players are completely unprotected.

There is no scoring in a taekyun match.  There are two ways to win--either by a successful kick to the face or by throwing the opponent on the ground.  Even though low kicks aren't tracked by the judges, they are still a major part of the game since they are used to weaken the opponent.

Low kicks are used to weaken the opponent.

A kick to the face will end the match.

A good throw will end the match.

At the Taekyun Battle, there are five players to a team.  Two players face off and have five minutes to win by head kick or throw.  At the end of the five minutes, if neither has achieved a victory condition, both players are eliminated.  If one does manage to decisively end the match, only the opponent is disqualified.  The winner stays to fight the next opponent from the other team.  In fact it's possible for one player to defeat an entire team single-handedly.

The game ends when one team's players have all been eliminated.

Taekyun Battle 2015 Finals

The opening ceremony for the finals included speeches by dignitaries and an explanation of the rules.  There were also demonstrations highlighting the aspects of taekyun that aren't immediately apparent from watching a taekyun competition.  One performance showed taekyun as a basics demonstration to live music and one showed taekyun as a practical martial art--both of which were fascinating, but will have to wait for another blog post.

The final match of 2015 took place between Sungju Taekyun Academy and a team of graduate students from Sungkyunkwan University.  Sungju, wearing muted red and green, had to travel about four hours to compete in Seoul.  Sungkyunkwan, wearing bright green, were much closer since their school is in Seoul.  These two teams had to eliminate ten others on their way to face each other in the finals. 

Sportsmanship:  Before the final match, Sungju surprises their opponents with fruit gift boxes.

Here is part of one of the match-ups, to give you an idea of how the game is played.  The nice folks at Kyulyun Taekyun provided this video and uploaded a longer version that shows all of the matches.

The judges confer about whether a high kick was blocked or not.

Kick blocked!  The match continues.

It ended up being a very close contest.  Two matches ended by kicks, two by throws, and two more ended with the clock eliminating both players.  Both teams were down to a single remaining fighter, and it all came down to the match up between Park Hyeonsu of Sungkyunkwan and Son Byungjun of Sungju.  Since it's determined by elimination instead of score, matches can be cruelly short.  Here is the final match-up in its entirety.

Taekyun Battle is finished until 2016.  Congratulations to the top four teams!

Because of Some Reading

After the 50 States Challenge part of my trip was done, there was still one last thing I had to do in Seattle.

A view from the water tower in Volunteer Park

But first, a flashback.  Just imagine your screen is doing that cheesy wobble thing and playing some stereotypical flashback sound.

When I was a color belt, I practically lived at the dojang.  One student quipped that I was there so often, the instructor was claiming me as a dependent on his taxes.  But it's impossible to be training every minute, so when I wasn't in class or practicing at home, I would read.

One particular book that I read was a collection of essays written by martial arts instructors.  One essay was about how instructors can adapt teaching techniques to help students who learn in different ways.  I thought the author might have some insight into a problem I had in sparring that had confounded both me and my instructors.

Between the references in the book and the wonder that is the Internet, I found an email address for a Sensei Carol Gittins.  I eagerly drafted an email explaining my situation and asking if she had any advice.  And then I didn't hear back.

I was disappointed, but not terribly surprised.  6th degree black belts (as she was at the time) are busy.  School owners are busy.  Published authors are busy.  6th degree black belt school owner published authors probably have better things to do than worry about some color belt clear on the other side of the country.

So I was quite surprised a couple months later to get a reply.  She apologized for the delay since their email had been down for a long time due to computer upgrades, and proceeded to write a detailed answer to my question.

I was excited and grateful, but some of what she suggested were drills specific to her style that I had never heard of before.  I had to sheepishly admit that I had no idea what she was talking about, and ask for some clarification.  She again sent back a detailed reply. We traded emails for months, and she always seemed just as happy to be answering my questions as I was to be getting those answers.  At one point, she recorded a video of her with one of her students performing one of the drills that she recommended, which she then burned to a DVD and mailed to me (stop laughing, it was the most convenient way to do it back then).

We kept in touch, and I promised that if I ever visited Washington, I would visit her in person.  It was the better part of a decade later when that finally happened.

