Jhoon Rhee, 1932–2018: The Definitive History of the Father of American Taekwondo

He arrived in Texas with forty-six dollars and so little English that a single page of a college textbook took him half an hour. He died sixty years later having taught more than 350 members of the United States Congress, invented the equipment that made sparring survivable, coached Muhammad Ali, lectured Soviet officials on honesty in the last year of the Soviet Union, and commissioned the advertising jingle half of Washington can still sing. This is the full record of Grand Master Jhoon Rhee’s life, from a village in occupied Korea to the Capitol, and what every school owner still owes him.

Tournament history: how Jhoon Rhee’s 1964 National Karate Championships and the fighters he trained led to the PKA and NASKA is traced in From Karate Illustrated to NASKA.

In context: how Jhoon Rhee’s institute became the root of the professional martial arts school business, and how its systems spread through Allen Steen, Pat Burleson, Nick Cokinos, Jeff Smith and their successors, is traced in The History of the Martial Arts School Business in the United States.

Korea, 1932–1956

A son, and a tiger in a dream

Jhoon Rhee was born on January 7, 1932, in Sanyangri, a village in Asan county in South Chungcheong Province, twenty-two years into Japan’s occupation of Korea. His father, Jin Hoon Rhee, was a clerk at a small company; his mother, Kayim Hong Rhee, had already given birth to two daughters, Namgoo in 1924 and Ahngoo in 1928. He was welcomed, he wrote seventy-eight years later, because he was a boy — in the Korea of his childhood almost every family wanted sons — and he added, with the plainness that runs through everything he wrote, that his mother served his father “almost like a king.” Two more children followed: a sister, Ongoo, and a brother, Jungoo, who would emigrate too and become Sam Rhee of New York.

Korean mothers speak of a taemong, a conception dream that foretells a child’s nature. His mother’s, as she told it to him, was of a palace behind a high, heavy castle wall and the roar of a tiger. He did not make much of it. His parents did, years later, when their son’s name began appearing in American newspapers.

Before his first birthday his sister dropped him on a hard floor and broke his right thigh bone midway between the knee and the hip. On the same day his maternal grandfather, Hong Chong Ki, died. His mother carried the baby five miles to her father’s house and, as he retold it, rubbed the broken leg with her dead father’s hand. The bone healed completely after one visit to a doctor. His mother told him later that she felt guilty that her fear for her son had crowded out her grief for her father. “Certainly,” he wrote, “you cannot predict the future of a child by past experience.” The leg he broke as an infant was the one he would jump and kick with for seventy years.

The grandfather

The person who shaped him most was his paternal grandfather, Kun Jae Rhee (1881–1973), a Confucian scholar who had received a doctorate from Sungkyunkwan, Korea’s ancient Confucian academy, on January 3, 1900, and who by family account lost the chance of a provincial governorship when Japan annexed Korea in 1910. Among his ten surviving grandsons, Jhoon Rhee counted four who became publicly known: a leading Korean scientist, a poet, a ports administrator and the one who taught Congress.

At five, under a family custom meant to build independence early, Jhoon was sent to live for a year with his uncle Sunghoon and his grandfather while his cousins lived with his parents. He learned to greet his grandfather each morning with a deep kneeling bow and the words “Did you have a peaceful rest through the night, sir?”; to say “sir” or “ma’am” at the end of every sentence to an elder; to stand when an elder entered and stay standing until told to sit; and to be silent when an elder spoke. Every instructor who has ever asked a class to answer “Yes, sir” is running a version of that household.

The same year produced what he called the most important moment in the building of his character. He lost a book his grandfather had given him, left on a school playground, and when his grandfather asked to see it he said he had lent it to a friend. His grandfather produced the book. He was punished twice, once for carelessness and once for the lie, and then his grandfather said softly: “My child, don’t you know that whenever you lie, cheat, or steal, God is watching; and whenever you do good, you are also being watched?” Seventy years of his public philosophy, which in the end reduced every human problem to deception, begins there.

His grandfather lived to ninety-two, which the grandson attributed to thirty minutes of stretching every morning. Jhoon Rhee’s “Daily Dozen,” the twelve stretching exercises built into the Jhoon Rhee curriculum, were designed, he wrote, from his memory of watching those exercises, with some yoga added.

The weakest boy in the class

Home again at six, he entered Shinpoong Grammar School in Suwon. He was the smallest child in every class until the seventh grade, finished last or next to last in every race, and came home crying because he could not stand up to bullies. The story he told about it for the rest of his life is precise. A five-year-old neighbour girl named Soonduck slapped him. He ran to his mother for comfort. His mother, furious that her son had been slapped by a younger girl, slapped him harder.

“When I found out she wasn’t going to be the answer to all my problems,” he wrote, “I knew I had to build the strength to stand on my own two feet.” There were no martial arts schools in Suwon, so he lifted weights, and did push-ups, sit-ups and whatever punching and kicking he could teach himself.

In 1943 he went to Seoul to live with his uncle Manhoon and attend Dong Sung middle and high school. He was there, on a summer visit to his grandfather, when Korea was liberated on August 15, 1945; he remembered screaming “We are free!” and his cousins looking at him as though he were a fool. That autumn his father bought a larger house in Suwon from a departing Japanese family. Two violins came with it. He taught himself to play them by ear, inventing his own names for the notes, and in 1946 he played violin and harmonica at a school talent show whose principal was Chang Myun, later Korea’s first ambassador to the United States and then its prime minister. He played folk songs of the kind street herbalists used to draw customers, and the next morning his classmates called him Yakjangsa, the quack medicine salesman. The harmonica, which he had started at six, stayed with him for eighty years.

Chung Do Kwan, 1947

In September 1947, aged fifteen, he enrolled himself at the Chung Do Kwan in Seoul, the school founded by Won Kook Lee, to learn what was then called Tang Soo Do and is now taekwondo. His conservative father regarded it as little better than street fighting, so for three months the boy told no one at home. When his father found out on a visit to Seoul, it was his uncle who persuaded him to give the approval the boy needed. A photograph in TRUTOPIA shows him in the front row of a 1948 promotion at the Chung Do Kwan as an eighth-grade (gup) white belt. (Some accounts, including this journal’s earlier profile, name Nam Tae-hi as his first instructor; both men were Chung Do Kwan, and Rhee’s own account names only the school and its founder.)

Two other things happened in those years that set the direction of his life. After liberation, American films flooded into Korea. Students were forbidden to attend them; he went anyway, and came out, he confessed, having decided to marry one of the beautiful women he had seen on the screen. The only way to do that was to get to America, and the only way to make a living there, he reasoned, was to introduce the art he was learning. So he studied English harder than any other subject. A ninth-grade teacher, Kwang Kim, praised his translation of a textbook passage in front of the class, and from then until graduation English was his best subject.

The second thing was a fight. In the eleventh grade, by then a brown belt, he asked a notorious bully to return a pencil the boy had snatched from his hand, was told to shut up, and invited him to settle it after school in the vineyard behind the building. The bully swung first. Rhee hit him in the left eye and kicked him in the throat, and the bully said, “You got me.” He came to school the next day with a black eye and had to explain it. “I personally gained my peace through strength,” Rhee wrote.

War, 1950–1953

In early June 1950 he graduated from high school, was admitted to Dongguk University and was elected vice president of the freshman class. Three weeks later, on June 25, North Korea invaded. With his nine-year-old brother Jungoo he fled south on foot to their grandfather’s house in Asan, arriving around the Fourth of July. North Korean troops passed through days later. After a month the two boys walked fifty miles back to Suwon, a three-day journey, to find their mother; the house was empty, and three hours later she came home carrying a sack of acorns, which were her daily food.

At eighteen he was exactly the age the occupying North Korean army was conscripting. He hid for a month in the underground cellar where the family stored its kimchi until American troops retook Suwon after the Inchon landing of September 15, 1950. When Seoul fell again to North Korean and Chinese forces in January 1951, he was washing dishes in a U.S. Air Force kitchen at the K-13 air base in Suwon, and was among a handful of Korean staff the Air Force evacuated south to Chinhae. His English, good on paper, now had to work in conversation.

What followed, in his telling, was a run of jobs that each depended on English and, when necessary, on his black belt. He hitchhiked toward the front, was taken on by an American lieutenant as a houseboy, and within a week was promoted to interpreter for a military police company of the U.S. 25th Infantry Division. Korean labourers, he wrote, were not always treated kindly by American soldiers, “but I didn’t have any problems with it because, whenever I got a new job, I always let everyone know that I was a Black Belt.” His officer gave him a Longines, the first watch he ever owned. In April 1951, too cold to stay at the front, he walked into a British Army food supply company at Seoul Railway Station without an appointment and came out as its interpreter, supervising more than a hundred labourers. A week later he staged a one-man demonstration at lunch for the officers, soldiers and labourers, and after that, he said, everyone was friendly. The Washington Post‘s obituary summarises this period more simply, as work as an interpreter for the U.S. Air Force; the detail above is his own.

In December 1951 the Korean Army drafted him. He described twelve weeks of basic training at Nonsan as hell, and then discovered that it had been heaven compared with the newly formed 101st Artillery Battalion near the front at Chulwon, where men slept in unheated tents with one blanket each and ate three spoonfuls of rice and a few sips of salt water a day because, he wrote, the commanding officer was selling three-quarters of the unit’s food on the black market. He thought about suicide and said so plainly in print. He applied instead for officer candidate school, which he had avoided because roughly seven in ten new lieutenants were being killed in action, and was sent to the officer cadet school in Kwangju, where there were three meals a day and six hours of sleep.

He wrote home that a general had arranged for him to stay on as a taekwondo instructor so that he would not be sent into combat. It was a lie, told to spare his parents — the one kind, he argued all his life, that is not a lie at all. Weeks before his class of 250 was due to graduate, the armistice was signed on July 27, 1953. “It felt like getting a presidential pardon from capital punishment,” he wrote. “My dead hope of promoting Taekwondo in the United States was alive again.”

The ticket to Texas

Commissioned after the truce, he trained in army aviation, then in weather and aircraft maintenance, and spent two and a half years teaching weather and aircraft maintenance to pilot students at the army aviation school. (This is why the obituaries disagree about his service: the Smithsonian remembered the interpreter, the Post an Air Force connection, and Wikipedia the officer. All three were true at different times.) When a notice announced an aircraft maintenance course in the United States for three officers, he competed against more than fifty applicants and, he learned later, passed with the highest grade. After a three-month English course he boarded his first aeroplane.

He landed at San Francisco on June 1, 1956. The cars, the neon, the skyscrapers and a Coke machine that counted out correct change stunned him. “What a contrast! I was in a hell yesterday and now I am in a paradise the next day.” He repeated that sentence in speeches for the next sixty years.

