The History of Hapkido: Korea's Art of Locks, Throws and Kicks

Takeda Sōkaku kept books. The Daitō-ryū master recorded who enrolled and who paid, meticulously, for decades, and his students remembered one another. Choi Yong-sool said he lived in that household for thirty years, serving and training under the Japanese name Yoshida Asao, until Takeda died in 1943. No Yoshida Asao appears in the books. No Korean servant appears in anyone's memory. And yet the man who came back to Daegu in 1946 knew Daitō-ryū's locks and throws so well that nobody has ever seriously doubted where they came from.

That is hapkido's history in one paragraph: a certain technique with an uncertain story attached. The short answer runs like this. Choi Yong-sool brought the joint locks, throws and pins of Daitō-ryū aiki-jūjutsu – or something very like them – from Japan to Daegu after Korea's liberation. His students, above all Ji Han-jae, added the kicks, the weapons and, around 1959, the name. After 1961 the South Korean state put the art into the presidential guard, the army and the police, and from there it went to the world. Its history is short, its documents thin and its lineage disputed, so this article says which parts are certain and which are the founders' word.

Key facts

Founder

Choi Yong-sool (1904–1986), teaching in Daegu from 1946

Technical root

Daitō-ryū aiki-jūjutsu, claimed from Takeda Sōkaku; unverified

Modern form

Ji Han-jae's Sung Moo Kwan, Seoul, 1957; name hapkido c. 1959

Meaning

Hap (harmony), ki (energy), do (way) – the same characters as aikido

Content

Locks, throws, pressure points, kicks, strikes, cane and stick

Organisation

Korea Hapkido Association 1965; many rival federations since

Thirty years that are not in the ledger

Choi Yong-sool was born in 1904 in Chungcheong Province, in a Korea that Japan would formally annex six years later. Around 1912 he was taken to Japan as a boy – kidnapped by a sweet-seller, by his own account – and from here on the story is his. He said he was placed in a Buddhist temple, then in the household of Takeda Sōkaku, master of Daitō-ryū aiki-jūjutsu and teacher of aikido's founder Ueshiba Morihei, and that he served and trained under Takeda for thirty years as Yoshida Asao until Takeda's death in 1943. Takeda kept meticulous enrolment and payment books. No Yoshida Asao or Choi is in them, and Takeda's students did not remember a Korean servant.

Historians and senior hapkido masters have argued about this for decades, and the honest summary has two halves. The techniques Choi taught – the joint locks, the throws from grabs, the pins – match Daitō-ryū so closely that a connection is certain. The details of how he came by them cannot be checked. Whether he studied with Takeda, with one of Takeda's students, or in another Japanese jujutsu school, he came back to Korea in 1946 with a complete grappling system that no one else in the country had. What he did not yet have was a student.

A rice-cake seller outside a brewery

Choi returned to Daegu after the liberation and sold rice cakes. The story goes that Suh Bok-sub, a judo black belt who owned a brewery, saw Choi defend himself against several men outside his office and took notice. Suh became the first student in 1948, and in 1951 the two opened a formal school in the brewery. Choi called the art yu kwon sul (“soft fist art”), later yu sul (“soft art”) or hapki yu kwon sul. Take the Korean names away and it was Daitō-ryū: locks and throws taught from grabs and strikes, with few kicks.

The kicks arrived with the students. Through the 1950s young men who had trained in the Korean striking arts came to Daegu, and the most important of them, Ji Han-jae (born 1936), joined Choi around 1953. Ji brought a large repertoire of kicks, drawn from the kwans of what was becoming taekwondo and, he said, from a Taoist teacher and a mysterious “Grandma” who taught him older Korean methods; he added weapons – the cane, the short stick, the rope – and a practice of meditation and breathing. In 1957 he opened the Sung Moo Kwan in Seoul, and around 1959 he and his circle settled on the name hapkido, written with the same three characters as the Japanese aikido, which Ueshiba's art had taken in 1942. Choi accepted the name for his own school in the 1960s. The modern art is his technique in Ji's frame.

The bodyguards, then the federations

Hapkido's rise was political. After Park Chung-hee seized power in 1961, Ji Han-jae's students taught the presidential security service and the army, and Ji himself became head instructor of the bodyguard corps. The police adopted the art; so did units sent to the Vietnam War; and for a decade the state's preference gave hapkido the same official standing as taekwondo. Organisation followed, by multiplication. The Korea Hapkido Association was founded in 1965, the Korea Kido Association by a different faction in the same decade, and dozens of associations, federations and kwans have issued ranks since. Choi built no organisation of his own. He taught in Daegu until shortly before his death on 15 June 1986.

The teachers left early. Han Bong-soo, a student of Choi and Ji, moved to California in 1967 and choreographed and appeared in the film Billy Jack (1971), whose hapkido fight scenes did for the art in America what Bruce Lee's films were about to do for kung fu. Ji Han-jae left Korea in 1984, after imprisonment in a political case, and founded Sin Moo Hapkido in the United States; the same year Myung Jae-nam, who had exchanged techniques with a Japanese aikido teacher, founded Hankido in Korea with a softer, aikido-like style. Schools opened across the Americas, Europe and Australia, usually as the self-defence complement to a taekwondo class, and the mix of hard kicks and soft locks made hapkido, for many students, the most complete of the Korean systems.

Hapkido today

No single governing body, no unified competition rules, no Olympic ambitions. That has kept hapkido what its founders made it: a self-defence art taught by lineage. Its schools run from grappling-centred traditionalists close to Choi's yu sul to acrobatic kicking schools closer to taekwondo, and its federations in Korea and abroad number in the dozens. What they share is the technical core Choi brought from Japan, the frame Ji gave it, and an argument about origins that, three generations on, still divides the art into those who believe the founder's story and those who check the records. Takeda's books have not changed.

Where to go next

• The hapkido discipline hub collects training articles, workouts and gear.
• The Japanese art with the same name and a shared root: The History of Aikido.
• The Korean striking art that supplied hapkido's kicks: The History of Taekwondo.
• Joint locks and throws also built judo: Judo: Kanō Jigorō and the Gentle Way.