Since I had no car, she picked me up in hers.  I thought it was funny to post on Facebook that, "I'm getting in a car with someone I met on the Internet!"  My family thought it was less funny.  Then she gave me a tour of the International District, Volunteer Park and Bruce Lee's Grave.

And the shore.

That was fun, but then I got a chance to train with her.  I have never seen, or even heard of a school like that before.  It's tiny.  There are only a handful of students, and they are all black belts.  The school has no website and almost no online presence, so I never would have found it on my own.  I feel very lucky to have been invited, though, because their approach was fascinating.

The classes were led by Sensei Gittins, but they were taught by everyone.  One might expect a class like this to be chaos, but it wasn't.

The class, minus the photographer.

The cliché about teaching being the best way to learn is a cliché for a reason.  Sensei Gittins is a professional educator with years of experience teaching both in public schools and in the dojo.  It's safe to say she knows what she's doing when it comes to the process of learning.  She directed each student to lead a part of the class, often just barely outside of their comfort zone, and often giving them some leeway in specifically what techniques they would cover.

I got a crash course in their curriculum.  There wasn't enough time to go into anything in depth, but I got a taste of quite a bit, spanning striking drills, sparring drills, one steps, joint locks, and forms.  She would direct someone to lead the class through five drills, then the next person had to lead us through a few more, and so forth.  Since I was completely absorbed in trying to make the most of my brief introduction to their material, I was surprised when she assigned me to lead the class through two techniques.

As luck would have it, before class one of the students mentioned that when she trained in taekwondo, she found a certain kick to be very difficult.  Class was about to begin, so I promised to show her a trick to make it easier afterward.  Class hadn't ended, but I found myself in a teaching situation and decided to use that time to answer her question.  I cannibalized part of my pivoting class that I had just taught, thereby making myself look much smarter than I actually am.  It looked like I came up with that lesson on the spot.

Sensei Gittins later told me that they operate the class with the philosophy that when you are struggling with something, you teach it until you figure it out.  It is a very different approach from any other school I've trained in, taught at, or even visited.  Even though this wasn't an official stop in the Challenge, the time I spent there was very much in the spirit of the project.  This is a project about teaching and learning and experiencing new ways of doing things.  I was beyond lucky to end up here.

What Does 400 Pounds of Food Look Like?

When I first spoke with Kris Wilder about the 50 States Challenge, he immediately suggested collecting and donating fresh fruits and vegetables, because those are scarce in food banks.  I liked the idea of everyone bringing a "ticket" to my class, which could be anything from a head of lettuce to a bag of apples.  But after discussing it with the West Seattle Food Bank, they came up with an even better idea.  It's a targeted program addressing a very specific problem.

Supporting an award-winning not-for-profit in Washington.

Some kids simply don't have enough healthy food to eat at home, so they rely greatly on school lunches.  That makes the weekend a tough time.  Often they're home alone for at least part of the time that their parents are at work, leaving them to prepare their own snacks and meals.  When they get back to school on Monday, even if they're not hungry, they're not necessarily nourished if they've been eating cheap snack food instead of balanced meals.

That's all unfortunate enough by itself, but it comes with some scary side-effects. Without the vital ingredients to build a healthy body and brain, malnourished kids get sick and miss school more often, have more trouble concentrating, and can lack the energy to participate in class.  Since their bodies are still growing, malnutrition in childhood can interfere with development and cause long term or permanent damage.  It can affect the whole class, too, because a child with poor nutrition is a staggering 7 to 12 times more likely to exhibit behavioral problems.

Fortunately there are programs like West Seattle Food Bank's Backpack Program.  They provide backpacks for latchkey kids to assemble their own healthy meals over the weekends when they might otherwise go hungry.  The very generous students at West Seattle Karate donated an impressive 400 pounds of food to this program.

I thought that since the 50 States Challenge is just starting out, there would be a slow start.  We might only collect a couple bags of food and some lessons learned for next time.  Please enjoy these pictures of the students proving me wrong.

One of the classes hiding behind a whole lot of healthy meals.

Piled into the van, on the way to the food bank.