Texas, 1956–1962

A bag on a bench

From San Francisco he flew to Austin and waited three hours at the Greyhound terminal for a bus to San Marcos and Gary Air Force Base, where the Korean officers were to train. Ten minutes into the ride he realised he had left a bag on the waiting-room bench. He went back first thing the next morning, and it was still sitting exactly where he had left it. He told that story, too, for the rest of his life, as the moment he understood something about American integrity in 1956.

He was the only officer and the only non-American among about twenty students, and, again, the shortest. The coursework repeated what he had already learned in Korea, which let him spend the six months studying English instead. On his first Sunday he wore his uniform to the First Methodist Church in San Marcos to attract attention, and got it: many of the congregation had never seen an Asian person. The pastor introduced “Lieutenant Jhoon Rhee, an army officer from Korea” to the whole church. Afterwards a young couple, the Rev. Frosty Rich and his wife Betsy, invited him to the Wesley Foundation, the Methodist student centre at Southwest Texas State Teachers College, and he became a regular.

His mission for those six months was to find an American who would sponsor him to return as a student, which meant taking legal responsibility for his welfare. Nobody came forward, and with a week left he had concluded, he admitted, that Americans were cold people. At his last Sunday service the pastor asked whether anyone would help Lieutenant Rhee continue his education in America, and an elderly real estate broker, Robert L. Bunting, stood and said, “I will!” The Richs had arranged it in advance. The Buntings walked him to the front of the church, the congregation sang a hymn and prayed for his safe return, and he was introduced to the college’s president, Dr. John G. Flowers, and Mrs. Flowers, who became, in his words, his foster parents. “Without Mr. & Mrs. Bunting’s sponsorship,” he wrote under their photograph fifty years later, “I wouldn’t be living in America and Taekwondo may not have been introduced to the world in such a positive and successful way.”

Forty-six dollars

He went home, served out his obligation, received an honourable discharge and returned to San Marcos on November 21, 1957, with, as the Congressional Record later put on the official record of the United States, forty-six dollars. He registered for classes on February 3, 1958. Bob Livingston, who became one of his black belts in Congress, wrote that in that first year it took Rhee half an hour to read a single page of a college textbook. At a Methodist student conference in Lawrence, Kansas, that winter, he was struck not by what a Chinese guest speaker said but by how fluently he said it, and set himself the goal of speaking English that well. He got around campus on a motor scooter.

He taught while he studied. He advertised his classes as karate, because that was the word Americans knew, and adopted taekwondo only after General Choi Hong-hi‘s visit in 1960 — which is how he came to be described, on this account, as America’s first taekwondo instructor. He chose the word his market recognised, and changed it when the market could carry the real one. In September 1960 he transferred to the University of Texas at Austin to study engineering.

The engineering degree

Whether he finished it is one of the small contradictions of his life. His own book says both things: in one place that he was “a civil engineer from the University of Texas,” in another that when his Washington school took off he “had to stay in Washington, DC and leave behind his civil engineering degree.” A 1975 first-person interview is explicit that he never went back to complete it. We follow the interview. It matters less than the coursework, which he credited for the design of the safety gear a decade later: speed and power, statics and dynamics.

His time in Texas also left him with a memory he returned to in 2009, watching Barack Obama’s inauguration: of seeing, as a student, a Black man dragged out of a restroom by police. He counted the distance between the two scenes as evidence that America keeps its promises, slowly.

Allen Steen and Pat Burleson

Texas also gave him his first two American black belts, Allen Steen and J. Pat Burleson, promoted within months of each other in 1962 and 1963. When Rhee left for Washington they became the primary developers of karate in the Southwest and made Texas one of the two birthplaces of American martial arts, alongside Chicago. They also broke from his organisation for commercial independence — and Steen’s championships a decade later were the first to require Rhee’s safety gear, and still called the two of them “the two original leaders of the Jhoon Rhee Taekwondo organization” in 2010, captioning a photograph from Steen’s sixtieth birthday. Steen’s lineage runs on through Chuck Norris; Burleson’s through the Fort Worth studio where, in 1985, Rhee would invent the industry’s business seminar.

Washington, 1962

Six students and a summer job

He went to Washington in the summer of 1962 for what was supposed to be a summer job at an existing karate school. The school had six students and could not pay his salary. So he opened his own, at 2035 K Street NW, on June 28, 1962, in less than a thousand square feet.

Before he could afford much advertising, he did two things. He wrote to most of the foreign ambassadors in Washington announcing the school and promising to guarantee their children’s character education and to help them make all A’s and B’s. And he bought two small advertisements on the sports page of The Washington Post. The phone, he remembered, rang all day. More than two hundred people came to opening day to watch his one-man demonstration. The guest of honour was General Chung Il-kwon, the Korean Army’s former chief of staff and a senior diplomat, who told the crowd an old Korean saying — “the smaller a green pepper, the hotter it is” — and said that Rhee had been the smallest and hottest young officer under his command. Rhee broke three one-inch boards with a speed punch and three more, seven feet off the ground, with a jump kick. He is five feet six.

Twelve people signed up that day. He had more than thirty within a month and a hundred and twenty-five by the end of August. He never went back to Texas.

One day a distinguished-looking man walked in and introduced himself as Captain John Fightner of the U.S. Navy, who, in Rhee’s telling, had read about tough Korean soldiers using taekwondo in Vietnam. (Korean combat troops did not reach Vietnam until 1965, so the visit was probably later than the opening months, or the reading was about their training.) After a ten-minute trial lesson he signed up, and the next day he brought a dozen Navy officers, three of them captains. Rhee, who eleven years earlier had been a houseboy for an American soldier, now had a class of American officers. “What a contrast in one life,” he thought.

The grades rule, and the diplomats’ children

Alongside the officers trained many diplomats’ children, and the school’s report-card rule, described below, meant they could not test for black belt without good grades. Ambassadors were delighted, and several asked him to send instructors to their own countries in South America and Africa. He had no instructors to spare, because he wanted to expand in America as fast as he could, so he introduced the ambassadors to his old classmates from Korea.

How much of taekwondo’s spread around the world follows from those introductions is impossible to measure, and Rhee’s own claims for it are large: that the Korean instructors he placed became bodyguards to kings and presidents, and made early business connections for Samsung, Hyundai, LG and SK when those companies were small. What is not in doubt is the mechanism, which is that an instructor in the capital of the world’s most connected country, teaching diplomats’ children, became a referral point for the art. Taekwondo today is practised in more than two hundred countries and has been an Olympic sport since 2000.

From one school to many

Within five years he had five schools, and he gave a motivational talk at every monthly promotion, which is how, he said, he learned to speak in public. By 1967 he could buy a house in Arlington, Virginia, for $60,000. Before buying it he showed a photograph to his assistant instructor, Jack Dutcher, a former Marine, who told him it was too big: “People will think you’re a Chinese houseboy.” Sure enough, as Rhee was mowing the lawn one Sunday a man in a black Cadillac convertible stopped and shouted, “Say, boy! How much an hour do you charge?” Rhee answered: “Nothing, sir, but I get to share the master bedroom with the madam who owns the house.” The man drove off.

By 1970 he had eight schools and studios in the Dominican Republic. At its mid-1980s peak the Jhoon Rhee Institute ran eleven studios and taught more than ten thousand students, with roughly twenty-five black belt instructors on staff. In 1980, by his own account, he stopped teaching regular classes in his schools in order to train, expand the organisation and travel as a speaker.

Forty-one years after the opening, the mayor of Washington declared June 28 Jhoon Rhee Day.

The Congressional Taekwondo Club

A congressman is mugged

His stated ambition was to teach members of Congress, because the image of taekwondo in Korea was low and he believed it had to be raised to succeed in America. He had been giving free lessons to reporters and public figures with that in mind. In the spring of 1965 one of his students, Dr. Jose Jones, handed him a front-page story in The Washington Post: Representative James Cleveland, a New Hampshire Republican, had been attacked near Capitol Hill. Rhee called Cleveland’s office the same day and left a message offering to teach him self-defence. He was, he said, following his father’s rule — “if your dream is strong enough and long enough, the dream will always come true” — and an old Korean one: “Don’t wait for an apple to fall into your mouth; climb up the tree to get one.”

Cleveland called back the next day and asked about times and prices. Rhee offered the lessons free and offered to come to the Hill himself to save the congressman’s time. Cleveland said he would ask colleagues whether they could form a class. Then he asked why it was free. Rhee’s answer, as he recorded it:

Sir, I have been grateful for what America did for Korea during the Korean War. I know 34,000 precious young American lives have been sacrificed for a country they never heard of, people they never knew. I wanted to do something to pay back, in my small way, for this American generosity.— Jhoon Rhee to Rep. James Cleveland, 1965, as recalled in TRUTOPIA

A Post photograph from the period shows Cleveland lunging at Rhee with a letter opener while Rhee’s assistant John (Jack) Dutcher watches; the caption notes that Cleveland had been attacked once with a linoleum knife and once with a letter opener, and records Rhee’s advice: “The safest way with a knife is the further away you are.”

The class began in 1965 in the members’ gymnasium in the basement of the Rayburn House Office Building. TRUTOPIA gives two dates for the first session, May 6, 1965, in one place and June 5, 1965, in another; no independent source fixes the day. It met three mornings a week, before the working day, free of charge, for the next forty-five years. Livingston remembered being booked at 7 a.m. “virtually every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday morning for several years,” and earning his black belt with “only a couple of modestly broken toes to show as war wounds.” In later years Rhee’s assistant, Master Ronnie Kim, taught when Rhee was travelling; attendance by then was five or six members a class.

If I wanted to do this for publicity, I would do this for four years. Not 45 years.— Jhoon Rhee

Who trained

By Rhee’s count more than 350 members of Congress went through the club; the Congressional Record put the figure at 250 in 2000, and Rhee’s own count was near 400 by his death. TRUTOPIA lists nineteen who earned black belts: Bob Borski, Bill Chappell, Mike Espy, Richard Ichord, Jesse Jackson Jr., James Jeffords, Mel Levine, Bob Livingston, Carolyn Maloney, Mike McIntyre, Toby Roth, Bob Schaffer, Gerry Sikorski, Nick Smith, Ted Stevens, Richard Swett, James Symington, Gene Taylor and Milton Young. Among the other members it names as students are Joe Biden, one of the first; John Boehner, Tom Foley, Newt Gingrich, Barbara Mikulski, Xavier Becerra, Peter DeFazio, Duncan Hunter, Jack Kingston, Dan Lungren, Jim Moran, Connie Morella, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Christopher Shays, Ike Skelton, Floyd Spence, Walter Fauntroy, Quentin Burdick and Greg Meeks.

