Korea’s “Pushing Hands”: The Story behind the Global Cultural Expansion of Korean Martial Arts

ABSTRACT

Over the past few decades, South Korean popular culture has not only attracted a great deal of interest in neighbouring Asian countries, but has also penetrated the West, becoming a global phenomenon. This is not the first time that the world has experienced a cultural wave from the Korean Peninsula. The Asian martial arts craze that swept the West in the 1970s and 1980s would have been incomplete without such Korean contributions as Taekwondo, Hapkido and others that introduced the world to Korean culture long before the Hallyu of the late 1990s and early 2000s. With this in mind, a closer examination of the Korean martial wave can be instrumental in understanding the country’s current cultural interactions with the rest of the world. This article analyses the forces behind this wave by dividing them into two dichotomic categories: those originating from Korean culture and society (the transmitter), and those generated by cultural and social processes in the rest of the world (the receiver). The article concludes that the transmitter’s promotional efforts contributed to the overall success of Korean martial arts expansion to a far greater extent than the forces on the receiving side.

KEYWORDS:

• Korean cultural expansion
• Korean Wave (Hallyu)
• martial wave
• Korean martial arts
• Taekwondo
• Hapkido
• Tang Soo Do

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Professor Rotem Kowner and Dr Guy Podoler for their endless support and inspiration, and all the help they have provided throughout my work on this article. I am also indebted to two anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments and suggestions helped greatly to improve the manuscript.

Notes

1. Hwang Kee (1914–2002) was the founder of Moo Duk Kwan and the most prominent promoter of Tang Soo Do outside Korea. Moo Duk Kwan is one of the five original kwan founded in Korea in 1944 and 1945 which later united to create the martial art of Taekwondo. According to Kang and Lee (1999, p. 9), Moo Duk Kwan was the most influential of the five throughout the 1950s.

2. Kim was appointed president of the KTA in 1971 after working for the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. In the early 1970s, he founded both Kukkiwon and the WTF, after which he promoted Taekwondo through his activities in a number of Korean and international organisations, thus serving as a South Korean tool of sports diplomacy, until he was jailed for corruption in 2004.

3. Saemaul Undong was a rural development programme launched by the South Korean government in 1970.

4. In most Japan-based martial arts, dan refers to black-belt ranks.