So what does 400 pounds of food look like?  It looks like a bunch of kids with a better shot at an education, a healthier childhood, and a greater chance of growing up to be healthy adults.

If you would like to support a cause like this in your community, get in touch with your local food bank.  Even if they don't have a backpack program, they may have something similar.  Volunteering or donating can make a huge difference to a lot of people.

A Martial Artist's Look at Seattle

In between some of my more ridiculous antics in Seattle, I had some rather sobering experiences.  Here are a few of them.

Seattle Dojo - America's Oldest Judo School

Seattle Dojo has been in this stand-alone building since the 30's, but the school was originally established in 1902.  The building looks and feels old, and the way the room shakes when students practice their breakfalls is only a little disconcerting.  I am sure this school has many stories to tell, but here I am telling only one, regarding the calligraphy on the walls.

Inside the oldest Judo school in America.

Seattle Dojo's calligraphy was done by Jigoro Kano, who is more famous for founding judo than he is for calligraphy.  However, the calligraphy on the walls today are copies of the originals.

It happened during World War II.  The Japanese Internment is a shameful chapter in America's history, in which Americans of Japanese ancestry were uprooted from their homes and relocated to concentration camps.  It was driven by fear in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Anyone of Japanese descent was given a few weeks notice to pack a single suitcase and leave everything else behind.  Many believed that they would not survive the ordeal, and even if they did, they would never be allowed to return to their property.  Many chose to destroy their farms and homes rather than allow them to be confiscated.

A sign at the entrance to Seattle Dojo.

The school had to close from January 1942 to September 1947 during the Internment, but the building survived thanks to one of the students, a Jewish corporate attorney, who kept the deed to the school and many other Seattle area Japanese-American properties in the vault at Seattle First National bank. The FBI did not attempt to confiscate it, as they did with almost all other Japanese-American property.  It was gutsy, but it paid off.  When the people were released from the internment camps and allowed to return home, the school had survived.

 

However, after reopening the school, it was discovered that the calligraphy was missing from the walls.  It is unclear if there was a break-in or if the calligraphy was removed for safe-keeping, and then accidentally lost, during the chaotic three weeks in December 1941 when Japenese-Americans were forcibly removed to various camps. Jigoro Kano had passed away even before the start of the war, so the school had to commission copies to be made to replace the originals.

One of Kano's last visits to Seattle Dojo.

Even though it's always sad when a piece of history is lost, that's not my takeaway from this story.  This is a story of resiliency.  This is a story about a community coming together in the face of adversity.  One might attribute it to the martial spirit of the judoka who carried the school through events that should have killed it, so that today it has not only survives but even thrives.  I have never trained at Seattle Dojo, but I think if I did, I would be very proud to be part of that legacy.

Japanese Garden

Completely surrounded by city, Washington Park Arboretum includes the Seattle Japanese Garden.  This would be an amazing place to sit and relax, read, or just enjoy a leisurely walk.  Of course, I did none of those things.  I zoomed through, hoping to save time to experience as much of Seattle as possible.  Yeah, I fail at vacation.  Though the sky was just a little too overcast to take perfect pictures, I did get to take some good ones.

Every few steps there's a completely different but equally beautiful view.

I've never been to a Japaense garden before, but this park reminded me greatly of certain venues in Korea.  The style is one of people whose open space is at a premium.  While I certainly appreciate Western botanical gardens and arboretums, they have a very different feel.  Here, every few steps provides a view substantially different from the views around it.  There's no symmetry here.  Taking a picture from one side of the pond could never be confused with the view from the other side.

A lantern by the water.

This park was built in 1959, with its construction delayed from the anti-Japanese sentiment in the wake of World War II.  Despite its newness, I was acutely aware of the history here.  The Nihon Shoki includes the earliest written mention of a Japanese garden. This is an art that has been in development for literally thousands of years.

Duck-sized koi in the pond.

In true Seattle fashion, it began to rain shortly after I arrived.  Not an unpleasant rain, but the kind of thing that is awful for taking pictures.  I'd love to return on a clear day and do it justice.