A few of them left particular marks. Toby Roth of Wisconsin broke two boards at his black belt test in the Russell Senate Office Building on June 24, 1986, and later wrote the biographical section of TRUTOPIA; he describes himself as one of Rhee’s “tens of thousands of Black Belt students.” Jesse Jackson Jr. earned his black belt in fifteen months, testing on July 23, 2001, after losing more than thirty pounds by drinking water, Rhee reported, which he recommended to everyone. Speaker Tom Foley broke two one-inch boards with an elbow strike at the Jhoon Rhee Championships at the Shoreham Hotel on August 1, 1993. A local news feature from that year, “Jhoon Rhee and the Congress”, shows Foley and other members in the demonstration. NBC’s John Chancellor filmed a session attended by Senators Ted Stevens and Quentin Burdick and Representatives Richard Ichord, James Symington, Floyd Spence and Tom Bevill.

The club also produced one of the most effective political advertisements of its era. Senator Milton Young of North Dakota, then in his late seventies and facing a challenge built around his age, trained with Rhee and ran a television spot in which he broke a board. He beat former Governor William Guy in the 1974 election by 177 votes, 114,852 to 114,675. (TRUTOPIA dates the race to 1977 and puts the margin at 200 votes; the election returns say otherwise.) Rhee said he was praised for the suggestion.

Republicans against Democrats

In 1975 Rhee staged what the Washington City Paper later called a charity “battle royale” at the D.C. Armory: members of Congress sparring, Republicans against Democrats. By Rhee’s account it took place on September 14, 1975, before more than five thousand people, with Senator Ted Stevens, Representative Floyd Spence and Representative Bill Gradison for the Republicans and Senator Quentin Burdick, Representative Tom Bevill and Delegate Walter Fauntroy for the Democrats. It ended in a draw. He believed it did more for the public image of his art than anything else he had done; it was televised and, he said, covered by the foreign press. An excerpt of that broadcast survives on his own channel.

Forty-five years

The class ran into the second decade of this century. On September 30, 2010, friends, family, students and former students filled the Caucus Room of the Cannon House Office Building to mark his forty-five years of volunteer service to Congress; the photograph of the plaque presentation shows, among others, Bob Livingston, Dick Swett, Trent Franks, James Symington, Connie Morella, Toby Roth and Katherine Harris. His stated goal at the time was to reach fifty years in 2015. Every account of those years agrees on the essential point: in forty-five years he never charged a member of Congress for a lesson. His office posted footage of the evening: the congressional reception and the hundred push-ups in fifty seconds he did in the Caucus Room, an event billed as his eightieth birthday.

What he invented on the business side

This is the section other obituaries skipped, and it is the reason this magazine exists. Jhoon Rhee was not the first martial artist to charge tuition in America, but he was the first to run a martial arts school as a marketing business on purpose, and to say so in public at a time when most of his peers regarded that as a betrayal.

He wrote to a high-value list

The ambassadors’ letters of 1962 were, in modern language, a targeted outbound campaign to a high-value list, run on a budget of nothing. The two small Post ads were a test of paid media. The opening-day demonstration, with an ambassador to lend it status, was an event. He had all three running before he had a hundred students.

He gave away lessons on purpose

The free Congressional class is usually told as a story about gratitude, and it was one; the reason he gave Cleveland in 1965 is consistent with everything he said for the next fifty years. It was also the most valuable marketing asset any martial arts school in America has ever owned: a class that brought him Speakers of the House, front-page photographs and the implicit endorsement of Congress. Rhee understood both halves of that, and was never embarrassed by the second.

“Nobody bothers me”

He was one of very few martial artists who believed in heavy advertising in the 1960s. He spent heavily in the TV Guide section of the Post, and he was, by most accounts, the first taekwondo master to advertise on television. The commercial featured his own children — Chun, standing on a milk crate, and Meme, the younger — and ran for around twenty years across the mid-Atlantic on Washington’s channels 4, 5, 7, 9 and 20. (Accounts of their ages differ; a caption in TRUTOPIA puts them at four and three in 1972, and Livingston’s foreword remembers the same.)

The jingle came later, in 1978, written and recorded by Nils Lofgren, who would go on to Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band, at Bias Studios in Falls Church. Conception to broadcast took under a month. Lofgren was paid in a lifetime membership.

The copy: “When you take Jhoon Rhee self-defense, then you too can say ‘Nobody bothers me. Nobody bothers me.’ Call USA-1000. Jhoon Rhee means might for right!” And then Chun, winking: “Nobody bothers me either!”

Note the phone number. He did not buy a number; he bought a mnemonic. Rhee said the jingle boosted business by twenty percent. Years later he said the slogan had changed his own attitude, from “Nobody bothers me” to “Nothing bothers me.”

I couldn’t believe it. Even now when I walk in the street — ‘Nobody bothers me!’— Jhoon Rhee, 2012

The report-card rule

Rhee required his students to earn A’s or B’s in school to be eligible for black belt rank. Every report-card incentive and character-education programme in this industry is downstream of that rule. So is the practice, now almost universal, of selling martial arts to parents as an education product rather than a fighting skill.

He paid instructors in equity

He gave Jeff Smith company stock, which Smith later exchanged for outright ownership of two schools. Smith came in as an instructor, moved up through management, and ended up training staff across ten locations. That is an instructor-retention mechanism most schools still do not have.

Nick Cokinos and the billing industry

Jeff Smith, who was there: “Nick Cokinos [the Educational Funding Company founder] helped Grandmaster Rhee initiate the [business] systems, although they had a falling out a few years later.”

EFC was founded in 1967, squarely inside Rhee’s expansion from one school to eight. Third-party tuition billing — the mechanism under most of this industry’s cash flow — was worked out in and around the Jhoon Rhee Institute in the late 1960s. Nobody has ever told that story properly. The deal terms, the contract structure and the nature of the falling out are not in any public source, and we will not speculate about them.

He charged, and said why

Critics in his own art called him commercial. His answer, which he put to struggling instructors in the 1980s, was a question: “Do you think what you teach has no value?” Most instructors of his generation, he believed, had absorbed from their teachers the idea that making money from martial arts was a kind of crime, and were proud to say they taught for free. He thought that was both false modesty and bad for students, and he said so for thirty years.

The tournament

In 1964 Rhee promoted the first National Karate Championships in Washington. Pat Burleson won it, and Rhee said he was proud that one of his own students won his first tournament. He ran the event through 1970, and tournaments under his name, the Jhoon Rhee Championships and later the Internationals, continued for decades. Film survives of the 1973 team match between Chuck Norris’s Los Angeles team and Rhee’s Washington team, and of Rhee’s own demonstration at the 1996 Internationals, aged sixty-four. Its champions and the fighters Rhee trained — among them Jeff Smith, Jim Butin, Skipper Mullins, Fred Wren, Demetrius Havanas, Pat Worley, John Worley, Gordon Franks and Wayne Van Buren — became the backbone of American sport karate and, through the PKA and NASKA, of the professional circuit.

He was, notably, an independent. He never joined the International Taekwon-Do Federation or the Korean Taekwondo Association, and spent six years, from 1964 to 1970, in meetings with Korean instructors trying to form a unified American organisation. It failed. The style his schools taught drifted away from Korean orthodoxy toward something he eventually called American taekwondo — forms to music, padded contact, curriculum built around character — and much of the Korean establishment never forgave him for it.

Bruce Lee

Long Beach, August 1964

Rhee and Bruce Lee were both invited to demonstrate at Ed Parker‘s International Karate Championships in Long Beach, California, in early August 1964 — Lee showing gung fu, Rhee taekwondo. Each was impressed by the other: Rhee by the quality of Lee’s punching, Lee by Rhee’s kicks. A widely shared clip shows Lee demonstrating at one of Rhee’s Washington tournaments; the uploader dates it 1968, which we have not been able to confirm. They became close friends and, for several years, visited each other about once a year; Rhee’s house was Lee’s home in Washington, and Lee’s house was Rhee’s in Los Angeles. A photograph in TRUTOPIA shows the two on a Los Angeles beach in 1968.

The exchange between them is almost always reported backwards, so, precisely:

Rhee taught Lee to kick. High kicks, side kick and round kick.

Lee taught Rhee the punch. An extremely fast strike built on exploiting human reaction time — it launches at the instant of decision, with no telegraphing lag, which is what makes it nearly impossible to block. Rhee named it the accupunch. He also trained in Jun Fan Gung Fu under Lee.

Rhee was irritated, late in life, by Korean press accounts that made him Lee’s teacher. “They learned from each other,” his book insists. He thought Lee a born martial artist and, pound for pound, the strongest man he ever met: nobody, he was told, had ever beaten Lee at arm-wrestling, and he had never before seen anyone do two-finger push-ups. “Bruce Lee was not an easy person to be close to,” he wrote, “but once he trusted a person, he would go out of his way to be helpful.”

In July 1970 Lee flew with Rhee to the Dominican Republic, where Rhee had scheduled black belt tests for his students there. TRUTOPIA reproduces photographs of Lee being welcomed at the airport, attending the testing and appearing on Dominican television, where his demonstration was a sensation.

When Taekwondo Strikes

It was on Lee’s recommendation that Golden Harvest cast Rhee, who had never acted even in a school play, in When Taekwondo Strikes, shot in Hong Kong in 1973 and directed by Huang Feng. It is a story of Korean resistance to the Japanese occupation, and it was based, Rhee said, on a synopsis he wrote. The billing is a point of pride in his account: he says he had signed a contract for the leading role, and that Lee argued with the director during editing to stop Rhee being moved to second billing. The released film credits Angela Mao first and Rhee second, as the taekwondo master Lee Chung-dong. He also had a small, uncredited part in Lee’s Fist of Fury. The original trailer is posted by Fortune Star, which holds the Golden Harvest library.

Shooting and editing were completed, by Rhee’s account, on July 18, 1973. On July 19 Lee telephoned him from Hong Kong to say the film was ready. The next day Lee was dead. Rhee called Linda Lee to confirm the news and believed he may have been the last person in America to speak to Lee. He took one more film role, in a Korean production shot in 1980 with Jeff Smith and Randy Anderson, the son of the columnist Jack Anderson, which he called Return of Dragon Masters; fan sources know it as Return of Rhee and, for a planned American release that never happened, Rampage. Then he declined further film work to concentrate on his family and his schools. In 2000 he published a short memoir of the friendship, Bruce Lee and I. Decades later he and Linda Lee Cadwell appeared together in Fort Worth to honour Lee’s memory.

