A Study on the Chronological Contradictions in Choi Sang-su's "Rules of Ssireum" and the Retroactive Value of Ssireum Techniques from the Japanese Colonial Period

This paper examines, on an empirical basis, the chronological contradictions contained in “The Types and Rules of Korean Ssireum” by Ain (兒仁) Choi Sang-su (1918–2009), a pioneer of Korean folklore studies, and analyzes the historical retroactive value of the text. Bibliographical verification reveals a discrepancy between Choi Sang-su’s birth year (1918) and the experiential periods described or cited in the work. However, this study focuses on the fact that the technical classification recorded by Choi is consistent with the 1940 source “Sports Feature” (運動欄特輯), and that the text preserves the original form of “hand-striking techniques” that have been lost from modern Ssireum. In particular, following Hand Technique No. 5 (Under-Chin Strike) and No. 12 (Neck Press), the “Daetoe-chigi” technique of Soksa (Yanbian Ssireum), recently excavated at an academic conference jointly organized by Song Jun-ho and the Department of Physical Education of Yanbian University in 2016, is presented as evidence of the martial characteristics of Mindung-ssireum, in which the opponent’s vulnerable areas could be struck directly. Based on the biomechanical principle that a knife-hand strike to the back of the neck is more than a simple pushing action and can affect inertia and bodily reflexes, this paper argues that although Choi’s document is a late transitional text compiled in the early 1960s, its substantive technical content functions as a decisive “time capsule” through which the combative prototype of late-Joseon Mindung-ssireum can be traced retrospectively to the 1880s.