Bruce Lee Remembered

Bruce Lee is buried in Seattle.  I've only dabbled in kung fu, but even if I hadn't done that, I'd still feel his impact on martial arts.  He inspired so many people to start training.  He opened doors for so many people by advocating for kung fu to be available to everyone, not just Chinese.  He is less known for his involvement in promoting women in martial arts. I think it's fair to say that the martial arts landscape in America would look pretty different if not for what he did.  I took a moment to appreciate how much richer my martial arts experience has been because of him.

Thank you, and rest in peace, Mr. Lee.

It also crossed my mind to wonder what he might think of the reason I was there.  He is well known for his mixing of styles, and that gives me hope that he would have liked the spirit of this project, even if the execution is, for the time being, unproven.

The Wing Luke Museum had an exhibit for him called Do You Know Bruce?  They didn't allow photography, but the surrounding area was fascinating.

The Western entrance to the International District.

I want dragons to hold up power lines everywhere.

Seattle has a lot to offer the martial artist.  Should you find yourself there, I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Coffee, Trolls, and Seattle Antics

The Space Needle as viewed from Volunteer Park.

Seattle is not the cheapest city to visit, and I'm trying to do this project on a budget. Fortunately I had friends I could rely on for transportation and a couch for sleeping.  They were also very cool about helping me run around and experience Seattle.

One of those friends raises alpacas!

I skipped the Space Needle since here are plenty of nice views available for free.  When the sky was clear, the colors were remarkably vibrant.  Crayola has nothing on Puget Sound.  I joked that I wanted it to rain during my visit or I wouldn't be getting the full Seattle experience.  When the rain finally came, it was accompanied by a wind storm that dropped giant trees on cars and left us without power for a day.  Others fared much worse.  Having survived the Ent Attack of 2015, I stopped joking about the rain.  I still felt completely free to mock the Fremont Troll, though.

It's a troll, eating a car, under a bridge.  Because of course it is.

Felicia Day was in town.  My friend's poor luck meant he wouldn't be using his tickets, so I got the chance to meet her.  It's hard for me to articulate why I like Felicia Day so much.  I find her work entertaining.  It doesn't hurt that she has built this online community based around what she loves, all without the benefit of a celebrity family or being born into money.  Nope, no reason at all why a novice blogger like myself might like Felicia Day. She kindly signed my... whatever you would call this thing.

Uh...

When visiting Seattle it is almost required to go to a Starbucks, since that's where it all got started.  One of my English students in Korea, a girl by the name of Luna, gave me a Starbucks gift card on the last day of class.  It's certainly a thoughtful gift for any soon-to-be jet lagged recipient, and the Korean Starbucks assured me I could use it in America. This turned out not to be the case.  So instead, I just looked like a doofus in a Starbucks. Which, for someone whose usual order is "candy that you drink and it keeps you awake," that's not a particularly unusual condition.

"Yeah, I'm going to order.  I just gotta take a picture of my gift card in front of the other gift cards."

Even though I was trying to limit expenses wherever possible, I did splurge on a ticket to the EMP Museum.  It's a museum dedicated to music and science fiction.  Not music IN science fiction.  It's two separate things.  The giant screen playing Michael Jackson videos is next to the Star Wars costuming exhibit.  You could say the museum has a little bit of a personality disorder.  It was a lot of fun, but I learned the disheartening reality that my knowledge of sci-fi weapons is not what I thought it was.

I don't know about you, but I couldn't name very many of these.

Everyone told me I absolutely had to go to Pike Place Market.  They also said the main attraction was seeing people throw fish.  I saw plenty interesting shops selling everything from antiques to novelty puzzles to literally profanity-inducing fruit and even seafood, but I could not find a single projectile sea creature.  My legs were tired from exploring and I was ready to call it a day.  I looked over at my friend, who seemed to feel the same since he was no longer swearing about delicious peaches and was sitting down to rest.  I told him, "I don't think we're going to see any fish throwing.  I think it's a prank Seattle residents play on visitors.  They tell everyone to see the fish throwing just so the tourists go around looking like idiots."

Tourists do not need help looking like idiots.  We do it just fine on our own.