Safe-T equipment

A broken cheekbone

In 1969 one of his students and instructors, Pat Worley, was seriously injured in competition; the most common account says his cheekbone was broken. Rhee said later that he felt he had two choices, to leave the business or to make it safe, and that he was equipped for the second because he knew both martial arts and engineering.

The design process is worth the detail. He tried foam rubber sandwiched around hard plastic, bulky chest vests, face masks. The breakthrough came from seeing a water-ski jacket in a sporting goods store and adopting the material. He ran roughly thirteen prototypes. He tested headgear while driving, having his son Jimmy wear them and give feedback at traffic lights.

Manufacturing: foam dipped six times, fifteen minutes drying between coats, seams hand-glued on every visible edge. Finished units weighed under four ounces. He built a factory in Virginia — Rheemax, Inc. — to guarantee supply, because his specialised foam was capped at ten percent of a friend’s plant output. The line eventually covered the hand, foot, head, chest, shin and elbow — Safety Face, Safety Glove, Safety Kick, Safety Chest, Safety Shin, Safety Elbow — and a photograph in his book shows his son Chun wearing the helmet, gloves and chest protector.

From a product to a rule

Production went from about 400 pairs a month in January 1974 to about 2,000 a month by December, and reached roughly ninety percent penetration among American instructors. It was marketed through Professional Karate and Black Belt. Mandatory use was voted in by the professional tournament figures of the day — Chuck Norris, Pat Worley, Pat Burleson, Allen Steen, Mike Stone, Mike Anderson, Fred Wren — and adopted by the Southwest, Southeast and Northeast associations. Allen Steen’s championships in February 1974 were the first to require it.

Chuck Norris said the gear “upgraded Karate by 10 years.” Jeff Smith said something more useful to a school owner: it “minimizes the injury but also the student drop-outs.”

Read that again. The safety equipment was a retention product. The man who invented it and the man who sold it both understood that, in 1974. Rhee went further in his own book: most martial artists, he wrote, believed the gear saved the industry, because insurers soon would not cover schools that sparred without it. We have not found an insurer’s policy that confirms the second half of that sentence, but nobody who ran a school in the 1970s doubts the first.

Patents, and the Museum of Modern Art

His Safety Face Mask of 1976, in vinyl-coated polyurethane foam, is in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (object number 213.1998, Architecture and Design). He remembered the letter telling him it had been selected as a surprise.

The patent record is larger than this journal first reported. Google Patents lists about twenty-one U.S. utility patents naming Jhoon Rhee as inventor — two filed in 1972 for a karate glove and a protective shoe, about ten filed in 1974 and 1975, five in 1978 and 1979, one in 1985 and one filed in 2002 and granted in 2009 for a posture apparatus — plus five design patents for helmets from 1974 and 1975, and foreign filings in Germany, Canada and at the European Patent Office. TRUTOPIA says “over twelve US patents” and patents in fifteen other countries; the U.S. figure understates the record and we could not check the foreign one. The posture patent was the product of what he described as ten years’ work on spine-correcting shoulder straps for children hunched over computers. He hoped governments would one day issue them to every child.

Seventeen years of patent protection, he said, made him financially comfortable enough to pay for his later work in the former Soviet Union.

When you’re tied by tradition, there is no improvement.— Jhoon Rhee, 1975

Martial ballet and “Might for Right”

The first musical form, 1968

In 1968 Rhee choreographed what he believed was the first musical form in martial arts history, set to the theme from the film Exodus. It ran two minutes and eighteen seconds, and he timed a spoken narrative to it so that words, music and movement landed together. He called it “Might for Right,” which had been the Jhoon Rhee Institute’s motto since 1962.

The motto rests on an old idea that turns up in several languages, including Korean: that the right hand stands for what is righteous and the left for what is sinister. He was careful to add that he did not mean left-handed people were evil; his son Jimmy was left-handed, “but Jimmy is certainly a good man.” The narrative, which he wrote in 1968 and reprinted in full more than forty years later, is the earliest statement of the philosophy he spent the rest of his life developing:

In the beginning, when the universe was created, the energy of God swept across the great void in a definite direction. Truth, Beauty, and Love manifested through all things of His creation… Since then, one strange element that has remained a mystery crept into the midst of all mankind: the evil force: Deceiving, Ugliness, and Hatred. Let us make the left hand a symbol of that evil… As Truth, Beauty, and Love cast all the evil elements out of this universe, so does the righteous right cover the evil left: Might for Right.— Jhoon Rhee, “Might for Right,” 1968

He went on to choreograph forms to classical music — Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, which became “The Marriage of East and West,” “Granada,” Strauss — and to national anthems, beginning with “The Star-Spangled Banner” (a form he called Meegook, Korean for America), “God Bless America” and the Korean anthem. He called them martial ballets. Recordings of him performing “Exodus”, Beethoven’s Fifth and “Granada” circulate among his former students. He also let his students create them, and formally approved one black belt’s Beethoven’s Fifth composition. That is his line about tradition, in practice.

For daring to do it, he said, many taekwondo masters called him every name they could think of, including “Fool Master Jhoon Rhee.” He lived to see almost every open tournament in the country offer musical forms divisions and grand championships. He went further than competition: martial ballets to national anthems became part of the Jhoon Rhee curriculum worldwide, taught, he said, in eight countries, and performed to the American anthem by students who had never been to America. Toby Roth wrote that he could barely believe his eyes watching the video. “It’s hard enough,” he added, “just trying to teach foreigners how to sing the National Anthem.”

He had a larger purpose for it. His vision of a perfected society, which he described at length late in life, was a society of performing artists; he believed people were born to perform arts, not to work, and that martial arts set to music was proof that the fighting arts belonged among them.

Muhammad Ali

The punch he could not block

Rhee met Muhammad Ali in 1975. He demonstrated the punch he had learned from Bruce Lee; Ali could not block it, and asked to be taught. Rhee said he coined the name accupunch while training Ali for the Dunn fight in 1976. His own definition, written for the book he published in 2010: a punch executed “at the moment I decided to punch — a punch of the body and mind in synchronization,” with no gap between decision and execution, so that there is no telegraphed motion to react to. He explained it with a traffic light: you cannot brake at the instant the light changes, because the eye has to tell the brain and the brain has to tell the foot. In seminars he invited volunteers to block it, and only once in his life, by luck, did someone manage, in Hawaii.

Ali, on the record: “I learned the Accupunch from Mr. Jhoon Rhee. It acts at the exact moment you decide to hit, and there is no lag time at all.” The blurb Rhee chose for his book is shorter: “Master Rhee taught me Accu-Punch; it is so fast, you can hardly see it.” A photograph in TRUTOPIA shows Rhee demonstrating his side kick to Ali at the Deer Lake, Pennsylvania, training camp in 1976.

Munich and Tokyo, 1976

On May 24, 1976, at the Olympiahalle in Munich, Ali defended his title against the British champion Richard Dunn. Dunn went down five times; the referee, Herbert Tomser, stopped the fight at 2:05 of the fifth round. When the NBC commentator asked Ali what kind of punch had done it, Ali, Rhee remembered, said on air that it was Jhoon Rhee’s accupunch, and Rhee could not believe Ali had given him credit so plainly. It was the last time Muhammad Ali ever knocked an opponent down. Top Rank has posted the full fight, and the journalist Alex Gillis, author of A Killing Art, made a short film on Ali, Rhee and the accupunch.

Rhee was in Ali’s camp again for the exhibition in Tokyo on June 26, 1976, against the Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki, which ended in a draw. Rhee’s organisation and several reference works describe him as Ali’s head coach for both fights. Ali’s head trainer throughout that period was Angelo Dundee; Rhee was in the camp as a martial arts coach and technique specialist, which is how his own photo captions put it: “I served as Ali’s Martial Arts Coach.”

The day after the Inoki fight, June 27, Rhee persuaded Ali to fly to Seoul. More than twenty members of Ali’s camp went with him. By Rhee’s account crowds lined both sides of the road from Kimpo Airport into the city, waving American and Korean flags — he estimated a million people — and Ali made more than a dozen appearances in four days, including an MBC television show on June 30. Nothing Rhee did made him better known in Korea. The Associated Press filmed the visit, including the crowds at Kimpo and Ali at a U.S. Army base in Dongducheon.

A public life, 1976–1988

“Martial Arts Man of the Century”

In the Bicentennial year, by Rhee’s account, the Washington Touchdown Club honoured five sports figures at a dinner at the Shoreham Hotel for two thousand people, with Bob Hope as master of ceremonies and Henry Kissinger receiving the first award, as Man of the Century: Muhammad Ali as boxer of the century, Wilt Chamberlain for basketball, Joe DiMaggio for baseball, Jim Brown for football, and Jhoon Rhee as “Martial Arts Man of the Century.” The columnist Jack Anderson introduced him. TRUTOPIA includes photographs of Rhee receiving the award from Anderson and standing with Chamberlain. We have not found an independent contemporary report of the event; the only other sources for it are the Congressional Record tribute of 2000 and later profiles, both of which repeat Rhee’s own biography.

His remarks that night are worth recording because they show how he worked a room. He thanked Kissinger’s embassy staff in Seoul for “working very hard and smart to pick the right people to issue visas only to good people like me.” Then, noting that the hottest argument in sport was who would win a fight between Ali and Chamberlain, he called Ali up to settle it on stage, and told Chamberlain to wait his turn until he had knocked Ali out first. Bob Hope, Rhee reported with pride, said he “must have a hell of a jock strap.”

Presidents and a parade

In 1980 Rhee and Jack Anderson were in Seoul for the inauguration of President Chun Doo-hwan and, by his account, were among Chun’s first dinner guests; he said he was the first person to sign the Blue House guest book that year. When Chun visited Washington for his summit with Ronald Reagan in early 1981, Rhee filled ten buses with five hundred taekwondo students to welcome him near Blair House. The President’s arrival was late, the students waited four hours, and Rhee ended up buying every student a hamburger and a soda.

In 1982 he was asked to chair the Fourth of July celebration in Washington. He accepted, he said, as fast as he could, “before anyone could change their mind,” and compared it later to the election of Barack Obama: something he would once have thought impossible for an Asian American. He formed an advisory committee drawn mostly from Congress, booked Wayne Newton for the concert on the Mall, which drew a crowd approaching a million, and gave fifteen thousand dollars toward the fireworks as a gift to the country that had defended Korea.

He also built a human flag. Two hundred and twenty-nine students in red, white and blue uniforms stood for the 229 million Americans of 1982, and 206 more for the 206th Independence Day; they led the parade as the first group and then performed the “God Bless America” martial ballet on the Mall, and won first prize among 126 parade groups. Only afterwards, he said, did he notice that 229 and 206 add up to 435, the number of seats in the House of Representatives. He was also pleased to find that at the moment the performance began, 3 p.m. in Washington, President Reagan was singing the same song in California at the landing of the space shuttle Columbia.

