Ji Han-jae, 1936-2026: The Man Who Gave Hapkido Its Shape
If you run a hapkido school, or teach hapkido inside a taekwondo curriculum, your certification almost certainly traces back through this man. He did not invent the art. He is the reason it became something you could open a school around.
- Died
- 28 January 2026, in Arizona, age 89
- Instructor
- Choi Yong-sool
- Founded
- An Moo Kwan, 1956; Sung Moo Kwan, 1957; Sin Moo Hapkido
- Title
- Dojunim
- Known for
- Building hapkido’s school structure and its international spread
Ji Han-jae trained under Choi Yong-sool, the man who brought the Daito-ryu-derived system back to Korea from Japan. What Choi had was a body of technique. What Ji built was an institution.
He opened the An Moo Kwan in 1956 and the Sung Moo Kwan in 1957, and from those two schools came the organisational architecture — curriculum, ranking, instructor certification, affiliation — that hapkido still runs on. He later developed his own system, Sin Moo Hapkido, and spent the back half of his life exporting it. He moved to the United States in 1984 and taught from there.
He carried the title Dojunim, and he is the reason there are hundreds of American schools whose lineage certificates lead back to a room in Seoul in the 1950s.
What a school owner should take from Ji Han-jae
The pattern here is the same one that runs through this whole section, and it is worth naming because it keeps recurring. The person who originates an art and the person who makes it teachable at scale are almost never the same person, and it is the second one whose name ends up on the certificate on your wall.
Choi Yong-sool had the technique. Ji Han-jae had the kwan, the curriculum and the affiliation structure — and hapkido spread across two continents on the back of that, not on the back of the technique alone. If you are sitting on something you teach well and cannot replicate, that gap is the whole problem, and it has been solved before.
The Bruce Lee connection
He is known to a much wider audience as the man who fought Bruce Lee in the pagoda sequence of Game of Death — one of the few people ever filmed opposite Lee in a serious martial exchange. For an industry that has spent fifty years measuring its growth against what Bruce Lee did to public interest, that is not a trivial credit.
Sources, and what we could not confirm
- This entry is deliberately short. The death and the institutional record are solid; the fine-grain biography is not well documented in English-language sources we could verify, and we would rather run a short accurate entry than a long one padded with material we cannot stand behind.
- Exact birth date, place of death, and cause are not established in the sources available to us. The age of 89 is as reported.
- Founding dates for the An Moo Kwan (1956) and Sung Moo Kwan (1957) are consistent across sources; the founding date of Sin Moo Hapkido is not.
- His role in naming the art and the precise division of credit between him and Choi Yong-sool are the subject of a long-running and sometimes heated dispute within hapkido. We have not adjudicated it, and any account that states it flatly in either direction should be treated with caution.
- Principal sources: published biographical records and the tribute coverage that followed his death in January 2026.
We would particularly welcome first-hand corrections and recollections on this one. If you trained under him or hold Sin Moo certification, please write.