Choi Hong-hi

Choi Hong-hi
Hangeul	최홍희
Hanja	崔 泓 熙
Revised Romanization	Choe Hong-hui
McCune- Reischauer	Ch'oe Honghŭi
See also : Korean name

Choi Hong-hi (born November 9, 1918 in Kankyō-hokudo , then the Japanese Empire , now North Korea ; † June 15, 2002 in Pyongyang , North Korea) was a South Korean major general and co-developer of the martial art Taekwondo .

Life

Choi Hong-hi was born on November 9, 1918 in the area of ​​Hwa Dae, in the Myong Chun district of the then Japanese province of Chosen (in the area of ​​today's North Korea). At the age of twelve he was expelled from school for incitement to the Japanese Empire, into which Korea was incorporated in 1910.

So his father sent him to see the calligraphy teacher Han Il-dong . With this he should have learned Taekkyon , but this is controversial. In his two-volume autobiography, Choi writes:

“The master [Note: Han Il-dong is meant] was good at one of the Korean traditional martial arts, Taek-Kyun [Note: Another spelling for Taekkyon], which mainly involved leg movements. He had a deep understanding of art. He was no less worried than Father about my weak body, which is why he talked to me about famous battles won. Even if it was perhaps on a low level, he himself showed me the basic movements of Taek-Kyun. "

- Choi Hong-hi

It is doubted that Han Il-dong mastered Taekkyon, as he is unknown as a Taekkyon master. Choi has also never demonstrated the basic movements he allegedly learned from Han. In addition, in the Gangneung region , where Choi was apprenticed to Han, the term “Taekkyon” was not used at all.

In 1938 Choi was sent to the main Japanese islands for further training. There he learned the Japanese martial art Shotokan Karate and gained his first Dan after two years of training . Later he is said to have obtained the second dan.

In the following years he made a steep military-political career in South Korea and developed the martial art Taekwondo. In 1972 he emigrated to Canada . In 1980 he brought Taekwondo to North Korea.

Choi died on June 15, 2002 at the age of 83 from stomach cancer in Pyongyang .

Martial arts in the cell

When the Second World War broke out , Choi was recruited into the Imperial Japanese Army . While stationed in Pyongyang, he was charged with organizing the Korean independence movement known as the "Pyongyang Students and Soldiers Movement" and detained in a Japanese prison for the eight months leading up to his trial. To alleviate the boredom and to keep himself physically fit, he is said to have practiced Shotokan Karate in his cell. In a short time, his cellmate and the prison guard became his students. The capitulation of Japan and the subsequent removal of control of the Chosen Province by the Allies in August 1945 saved Choi from a seven-year prison sentence. He then traveled to Seoul , where he founded a soldiers and student party.

Martial arts and military

In January 1946 he was accepted as a deputy lieutenant in the newly established Korean army and soon afterwards company commander of the fourth infantry regiment in Gwangju in Jeollanam-do Province (Choi Hong-hi, p. 24). There he began to teach his soldiers karate. He wanted to develop his own martial art that was superior to Japanese karate in psyche and technique.

Parallel to his steep military career (in 1948 he became lieutenant colonel , 1951 brigadier general , 1954 major general , 1958 head of the reservists' office, 1959 deputy commander of the 2nd Army in Daegu , 1961 commander of the 6th Army Corps ), his influence in the military grew and so on he was able to get the martial art he developed to be included in the army's training program (Choi Hong-hi, pp. 748-750).

Internationalization of Taekwondo

The martial art spread quickly on the Korean Peninsula under the new name Taekwondo . In 1959 Choi Hong-hi traveled with a 19-strong demonstration team to South Vietnam and Taiwan to spread Taekwondo outside of the peninsula (Choi Hong-hi, p. 24). This trip was an overwhelming success, both abroad and on the peninsula itself. In the years that followed, he traveled to America, Europe, the Near and Middle East with constantly reassembled teams; many members of these teams then stayed in the countries visited to spread the martial arts and to found new national associations. On March 22, 1966, the International Taekwondo Federation (ITF) was founded in Seoul . Choi Hong-hi became the first president of the ITF, and held that office until his death in 2002.

Martial Arts and Politics

In 1961, Choi supported the military coup in South Korea, but when General Park Chung-hee gained the upper hand, his star began to decline: in the late 1940s, Park was sentenced to death by a military court of which Choi was a member . The sentence was not carried out. When Park came to power, Choi was forced to retire.

In 1962 he was sent to Malaysia as an ambassador (Choi Hong-hi, p. 751). After his return to South Korea three years later, Choi was already "retired two-star general" (Choi Hong-hi, p. 752). And in 1968 he was awarded the "Order for Research in the Field of Sports" (Choi Hong-hi, p. 753). But in the course of the following years he found life under the park regime so unbearable that he emigrated to Canada in 1972 - the ITF also moved with him. In response to this, the regime-loyal World Taekwondo Federation (WTF) was founded in South Korea under the military dictatorship .

Web links

• Biography at itf-Ludwigsburg
• Biography on the website of the International Taekwondo Federation
• Obituary: Obituary , in The Guardian, August 9, 2002.
• Obituary , in The Daily Telegraph, June 26, 2002.
• General Choi Hong Hi in the Taekwondo Hall of Fame (Engl.)

credentials

1. ↑ ^{a b c d e f g h} Choi Hong Hi: Taekwon-Do. Ed. International Taekwon-Do Federation (Germany) 2003, p. 747
2. ↑ Choi Hong-hi: Taekwon-do and I. Volume 1. Motherland: the land in turmoil. Without information on the year and place of publication, p. 48. Quoted in Taekkyon - Wie Wasser und Wind
3. ↑ Hendrik Rubbeling: Taekkyon - Like water and wind. Self-published, Hamburg 2014, p. 203.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Hendrik Rubbeling: Taekkyon - Like water and wind. Self-published, Hamburg 2014, p. 204.

Note: This article places the family name before the person's first name. This is the usual order in Korean. Choi is the family name here, Hong-hi is the first name.