Commissions and councils

He served on the National Council on Vocational Education from 1984 to 1988 — TRUTOPIA captions his photograph with Reagan as “Commissioner on Vocational Education during the Reagan Administration” — and as a special advisor to the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports from 1988 to 1991. A photograph from 1984 shows him with his students and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who later chaired that council. On March 17, 1992, President George H. W. Bush named him the 721st Daily Point of Light. “He is a great volunteer and has done a lot for our country,” Bush said. “He is so famous that he is a great face for our great ally Korea.”

The business seminars

Fort Worth, July 4–6, 1985

By the mid-1980s Rhee was worried that martial arts were declining in popularity and that school owners were struggling, and he noticed that nobody offered them any business training. He announced the first martial arts business seminar for July 4 to 6, 1985, at Pat Burleson’s studio in Fort Worth. TRUTOPIA reproduces the schedule. It began at 2 p.m. on Friday and ran to midnight, resumed at 6 a.m. on Saturday and ran to midnight again, and finished at 5 p.m. on Sunday. Each day opened with the Jhoon Rhee Daily Dozen and alternated blocks of martial arts business with blocks of training, with sessions on the Seven Qualities of a Champion, “six steps of martial arts business,” the universal purpose and values of life, the American Founding Fathers, the power of vision and, on Sunday, a membership campaign he called the 10021 Club. Five hours of philosophy ran alongside the published schedule.

About thirty people attended. The book names Pat Burleson, Al Garza, H. K. Lee, George Menshew, Steve Oliver, Ishmael Robles and Jose Santamaria. (That is this magazine’s publisher; see the disclosure above.) We found no independent record of the seminar, so its date and attendance rest on Rhee’s account.

The seminars became so popular that Rhee ran them monthly for several years. The later graduates he named include Pat Burleson, Dennis Brown, Tom Callos, Joon Chung, Azhakh Fariborz, Jim Harrison, David Kovar, Soojin Lee, Ernie Reyes, Simon and Phillip Rhee, Jose Santamaria and Don “The Dragon” Wilson. Many of them, he wrote, went from grossing less than $100,000 a year to a million or more. He did not claim the business techniques did it on their own: the students’ success, he said, was “directly proportional to the degree they were motivated to live an honorable life.” He liked to quote Tom Callos, who wrote that he had not learned much business technique from Rhee “but I was pumped up in life by his Martial Arts Action Philosophy.”

The school-business seminar, the business coaching programme, the industry association and the trade journal that followed — including this one — all descend from that weekend. Rhee’s seminar title, “Born to Be Healthy, Wealthy, and Happy,” was also the title of the speech he gave for the next twenty-five years, to the Department of Labor, to Russian education officials and to the Texas Martial Arts Conference in Dallas, where a photograph shows Chuck Norris holding boards for him.

The Seven Qualities of a Champion

The core of what he taught on those weekends was an essay he had written in the early 1970s for Black Belt, where he had a column. The editor asked him to justify his claim that taekwondo was a philosophy, and he admitted he was in trouble because he did not know how. Three months of research produced “Seven Qualities of a Champion,” which spread well beyond his own schools. Its premise is that the mind follows the body as much as the body follows the mind — ask an audience to be sad and they drop their heads; ask them to be excited and they straighten up — so training a physical quality trains the human quality that corresponds to it. “Martial arts without philosophy,” he wrote, “is merely street fighting.”

The seven pairs, in his order:

1. Power — knowledge. Strength in the body, honesty in the heart and knowledge in the mind, developed by daily exercise and daily learning.
2. Quickness — alertness. The accupunch principle applied to life: no gap between decision and action. “Procrastinators are thieves of their own time.”
3. Timing — punctuality. Acting at the right moment; honouring appointments. A University of Texas teacher told him to arrive five minutes early and leave five minutes late, and the boss would promote him.
4. Endurance — perseverance. Illustrated by the Jhoon Rhee Institute’s “double counter,” a beginners’ sparring drill that trains a second and third counter after the first is blocked.
5. Balance — rationality. Both hands and both feet; health, character and knowledge together.
6. Flexibility — gentleness. Water, which takes the shape of whatever holds it, against ice, which he likened to dogma.
7. Posture — honesty. Upright alignment as the outward sign of upright character.

His favourite illustration of perseverance was a brown belt named Marvin White, born with the effects of thalidomide — one leg, two elbows and a single thumb — who watched his younger brother’s classes at the Jhoon Rhee school in Stafford, Virginia, until the head instructor, Master Ken Carlson, persuaded him to try. A year later he could break boards with a spinning wheel kick and a cinder block with his elbow. “I am not ‘Marvelous Marvin,’” he told audiences, “but I am Happy Marvin. If I can be happy, there is no reason why anyone cannot be happy.”

Joy of Discipline and the schools

Chario and kyungye

Rhee’s school programme, “Joy of Discipline,” turned two taekwondo commands into a classroom method. Chario, attention, meant standing completely still until released — “even if a bee were to sting you on the nose, you would not move to chase it” — which he taught as the physical form of paying undivided attention to a teacher. Kyungye, the bow, was the physical form of respect, and he believed students will only learn from teachers they respect. A motion triggers an emotion, he liked to say, as much as an emotion triggers a motion.

His favourite story about it involved his own son. In August 1983 he read General William Wilbur’s The Making of George Washington, which records that the boy George stood whenever his father entered the room. Rhee realised his sixteen-year-old son Chun never did that for him, though he had always stood for his own father in Korea, and asked him to start. The next day he came home to find Chun half lying on the couch watching television; Chun glanced at the door and turned back to the screen. Someone did stand up to greet him: the family’s French poodle, Slunky. Rhee pointed this out to Chun with a smile, which he held up as the golden rule of teaching children — never fail to correct a mistake, but always with a smile — and Chun stood for him every day after that. In August 1985, leaving for his first year at the College of William & Mary, Chun thanked him for it.

Amidon and Bowen, 1988

Through an introduction from Secretary of Education William Bennett, Rhee volunteered to run Joy of Discipline in 1988 at the Amidon and Bowen elementary schools in Southwest Washington. It was expanded to seven more District elementary schools in the fall of 1990, by TRUTOPIA‘s account; the book’s biographical appendix says eight District schools in all adopted it in the early 1990s, and we cannot reconcile the two figures. Pauline Hamlette, Amidon’s principal, credited it with dramatic improvements in classroom discipline and self-esteem: “We don’t have a lot of disciplinary problems with these students because the program serves as a vehicle to build self-discipline and a positive self-image. It also fosters creativity that allows students to relate better to each other.”

The programme’s three themes were quotations: James Madison’s “If all men were angels, no government would be necessary”; Thomas Jefferson’s “The first chapter in the book of wisdom is honesty”; and Henry Adams’s “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops.”

A delegation to Moscow

Dr. Constance Clark, the assistant superintendent for elementary and early childhood education in the District of Columbia, liked the programme enough to lead eight D.C. principals to Moscow, on a trip paid for by Rhee and his student Charles Scott of the Charles Scott Insurance Company. Hosted by Ernest Bakirov, head of Moscow’s city education council, they joined eighty Moscow principals for a two-day Joy of Discipline programme taught by Rhee, Master Kenneth Carlson and Master Kevin Gilday, a Wharton graduate specialising in development. “We have much to learn from each other,” Clark said, and announced a D.C. pilot. Bakirov later brought ten Moscow educators to Washington as Rhee’s guests, and they were given a White House luncheon.

Teacher Appreciation Day

Rhee was troubled by what he saw as academic and moral decline in elementary schools, and his answer was to persuade Congress to honour teachers. He lobbied the members he knew through taekwondo, and Representative E. Clay Shaw Jr. of Florida sponsored the legislation. The record here needs precision, because Rhee’s own account and most retellings of it compress two things.

House Joint Resolution 635 of the 99th Congress became Public Law 99-480 on October 16, 1986. It designated the school year from September 1986 to May 1987 as the National Year of the Teacher and January 28, 1987 — the first anniversary of the Challenger disaster, in memory of the teacher-astronaut Christa McAuliffe — as National Teacher Appreciation Day. President Reagan’s Proclamation 5593 followed on December 22, 1986. That was a one-time designation. Shaw had earlier introduced a separate resolution for an annual day on the first Friday in May, and Rhee’s larger plan — an annual national essay and speech contest called “Why I Appreciate My Teachers,” with state champions, eight national finalists on television and up to a million dollars a year in scholarships — depended on amending the law to make the observance permanent. It was never amended.

The Soviet chapter, 1989–1991

The least-known part of Jhoon Rhee’s life is the two years he spent, as a fiercely anti-communist Korean American, teaching martial arts and moral philosophy inside the Soviet Union as it came apart. Almost all of it rests on his own account, and some of his larger claims for it cannot be confirmed. But the outline is supported by Russian sources, and it explains why dozens of schools across the former Soviet Union still carried his name decades later.

A phone call and a new form

On November 12, 1989, Charles Sutherland, president of the Washington Film Company and a black belt student of Rhee’s for seven years, called to suggest they perform in Moscow — the Beethoven’s Fifth ballet, “The Marriage of East and West.” Rhee immediately choreographed a new martial ballet to the Soviet national anthem and named it “Mikhail Gorbachev,” in honour of perestroika and glasnost, and he and four students rehearsed it for two weeks. Sutherland then called from Moscow to say a performance to the Soviet anthem was too risky, because nobody knew how the authorities would react. Rhee’s solution was to ask the Soviet Embassy in Washington to film children from the embassy performing it and show that on Soviet television before he arrived. In the end, both anthems were performed.

He flew to Moscow with his daughter Meme, then twenty-one, and three students aged fifteen, thirteen and seven, arriving on December 14, 1989. He was shocked by the cold and the poverty — an average wage, he was told, of under a hundred dollars a month, when he was earning more than ten thousand — and reminded of the Korea he grew up in. At the hotel he was met by a stranger, Ilya Gouliev, a fourth-dan karateka, president of the Soviet Association of Martial Arts and the son of a Soviet diplomat, who had lived in New York for six years, spoke nearly perfect English, knew Rhee from magazines and volunteered to be his interpreter for the whole trip.

The Star-Spangled Banner in Moscow

On December 18, 1989, before an audience he put at three thousand, Rhee’s team performed Meegook to the American national anthem and “Mikhail Gorbachev” to the Soviet one, followed by “The Marriage of East and West” and a comedy piece to the theme from Chariots of Fire. Senator James Jeffords of Vermont, one of Rhee’s congressional black belts, and Mrs. Jeffords were on the trip, and the senator spoke. Rhee counted it as the first performance of “The Star-Spangled Banner” in the Soviet Union, a claim we cannot test, coming about two weeks after the Bush–Gorbachev summit at Malta. He was interviewed afterwards, he said, by at least a dozen reporters, including TASS and Izvestia.

