Meet the Founder - Part 3

Neighbour troubles

Imagine that your next door neighbours liked where you live so much that they turned up one evening and started living in your house, taking all the best rooms, eating all your food,taking the TV remote for themselves and making you live in the garden shed out the back with only leftovers to eat. You wouldn’t be very happy about it, would you? This was the situation in Korea when General Choi was growing up.

Japan, one of their nearest neighbours, had come into their country,and taken it over. The Japanese took all the best things for themselves,and the Koreans had to make do with whatever was left. Most of the Koreans were scared, did what they were told, and tried to live their lives as best they could, but Choi Hong Hi could not do it. He was deeply upset at how the Japanese treated his fellow Koreans, and he decided to do what he could to stop it. It is very hard for one person to make a difference, but he figured that if he could study to become a lawyer, then he had a chance at beating the Japanese with their own laws, and defend the rights of his poor people. Good Plan! There was only one little problem...

...Japan was on the losing side in a big fight (World War II... you don’t get a much bigger fight than that!). Too many Japanese had died and they needed a fast supply of soldiers to continue the fight if they had any hope of winning. The Japanese army decided that the Koreans could do this for them, and “encouraged” all the young men to join the army. Some of their ways of encouraging were not very nice, so hardly any Koreans refused, even though they knew they would probably die in the war. Many were just taken away, dragged from their homes, whether they liked it or not.

Choi Hong Hi was one of the ones that did everything they could to avoid joining the Japanese Army. They really didn’t want to fight Japan’s battles, and they didn’t want Japan to win either! Which of the following do you think he did to get out of joining the army?

a. Said, “No thanks, I want to be a lawyer, not a soldier”
b. Went on the run so they couldn’t find him
c. Ate nothing for three weeks so he would look too sick to fight
d. Got arrested and thrown in jail for hitting a policeman
e. Chopped off his fingers so he couldn’t hold a gun
f. Deliberately ate tuberculosis bacteria so he’d get too sick to fight (a nasty and often deadly disease it was too!)

Even though some of the men who did not want to fight really did chop off their own fingers or deliberately give themselves a deadly disease so that they wouldn’t get in the Army, Choi Hong Hi only tried all the other ways. It didn’t do him any good though, and he found himself in the Japanese Imperial Army – a law student no more.

I want more...take me to Part 4

Text from Taekwon-Do and I, The Memoirs of Choi Hong Hi, the founder of Taekwon-Do