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The founder of the Korean martial art of hapkido, Choi (born in 1904) always claimed to have been abducted, aged eight, from his village in present-day South Korea by—of all people—a Japanese confectionary maker. (There exist, however, several conflicting stories concerning Choi’s early years.)

The man abandoned the child in Moji, Japan, and Choi made his way to Osaka, where he was picked up by the police and placed in a Buddhist temple in Kyoto that cared for orphans.

In the two or so years that he spent at this templecum-orphanage, Choi had a particularly miserable time. Endlessly bullied because of his nationality and the fact that he couldn’t speak Japanese very well, he reacted in the only way he was able—with his fists.

Finally, the temple abbot thought to ask Choi where he saw his life going, and the young Korean replied that he was extremely interested in learning a martial art.

By a stroke of good fortune (surely by now deserved by Choi), the abbot—a man named Watanabe—knew the founder of the martial art daito-ryu aiki-jujitsu, Takeda Sokaku.

By all accounts, Choi was next whisked by Sokaku to a dōjō on Shin Shu mountain, where he and his sensei lived and trained for the following thirty years. During this time, said Choi later, he grew to have a complete understanding of Sokaku’s style.

Following the end of the Second World War, Choi returned to Korea, where for a time he earned his living raising and selling pigs. However, a local brewery chairman happened to see him in action when a heated discussion he’d been having with several men turned ugly. In the ensuing skirmish, Choi quickly saw the men off.

‘Hey, you’re pretty good,’ said the brewery chairman, a man named Suh Bok Sub (who was himself a first dan in judō). ‘Why don’t I pay to have a dojang (the Korean for training hall) built on my premises, so that you can teach there? I can be your first pupil!’

And so it was; in 1951 the two men opened a school named the Korean Yu Kwan Sool Hapki Dojang, followed, in 1958, by Choi’s very own school—which for the first time bore the shortened title ‘Hapkido’.

Having travelled as far as North America to teach his new martial art, Choi died in 1986 at the age of eighty-two.