The team took the night train to Leningrad, performed again the next morning, and were given a private tour of the Hermitage on a day it was normally closed. Back in Moscow on December 21 Rhee gave a two-and-a-half-hour philosophy seminar at Moscow University to an invitation-only group from the Soviet Association of Martial Arts, drawn from Leningrad, Georgia, Armenia and other republics. It was on the news the next morning, and a one-hour television special followed. The Moscow performance, for the Soviet Children’s Fund, was scheduled to air on January 7, 1990 — Russian Orthodox Christmas, and Rhee’s fifty-eighth birthday.

Legalisation

On December 22, 1989, Rhee met officials of the State Sports Committee, including Anatoly Kolesov, a deputy chairman of the committee, and his assistant Yuri Aleksenko, to discuss recognising the martial arts as an official Soviet sport. On December 24, he wrote, Gouliev called to tell him the committee had legalised all Asian martial arts in the Soviet Union.

The context is this. Karate had been criminalised in the Russian republic in November 1981 and banned outright in May 1984, when the Soviet Karate Federation was dissolved; for years people trained underground, and some were prosecuted for it. In December 1989 the ban was lifted: Russian sources describe a decision of the Goskomsport board in the week before Christmas and the creation, on December 25, 1989, of a Soviet martial arts federation under the committee covering karate, taekwondo and the other Eastern systems. Kolesov was, as Rhee said, a deputy chairman of the committee. Rhee’s meeting fell in the same week as the decision, and in a 2009 interview with Sport-Express he said the arts were legalised within forty-eight hours of it. Whether his meeting caused the decision, contributed to it, or simply coincided with a change already under way, no independent source says. We report the sequence and leave the causation where the evidence leaves it.

That same week he dined with Sergey Taranov, sports editor of Izvestia, who ran a full-page story a week later. Rhee told him what he told every audience: martial arts without philosophy is street fighting, and unless it builds the character of young people it has no significant role in society.

He flew home on December 24 “prouder than ever of being an American.” Friends who knew how hard he had denounced communism could not believe he had been waving the Soviet flag. Neither, he admitted, could he.

Eleven days, eighteen hours a day

Three more seminars followed in 1990. In September of that year he appeared on Boris Notkin’s late-night Moscow talk show. Then, leaving Washington on his birthday, January 7, 1991, he ran the event he considered the high point of his Soviet work: an eleven-day seminar in Moscow, from 6 a.m. on January 9 to one minute before midnight on January 19, 1991, organised by Sergey Alikhanov and Andrei Palchevski. Each day held five hours of philosophy, five of taekwondo, five of martial arts business and an hour for each meal. He kept three shifts of interpreters working six hours each; the chief translator, Palchevski, a former KGB officer, spoke better English, Rhee said, than most Americans.

The participants were karateka who had trained, many of them for ten or twenty years, in a system that had given them no way to be promoted; they were still wearing white belts because there had been no one to test them. Rhee’s figures are not quite consistent — he gives eighty-two students, and also says that five dropped out and eighty-two graduated as Jhoon Rhee black belts — but the claim he made most often is clear: when he asked who wanted to run the Jhoon Rhee system when they got home, all sixty-five of those who already owned karate schools raised their hands, and he counted sixty-five new Jhoon Rhee schools created in eleven days. Schools bearing his name were later reported in Russia, Ukraine, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, with Master Alexander Korobov as director of the Jhoon Rhee Institute in the Commonwealth of Independent States and Master Alexander Lee in Kazakhstan.

On the eleventh day he held a fifteen-hour question-and-answer session and, by his count, answered more than five hundred questions. The last was whether the chicken or the egg came first. He gave four reasons for the egg: living things do not grow smaller after birth; creation runs from simple to complicated; a maker first builds a single model and then copies it; and new things are made to be worth more, not less. He found out afterwards that the questioner was a philosophy professor at Moscow University. The answer became a set piece in his speeches for twenty years and, in the end, the organising principle of his plan to change the world: one model person, then one model school, then one model city.

The seminar was followed on January 20 by a three-hour celebration concert at the Moscow Youth Palace with the singer Oleg Gazmanov, later televised nationally. It came days after Soviet troops had killed civilians in the Baltic republics. When Rhee took the microphone he quoted Patrick Henry — “Give me liberty or give me death” — to a Soviet audience. He found out later that the quotation had been cut before broadcast.

“Happyism”

At the concert was Boris Pyadyshev, the editor of International Affairs (Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn), the journal of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which Rhee associated with Andrei Gromyko. Pyadyshev asked Rhee to write about his philosophy, which he then called “Happyism.” Rhee’s article appeared, by his account, in the February 1991 issue, and in it he told the foreign ministry’s readership that Soviet communism would never work:

American Senators drive without chauffeurs and use the same grocery stores as ordinary citizens. However, members of the Soviet Dumas have chauffeurs and special shops apart from ordinary citizens. What kind of Communism is that?— Jhoon Rhee, International Affairs, 1991, as quoted in TRUTOPIA

Marx’s theory was excellent, he wrote, but it overlooked “our basically greedy human nature.” He said the journal’s editorial council later named the article the best material it published in 1991. We could not locate the article or the prize record, but the journal itself, in a 2007 piece, called Rhee “our old friend” and a laureate of Mezhdunarodnaya Zhizn, which is consistent with his account. Alexander Potemkin, cultural attaché at the Soviet Embassy in Washington, is quoted in TRUTOPIA telling an audience that included members of Congress that if asked who had the most influence on Soviet foreign policy, he would say Jhoon Rhee, and holding up the article.

The trip that did not happen

On July 15, 1991, Pyadyshev took Rhee to meet Dr. Vladimir Kudinov, first vice chairman of the Znanie Society, the organisation responsible for teaching communist ideology throughout the Soviet Union. Kudinov proposed a lecture tour of all fifteen republics. Rhee told him that true communism was the Creator’s original design for a happy society, but that greedy human nature had to be changed by education first. He felt, he wrote, that he had almost brought the two superpowers together as allies, and that it was the greatest miracle of all. He bought a ticket to return to Moscow on September 1.

He never used it. On August 19, 1991, hard-line officials attempted a coup against Gorbachev; it collapsed within three days, and the Soviet state collapsed with it by the end of the year. (TRUTOPIA says the Gorbachev administration was “overthrown by Boris Yeltsin on August 25”; the chronology is as given here.) Rhee remained an admirer of Gorbachev all his life, thanking him in the acknowledgements of his book for ending the Cold War, and he kept going back: by his count, seven trips to the former Soviet Union in the five years after his 2004 stroke alone. In 1992 he visited President Leonid Kravchuk in Ukraine, and later met him again on Capitol Hill.

An evening at the Soviet Embassy

On December 5, 1991, three weeks before the Soviet Union was dissolved, its embassy in Washington held “An Evening with Master Jhoon Rhee,” at which he and his students gave a taekwondo demonstration. The following September, the KBS talk show Let’s Meet at 11 interviewed him about his Soviet work.

The long second act, 1992–2010

Family

Rhee’s first wife, Han Soon Hahm, was his partner through the whole rise of the Institute; they were married twenty-nine years, and she died of cancer in 1996. (TRUTOPIA gives her dates as 1934–1995; The Washington Post published her obituary on April 6, 1996.) They had four children: Chun, who appeared in the commercial, went to William & Mary and became a taekwondo master running the Jhoon Rhee school in Falls Church; James, known as Jimmy, the left-handed son who test-drove the headgear; Joanne; and Meme, the girl in the commercial, who travelled with her father to Moscow and became a psychotherapist in Beverly Hills. His mother, Kayim Hong Rhee, lived near him in the Washington area, where the Korean community knew her simply as “Jhoon’s mother”; she celebrated her eightieth birthday at a Buddhist temple in Maryland in 1986 and died in 1994. His brother Sam ran a golf shop in New York and was the source of more than one turn in his life, including the harmonica concertos and a 1997 calendar that introduced him to Tagore.

In July 1997 he married Theresa Chun. His best men were his sons Chun and Jimmy, his brother Sam and Representative Toby Roth. They were married twenty years. Theresa was fifty-one when they married; they exercised together for an hour or two every day, and he reported with satisfaction that her aches and winter colds disappeared within six months.

Honours, real and reported

The 1990s and 2000s filled with the honours of a public figure, some well documented and some known only through his own publications.

By his account, he and the model Cheryl Tiegs were on the cover of Parade for March 16, 1997; a photograph in TRUTOPIA shows him with Tiegs and Ira Yoffe, the magazine’s design director, and another shows Speaker Newt Gingrich asking South Korea’s President Kim Young-sam to pose with the issue at the Blue House two days later. The Congressional Record of 2000 confirms only that he was featured on a Parade cover; the date and his cover partner come from his own sources.

When Bob Hope retired, Rhee was invited in 1999 and 2000 to take over Hope’s USO shows for American troops in Korea. His team performed at Yongsan and Osan; soldiers gave standing ovations to Congressman Bob Livingston and former Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy breaking boards in uniform in 1999, and to Congressmen Toby Roth and Jesse Jackson Jr. in 2000. The Korean Army’s parachute brigade put on an air show and taekwondo demonstration for the group in Seoul.

He had played the harmonica since he was six and served on the board of the Washington Symphony Orchestra until 2002. When the orchestra needed money, he performed a harmonica concerto at the French Embassy in January 2000 — the Blue Danube waltz, played on eight harmonicas in different keys — and sold all three hundred seats at a hundred dollars each. On March 30, 2005, he and his brother Sam performed with the Seoul Royal Symphony Orchestra at the KBS Music Hall in Seoul for broadcast. He wanted, he said, to show that martial arts were not just punching and kicking.

In 2000 the Congressional Record reported that the National Immigration Forum, working with the Immigration and Naturalization Service, had selected him as one of the two hundred most famous American immigrants of all time, and the only Korean on the list. He later referred to it as “203 Outstanding American Immigrants in US History.” He learned of it from a Korean newspaper his brother mailed from New York, and when he asked the Forum for the list he received a single sheet, prepared in February 1999, headed “Immigrants in the News,” naming Albert Einstein and Alexander Graham Bell among the dead and, among the living, Madeleine Albright, Henry Kissinger, Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, Sidney Poitier, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elizabeth Taylor, Elie Wiesel — and “Jhoon Goo Rhee, Taekwondo expert (Korea).”