As soon as I said that, the workers in the fish shop behind me started tossing a fish around.  But I didn't get a picture!  I'm leaving it as an exercise to the reader to figure out if I actually did see fish throwing, or if I just decided to join the Seattle prank and help spread false rumors of aerial fishmongering.

Spending October in Korea

I am very excited about the 50 States Challenge, and I have big plans for it, but those plans have to go on hold for the time being.  I have worried about this greatly, since after visiting only one state, I am going to spend my entire travel budget on a trip to Korea.  It makes it seem like I'm not serious about the 50 States Challenge.

Here's the problem.  I usually visit Korea in August or January, or both if I can.  This is because I can teach at an English camp, which pays enough to cover the cost of the plane ticket and my expenses while I'm there.  They also provide lodging and some meals. It's usually a really good arrangement.  However, this year the camp I usually work had an explosion of interest among teaching applicants, and they filled up before I even sent my application.  So I had to choose between not going to Korea this time, or paying for the trip out-of-pocket.

Well, I'm training with Grandmaster Park in Korea.  I figure for many of you reading this, that doesn't mean anything to you.  But try to imagine having an instructor who was good to you at a time when you desperately needed someone to be good to you.  Imagine having the chance to train with someone who has been deeply involved in martial arts since taekwondo was first finding its identity and even before the name "taekwondo" was conceived.  Imagine having an instructor who not only taught you, but went out of his way for you to a degree that could never be called fair.  Or maybe you have an instructor that awesome and you don't need to imagine.  But suffice it to say there is no force on this earth that can keep me from meeting up with him like I promised back in January.  Even if I have to put the 50 States Challenge on hold.

I've trained with him every chance I get, but only once
did it make the front page of Taekwondo Times.

The other exciting opportunity on this trip is training in taekyun with Master Do Kihyun.  I talked about this a bit in a previous post, and this trip will be a continuation of what I learned from him before.  He told me once that the nearest taekyun school to where I live, as far as he knows, is in Vancouver.  That's only a 30-hour drive away.  As you might imagine, I don't mind travelling for an opportunity like this.

Of course, it's fun, too.

So, why October?  Two reasons.  First, the flights are cheapest in October, whereas August and January are peak seasons.  Unfortunately, that's a stressful concern.  And second, I've always wanted to go back to Korea in October.

The first time I went to Korea, I was there for a year.  I got to experience each yearly occurrence once.  Each season, each festival, each holiday.  The one exception was October.  I got sick in October, and it took me the entire month to get over it.  During that time, the weather was gorgeous and there were a ton of festivals and events, but I couldn't attend any of them because I couldn't exactly breathe.  I told myself that someday when I'm rich I'll return for the month of October and do it properly.  Well, I'm not rich, but I'm motivated.

How I spent my first October in Korea, except without Darth Vader.

I'll have a lot to tell about this trip, and I hope you enjoy it.  I'm anticipating stories about travel, culture, martial arts, and history.  I also have a couple more posts from Washington that will go up soon.  I will be posting one article per week until I run out of interesting stories to tell, but I am all too aware that when I get home, I'll to have to spend some time earning back all the money I'm pouring into this before I can resume the 50 States Challenge.  I hope I don't have to go into complete radio silence while I'm doing that, but if I do, know that I will be back.

Lessons in Seattle

I expected that over the course of this project, I would learn a lot of physical skills and a few nonphysical ones.  I still hope to do exactly that.  Certainly there is a lot to be learned in martial arts besides movement, so maybe I should not have been surprised that most of the lessons here were not physical in nature.

I told Kris Wilder what I have told every instructor I've ever trained under:  "I am happy to try to learn whatever you try to teach me."  He took that more literally than most and spent that training time teaching me about teaching.  He is perhaps better known for teaching physical skills, but if you have read Sensei Mentor Teacher Coach, you will understand why I did not feel cheated by this at all.  (And if you have not read it, you may want to fix that sooner rather than later.)

It seems that after watching me teach on the first day, he got it in his head (correctly) that I would want to teach martial arts for a living someday.  Since he was happy with how I ran class, he focused on the meta-skills of teaching.

Seven Basic Actions instead of kicking for this class.

