This research is to find out the life of Ahn Hwak focused on his life and spirit toward physical education. By looking into his whole life, we can see his authenticity on physical education as well as his leverage on the modern development of Korean ...
This research is to find out the life of Ahn Hwak focused on his life and spirit toward physical education. By looking into his whole life, we can see his authenticity on physical education as well as his leverage on the modern development of Korean physical education and more over, we can see how his spirit of physical education could provide us with the lead to solve the problems that modern Korean physical education has.
Searching for Ahn Hwak's life and his spirit of physical education, selections from his writings such as 『Collection of Jasan Ahn Hwak's Koreanology』 and 『Ahn Jasan's Collection on Koreanology』were used in regard to his comments and writings on physical education. The articles regarding physical education are 『The work of Young Men's Association』,『The Weird and Splendid Physical Education of Ancient Chosun』,『From ancient times to the present Physical Education of Envisage』, and 『Danoh and Chosun's style』. His spirit of physical education is based on his writings such as 『Writing on Self-awareness』,『Writing on reconstruction』, and 『The hero story of Chosun warriors』. Ahn Hwak concentrated on independence movement and studying Koreanology and also he established a baseball and soccer club first time in Kyungsangnam-do area. Although he was active in various physical education, his name is quite unknown to us. And his problematic wandering life is still vague.
This time raises doubts from many scholars who study his life. However, his wandering time wasn't made at once, but composed of many different travels from domestic areas to Japan, Manju, Beijing, and Hawaii whenever he got new purpose related to independence movement and study on Koreanology.
His life was all about independence movement and studying Koreanology, and he recognized the importance of physical education and took the initiative in studying and dissemination of modern physical education to the public.
In addition, he put emphasis on the importance of rationality through his writing, 『Writing on Self-awareness』and『Writing on reconstruction』. According to him, rationality highly depends on physical nature and healthy physical activity comes from the unification of those two. This idea was also used to awaken the relationship between physical education and moral virtue in his other writing 『The work of Young Men's Association』 in which he explained the effect and problem of field day, entertainment and travel to suggest his idea on the role of physical education in detail. Thanks to this effort, he published another big achievement in Korean history of physical education, the book called 『The hero story of Chosun warriors』. Meanwhile, there were divergent opinions on the time of publishing, but this study narrows the gap of publishing time and assumes the direct intension and background of this book by looking into Moon Il-pyung's diary. In the book, 『The hero story of Chosun warriors』, Ahn Hwak explained that the virtue of warrior came from martial arts and it is essential in human life. This accords with the purpose of physical education, too. Particularly, the book focuses on introducing various martial arts which effects on physical education and the importance of martial arts dialectically using thesis-antithesis-synthesis theory. To Ahn Hwak, martial arts were physical education and physical education was martial arts. This was to make people become aware of their physical and mental strength under the national crisis and regenerate themselves through the virtue of warrior. The trend of public opinion at that time and the present is very similar in terms of the tendency that makes light of physical education. At this point of time, Ahn Hwak's spirit of physical education is very suggestive to modern physical education and it definitely plays a part in enriching Korean history of modern physical education and martial arts.