Kyungnam University in Korea gave him an honorary doctorate on April 11, 1995, alongside Toby Roth. He hosted a talk show, Jhoon Rhee’s One on One, on the Arirang international network. He attended the 1995 White House state dinner after the dedication of the Korean War Veterans Memorial, where he was photographed with President and Mrs. Clinton and his daughter Meme. In 1997 he and Jack Anderson hosted a Rayburn Building luncheon with former Speaker Tom Foley, John Marriott and a North Korean delegation to discuss a congressional taekwondo diplomacy visit to the North and a “taekwondo town” inside the Demilitarized Zone. Neither happened.

The 10021 Club

On March 4, 2002, at the Marriott in Seoul, before an audience he put at seven hundred, he launched the 10021 Club International. The number was his life motto, which he had been using since his thirties: “100 years of wisdom in a body 21 years young.” It also carried a second meaning, the completion of his ideal society within the hundred years of the twenty-first century. The former Prime Minister Lee Soo-sung and Kim Jung-kil, former president of the Korea Taekwondo Association, attended.

Jhoon Rhee Day

KBS marked the occasion with a forty-six-minute documentary, broadcast on June 25, 2003. Washington’s mayor, Anthony Williams, declared June 28, 2003, Jhoon Rhee Day, on the forty-first anniversary of the first school. Rhee was told he was the first Asian American so recognised. Students who had trained with him before 1980 and after gathered for two reunion dinners. The city marked the fortieth anniversary two years late, on June 28, 2004, with a peace concert at RFK Stadium by eighteen Korean singers, attended by an estimated thirty thousand people. We have not found the proclamation itself in the District’s records; the date is reported consistently in Korean and American profiles.

The heart

He had lived with a heart murmur since birth. On February 11, 2004 (one account says February 12), at seventy-two, he underwent open-heart surgery that he said lasted eleven hours — two bypasses — and suffered a stroke during it. For weeks his wife had to dress him and help him move around the house. Everyone in the organisation, he was told, including his family, thought the old Jhoon Rhee was finished.

He did not. His doctor told him not to fly for four years; in the next five he went to Korea fourteen times and to the former Soviet Union seven. Within two years he was breaking boards and doing a hundred push-ups in sixty-two seconds, against fifty-seven before the operation. “The fear that my teaching will stop never entered my mind,” he said. “I knew I would recover.” He attributed it, characteristically, to a vow he had been repeating since the early 1970s, after watching a 60 Minutes segment about a 109-year-old man in the Caucasus bathing in a freezing creek before his 135-year-old mother’s birthday party: that he would live to at least 136. He dreamed, he said, of billions of his brain cells lined up like taekwondo students, reporting that they would carry out the order. “I may die in an airplane or while delivering my messages around the world,” he wrote, “but I will never die in my bed.”

The United Nations, 2007

At a Chinese New Year party for Wall Street figures in New York, his speech so impressed Oh Joon, deputy ambassador of South Korea’s mission to the United Nations, that Oh arranged for him to address the U.N. On April 10, 2007, he spoke to an audience he put at two hundred ambassadors, deputy ambassadors and staff, on “Mending Our Troubled World through a Philosophy of Action,” for fifty-nine minutes. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon was present, and Albert Einstein’s grandson held boards. He was seventy-five. He did a hundred push-ups in sixty-two seconds, a split with his chest to the floor, broke three unsupported boards with a bare-knuckle accupunch and stood on one foot with the other leg stretched over his head. The Russian sculptor Gregory Pototsky and his wife presented a bust of him at the event.

Two weeks later, on April 26, 2007, he said, he and Ban Ki-moon received the Russian International Peace Award in Moscow, which Mikhail Gorbachev had received the year before. We found no independent record of that award. In June 2007 he and Theresa were state guests of President Chen Shui-bian of Taiwan for five days, dining with the president for two and a half hours on the first evening; Rhee asked, and his hosts agreed, that no alcohol be served. He gave a private demonstration after dinner. Morocco invited him to speak soon after, his first visit to Africa, and Ambassador Aziz Mekouar gave a dinner in his honour in Washington on May 5, 2008, attended by former Senator George Allen, Congressmen Duncan Hunter, Jack Kingston, Ben Chandler and Joe Wilson and a room full of his former students.

Jeju

From February 9 to 13, 2009, the 10021 Club hosted a conference of OVAL — “Our Vision for Asian Leadership,” a student organisation begun by a Japanese think tank in 2003 — on the South Korean island of Jeju, for about eighty student leaders from elite universities in Seoul, Beijing and Tokyo. His purpose was simple: when these students became national leaders, their summits would be meetings of old friends. He wanted to follow it with an American version including Mexico and Canada.

Jeju was not an accident. Since 2001 he had been proposing it, in speeches, radio, television and newspapers, as the place to test his philosophy on a whole society: half a million people, one percent of South Korea, and from 2006 a special self-governing province with the power to set its own education policy. He spoke in its elementary, middle and high schools and universities. At the Hamduk Elementary School on July 11, 2008, he asked the children whether drinking and smoking were good for them. “No, sir.” Were they good, then, for parents and teachers? “No, sir!” He heard later that the principal had quit smoking after forty years.

TRUTOPIA: what he believed

For the last four decades of his life Jhoon Rhee thought of himself less as a martial arts teacher than as a philosopher who used martial arts as his medium. He called the result, successively, the “Lead by Example Action Philosophy,” “Happyism,” “Free Common Possessionism” and finally, from 2007, TRUTOPIA — true plus utopia. He set it out in full in the 2010 book of that name. It is easy to smile at, and many people did; he knew that, and printed their objections in the book himself. It is also the frame through which he understood everything else in this history, and a school owner who wants to understand why he taught for free for forty-five years, or why he put character before kicking, has to take it seriously.

Where it came from

He dated it to the early 1960s. At every monthly promotion in his first schools he gave a motivational speech, and his favourite line was “We can achieve as far as our thoughts can reach.” One day, he wrote, an inner voice asked him why, if he believed that, he did not seek the biggest thought anyone could conceive. The biggest goal he could imagine was to own the world, which he decided would be a headache. The biggest goal without headaches was to help everyone be “happy with every breath of life.” He committed himself to it, he said, in the mid-1960s, and dated the book’s gestation to his first class in the Rayburn gymnasium.

Truth, Beauty and Love

The argument is short, and he designed it to be understood by children. The universal purpose of life is happiness — he asked audiences all over the world whether they could think of an answer that all six billion people could agree on, and said children always could. The three universal values are Truth, Beauty and Love, which he abbreviated to TBL. Truth makes the heart beautiful; beauty, inner and outer, is what people love; and being loved is what makes people happy. Their opposites are Deceiving, Ugliness and Hatred, which he abbreviated, knowing exactly what he was doing, to DUH. The couplets he asked every audience to recite were:

When I am truthful, my heart is beautiful; when my heart is beautiful, people love me; when people love me, I am happy.— Jhoon Rhee

— and its negative: when I deceive, my heart is ugly; when my heart is ugly, people hate me; when people hate me, I am unhappy. “Therefore,” he wrote, “a truthful way of life is not only good, but also wise; deceiving is not only wrong, but also foolish.”

From this he derived the claim at the centre of the whole system: that there is only one cause of the world’s millions of problems, which is deception motivated by self-interest, and therefore only one job, which is to restore the human conscience through education, beginning in kindergarten. He was fond of quoting Jefferson — “The first chapter in the book of wisdom is honesty” — and Robert Fulghum’s All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten. He made one exception, and it tells you a great deal about him: the “beautiful lie” of the Korean folk heroine Shim Chung, a poor blind man’s daughter, who begged a bowl of rice for her father and, asked whether she had eaten, said yes when she had not.

Human perfection

His definition of a perfect human being was deliberately attainable: someone who never knowingly makes a mistake. It does not require knowing everything, only never doing what you know you should not and always doing what you know you should. He paired it with the three qualities he had been teaching since the 1960s — strength in the body, honesty in the heart and knowledge in the mind — and with four affirmations he recited every day:

1. I like myself because I always take action to make good things happen.
2. I am humanly perfect because I never make a mistake knowingly.
3. I am wise because I always learn something good every day.
4. I am happy that I am me because I always choose to be happy.

“Therefore,” he concluded, “I am one of the wise, humanly perfect, active, and happy centers of the universe.” For parents and teachers he had three golden rules, which are the most directly useful thing in the book: lead by example; never fail to correct a child’s mistakes, with a smile, until good habits are formed; and lead by example, continually. “A picture is worth a thousand words,” he liked to say; “an action is worth a thousand pictures.”

A society of artists

The utopian part of TRUTOPIA follows from the premise. If nobody deceived anybody, he argued, society would no longer need the occupations that exist to guard against deception — soldiers, police, lawyers, accountants, locksmiths, most of government — nor, he added cheerfully, taekwondo fighters. With technology already allowing three million American farmers to feed three hundred million people, he calculated that four workers each producing food, clothing, housing and everything else for a hundred people could support a society in which each able adult worked about an hour a day. The other fifteen waking hours would go to the arts: singing, dancing, painting, cooking, building, inventing, performing. Property would be shared because it could be trusted; he imagined streets lined with cars anyone could take and leave. He called that Free Common Possessionism and was at pains to distinguish it from Soviet communism, which he believed failed not because the idea was wrong but because it ignored greed.

He also had a theology, which he offered as a bridge rather than a creed. He recognised a supreme intelligence as the origin of life, proposed “creative evolution” as a way of reconciling creationists and evolutionists, and argued that religions should teach their shared values rather than their differences — that dogma is ice and a good mind is water. He thought God did not want anyone to die for Him and was saddened when people did. God, he concluded, was waiting for people to build a happy world, while people were waiting for God to do it, “and all that will come about from this stand-off is an eternity of waiting.”

A plan of action

His plan was the chicken-and-egg answer from Moscow: one model person first, who must earn the absolute trust of a spouse, then a family, then everyone who knows them; then one model school, city, province and nation. Jeju was to be the model province. Korea, he believed, was the right country to begin, and he found confirmation in Rabindranath Tagore’s 1929 poem calling Korea a lamp-bearer of the golden age of Asia, which he read for the first time on a calendar his brother sent him in 1997. He paraphrased Martin Luther King to close the book: “I have a dream that one day everyone will live in a TRUTOPIA.” He expected it to be achieved by the end of the twenty-first century, and said that if it were, the people of the twenty-second would call him a visionary rather than a madman.

His friends did not all follow him. Toby Roth wrote that his own first reaction was “Nonsense,” which he was careful not to say aloud. What struck Roth, and nearly everyone else who wrote about Rhee, was that in more than thirty years he had never seen him emotionally down. Bob Livingston, a Republican Speaker-designate, called him “the greatest American I know.”