First he showed me his method for planning a class.  He keeps notes for each class in a subtle file on the wall.  The template is split into three sections, warm ups, basics, and skill drills.  He has pencil markings over a week's worth of pages for what he plans to cover. His lower level classes are just reductions of the main lesson plan.  Even though he stressed the importance of planning, he also highlighted the need to stay flexible.

He also talked about how important it is to "read outside of your industry."  He said that he learns things outside of martial arts that help him with his martial arts every day, because he has made a habit of exploring other fields.  He told stories of making connections overseas as an accidental byproduct of investigating cinematography, and at worst it has been "a neat little dead end," as when he learned the neurology of how the eyes focus while studying magicians' tricks.  He cited Malcolm Gladwell as a perfect example of success through exploring other industries, as his books tend to illustrate broad concepts by in-depth excursions into a wide range of fields.

If you have not read Outliers, you should fix that immediately.
Seriously.  Stop reading this blog and go do it.

But most of the instruction came through stories and examples.  He told me about how he motivated a young student with severe attention difficulties by making sure the kid knew he wasn't in trouble when he heard his name called again and again, but instead it meant that he was about to hear something important that would help him learn and excel.  He told me about his rules for managing disruptive behavior.  Kids who need a time-out sit at the edge of the mat, but if they leave the mat they have to go home.  It draws a concrete line between being in class and not.  He even told stories about how to deal with upset parents and how to kick a student out of the school if a severe problem can't be solved any other way.

He also told a story about how he helped an adult student overcome a drug problem and clean up his life after getting out of jail.  When I suggested telling this story in detail on the blog, he seemed to think the story was not unique enough to be interesting.  While I have to respectfully disagree on that point, what he said next was plenty interesting by itself. He said, "That's not what teaching is about."

Kris Wilder, between classes.

He went on to explain that the goal is not to help people change, but to help them find something inside of them that was already there.  This launched us into a discussion about why people sign up for martial arts classes.  If you ask them, they will often say they want to learn self defense.  But why do they want to learn self defense?  Most of them do not face violence on a regular basis, so most new students' desire to learn self defense doesn't come from a fear of what will happen if they don't have those skills.  Instead, they often hope that this will be a solution to something that is missing in their lives.  For example, everyone has an innate need to feel competence.  Someone who does not feel competent at work or feels unappreciated there might seek to fulfill that need through martial arts.  In other words, students are already looking for something inside themselves.  The instructor's job is just to help them find it.

With kids it's different, of course, since sometimes they join because of the parents' interest and not their own.  He suggested a scenario where a kid's parents are "the Charlie Brown teacher," where it becomes the instructor's job to reach the students in a way the parents can't.

But he also pointed out that even though the objective of teaching is to reach students and help them find what is already inside them, reaching more students doesn't necessarily make you a better teacher.  Sensei Kris puts his money where his mouth is on this one.  He runs a small school, both in square footage and number of students.  By keeping it small he hopes to reach his students more deeply.  It's also worth pointing out that I never once heard him boast of his students' skill, but he was happy to tell stories of their achievements outside of martial arts.  There are no trophies or other tokens of students' karate accomplishments on display, but he does celebrate the students who have left him to go to college by displaying their schools' pennants.

The accomplishments of West Seattle Karate students.

In the end I interviewed Sophal and told his story instead of the one about getting out of jail.  It turned out to be another story about finding something within that was always there.  That was clever on Sensei Kris's part, but then he went all Mr. Miagi on me.  At one point in an unrelated conversation, I told him a story from when I was a kid.  One summer I taught a girl in Special Ed how to read, not knowing that everyone else had given up on her.  My point was that she obviously didn't deserve to be given up on, if a grade-schooler like myself could help her.  Sensei Kris suddenly took a serious tone and reinterpreted the story as evidence that I have always been a good teacher.

Now, please bear with me while I recap:

1.  Sensei Kris knew that I was not terribly confident about teaching his students.
2.  Sensei Kris was trying to teach me about teaching.
3.  Sensei Kris asserts that teaching is really about helping people find something they've always had.
4.  After hours of instruction on teaching, Sensei Kris finds a way to suggest that this is a skill I've always had.

I see what you did there, sir.