The body

At five feet six he was, in Livingston’s phrase, “a masterpiece of fitness and integrity.” From 1985 until three days before his heart surgery his daily training included a thousand push-ups, done in sets of a hundred. At sixty-eight, per the Congressional Record, the daily regimen was a thousand push-ups and a thousand sit-ups. At sixty he did a hundred push-ups in under a minute during a House committee hearing. At seventy-eight, at the 2010 Cannon Caucus Room reception billed as his eightieth birthday, he did a hundred in fifty seconds. At the U.N. at seventy-five, after the stroke, it was sixty-two seconds. A photograph in his book shows him breaking two boards held seven and a half feet off the ground by students standing on chairs.

He published his rules for staying that way, and they are as plain as the rest of his thinking. For the body: stop eating the moment you are no longer hungry, because “it is too late once you are full”; never eat before bed; eat plenty of fruit and vegetables and get protein from nuts, beans and fish; drink at least half a gallon of water a day, between meals; sleep short but deep, on a firm mattress with a low pillow or none, on your back; exercise every day, more as you age; and keep positive emotions, which he believed strengthened the immune system. For the mind: a daily diet of wisdom, including the scriptures of other people’s religions; meditation, breathing in and out for four seconds at first and gradually up to eight, lying down, at night and on waking; creativity as mental exercise; and positive emotion around the clock. He checked his posture in shop windows whenever he walked downtown.

The deeper purpose, he said, was to make himself a physical role model as well as a moral one — for young students, for members of Congress and for the elderly — and to prove his motto: a hundred years of wisdom in a body twenty-one years young.

The end

He did not reach 136. He spent his last period at an assisted-living community in Arlington, Virginia, and died there at 7:25 on the morning of Monday, April 30, 2018, of complications of shingles, with his wife Theresa and his daughter Meme at his bedside. He was eighty-six. His son Chun, who runs Jhoon Rhee Tae Kwon Do in Falls Church, confirmed his death.

“Martial arts was a way of life for him,” Chun said.

He was survived by Theresa, his wife of twenty years; by his four children, Chun, James, Joanne and Meme; by a brother and two sisters; and by four grandchildren. The Smithsonian reports his last words as: “I think I did enough.”

The memorial service

His memorial service was held on May 8, 2018, and recorded by McLean Bible Church. The full service, about two and three-quarter hours, is below. WUSA9 covered his death and the gathering of grandmasters, celebrities and politicians at the service; in Korea, KBS News and Yonhap News TV reported it the next day.

Video archive

These are the most useful recordings of Jhoon Rhee we could find, organised by where they come from. Every link was checked when this page was updated; the dates are the uploaders’ unless the footage dates itself. The memorial service is embedded above, and WAMU’s Kojo Nnamdi Show remembrance (May 3, 2018) is available as audio.

From his own channel

Posted by Jhoon Rhee’s office in 2012. Dates are from its descriptions.

• 
  65 Years of Tae Kwon DoCareer highlights reel
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  “Nobody Bothers Me”The television commercial
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  Republicans vs. Democrats sparringD.C. Armory, September 14, 1975
• 
  An Evening with Master Jhoon RheeSoviet Embassy, Washington, December 5, 1991
• 
  Keynote, Fairfax County Diversity ConferenceNovember 3, 2006
• 
  Speech at the United NationsApril 10, 2007 (English)
• 
  Congressional receptionCannon Caucus Room, September 30, 2010
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  100 push-ups in 50 secondsCannon Caucus Room, September 30, 2010
• 
  “Born to Be Happy”A song written to his philosophy

Historic moments

Third-party uploads are labelled; where an uploader dates footage we could not confirm, we say so.

• 
  Bruce Lee at a Jhoon Rhee tournamentUploader dates it 1968 (unconfirmed)
• 
  Bruce Lee and Jhoon Rhee in the Dominican RepublicJuly 1970 (fan compilation)
• 
  Team Chuck Norris vs. Team Jhoon Rhee1973 Jhoon Rhee Championships; Jhoon Rhee Falls Church channel
• 
  When Taekwondo Strikes: original trailer1973; Fortune Star (Golden Harvest library)
• 
  When Taekwondo Strikes: restoration trailerEureka Classics, 2023
• 
  Muhammad Ali vs. Richard Dunn: full fightMunich, May 24, 1976; Top Rank
• 
  Ali visits KoreaJune 1976; AP Archive
• 
  Muhammad Ali, Jhoon Rhee and taekwondoShort film by Alex Gillis, author of A Killing Art
• 
  Jhoon Rhee and the Congress1993, with Speaker Tom Foley
• 
  Rhee’s demonstration at the 1996 InternationalsBlack and Blue Video
• 
  Martial ballet: “Exodus”Rhee performing “Might for Right”; uploaded by a student
• 
  Martial ballet: Beethoven’s Fifth“The Marriage of East and West”; uploaded by a student

Interviews and documentaries

• 
  One on One, Al Jazeera English, part 1August 2009
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  One on One, Al Jazeera English, part 2August 2009
• 
  KBS documentary (Korean)Broadcast June 25, 2003
• 
  KBS, Let’s Meet at 11 (Korean)Broadcast September 14, 1992
• 
  WUSA9 archive: Rhee and his children on “Nobody bothers me”1993
• 
  Karate & You: Jhoon Rhee seminar, part 1Cable programme
• 
  Karate & You: “Try and block my punch”The accupunch challenge
• 
  It’s Your Business: interview with Steve ChaconasCable interview
• 
  whistlekick Martial Arts Radio, episode 180Podcast interview, 2017

His death and legacy

• 
  “DC legend Jhoon Rhee passes away at 86”WUSA9, April 30, 2018
• 
  KBS News obituary (Korean)May 1, 2018
• 
  Yonhap News TV obituary (Korean)May 1, 2018
• 
  Celebrities and grandmasters gather to remember himWUSA9, May 8, 2018
• 
  “Exodus” tribute, U.S. Capitol ClassicsAugust 2018; sportmartialarts
• 
  His school turns sixtyWUSA9, 2022, with Chun Rhee
• 
  His uniform enters the Martial Arts History MuseumGlendale, California, 2025

Timeline of record

Dates marked “(his account)” come from TRUTOPIA or Rhee’s other statements and have not been independently confirmed.

Date	Event
January 7, 1932	Born in Sanyangri, Asan, Korea, under Japanese occupation
c. 1937–38	A year with his grandfather Kun Jae Rhee, a Confucian scholar; the lesson about the lost book (his account)
1943	Moves to Seoul to attend Dong Sung middle and high school
August 15, 1945	Korea liberated from Japan
September 1947	Enrols at the Chung Do Kwan, Seoul
June 25, 1950	Korean War begins weeks after he enters Dongguk University
1951	Works as an interpreter for U.S. and British forces
December 1951	Drafted into the Republic of Korea Army (his account)
July 27, 1953	Armistice signed weeks before his officer class graduates (his account)
June 1, 1956	Arrives in San Francisco for aircraft maintenance training at Gary Air Force Base, San Marcos, Texas
November 21, 1957	Returns to San Marcos as a student with $46
February 3, 1958	Begins classes at Southwest Texas State Teachers College
1960	Adopts the name taekwondo after General Choi Hong-hi’s visit; transfers to the University of Texas in September
1962–1963	Promotes Allen Steen and Pat Burleson, his first American black belts
June 28, 1962	Opens his first school at 2035 K Street NW, Washington, D.C.
August 1964	Meets Bruce Lee at Ed Parker’s International Karate Championships, Long Beach
1964	Promotes the first National Karate Championships in Washington; Pat Burleson wins
1965	Rep. James Cleveland is attacked; the Congressional Taekwondo Club begins in the Rayburn gym
1967	Buys a house in Arlington, Virginia; EFC founded by Nick Cokinos
1968	Choreographs “Might for Right” to the theme from Exodus, the first musical form (his account)
1969	Pat Worley’s injury prompts the design of Safe-T equipment
July 1970	Takes Bruce Lee to his black belt testing in the Dominican Republic (his account)
1972	First Safe-T patents filed; “Nobody Bothers Me” commercials running with Chun and Meme
1973	Films When Taekwondo Strikes in Hong Kong; Bruce Lee dies July 20
February 1974	Allen Steen’s championships first to require safety equipment
1974	Sen. Milton Young’s board-breaking ad; Young wins by 177 votes
1975	Meets Muhammad Ali; Republicans-vs-Democrats exhibition at the D.C. Armory
1976	Safety Face Mask, now in MoMA’s collection
May 24, 1976	Ali stops Richard Dunn at 2:05 of round 5 in Munich
June 26–27, 1976	With Ali for the Inoki bout in Tokyo; takes him to Seoul the next day
1976	“Martial Arts Man of the Century,” Bicentennial sports awards (his account)
1978	“Nobody Bothers Me” jingle by Nils Lofgren
1980	Stops teaching regular classes; films a second picture in Korea with Jeff Smith
July 4, 1982	Chairs Washington’s Independence Day celebration; the Human Flag on the Mall (his account)
1984–1988	National Council on Vocational Education
July 4–6, 1985	First martial arts business seminar, Fort Worth (his account)
October 16, 1986	H.J.Res. 635 becomes Public Law 99-480, designating January 28, 1987 as National Teacher Appreciation Day
1988	Joy of Discipline begins at Amidon and Bowen elementary schools
1988–1991	Special advisor, President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sports
December 14–24, 1989	First Soviet trip; U.S. and Soviet anthem ballets in Moscow; martial arts legalised that month
January 9–19, 1991	Eleven-day, eighteen-hour-a-day seminar in Moscow (his account)
February 1991	“Happyism” article in International Affairs (his account)
March 17, 1992	Named the 721st Daily Point of Light by President George H. W. Bush
August 1, 1993	Speaker Tom Foley breaks boards at the Jhoon Rhee Championships
1996	First wife, Han Soon, dies
July 1997	Marries Theresa Chun
1999	NAPMA Lifetime Achievement Award; USO shows in Korea, 1999–2000 (his account)
2000	Named among the most famous American immigrants; publishes Bruce Lee and I
March 4, 2002	Launches the 10021 Club International in Seoul (his account)
June 28, 2003	Jhoon Rhee Day in Washington (reported; proclamation not located)
February 2004	Open-heart surgery and a stroke
April 10, 2007	Addresses the United Nations
February 9–13, 2009	OVAL student leaders’ conference on Jeju (his account)
2010	Publishes TRUTOPIA
September 30, 2010	Celebration of forty-five years teaching Congress, Cannon Caucus Room
April 30, 2018	Dies in Arlington, Virginia, aged 86
May 8, 2018	Memorial service, McLean Bible Church

Questions