TAE KWON DO / JUNG ORGANIZER

AUG 13, 2010

| Six neat pieces between the cinder blocks, and the crowd exploded into yelling and applause.
Everyone was relieved, and as she walked to the side of the stage, Kim waved, smiling all the way.
The North Korean national Tae Kwon Do Demonstration Team stopped in Cedar Rapids last night, at the Paramount Theatre, 123 Third Ave. SE, drawing a crowd of around 1,600.

| The tae kwon do team’s five-city tour across America is largely the work of Cedar Rapids businessman and taekwondo instructor Woo Jin Jung. He organized it in order to build friendship and good will between North Korea and the United States.

| The demonstration s full of acrobatic technical displays like board-breaking, brick breaking and demonstrations of tae kwon do forms.

| The technical work was often breathtaking, eliciting regular oohs and aahs from the crowd. A man sprinted and flipped over two of his standing colleagues to break boards held above their heads with his feet at the peak of the flip.

| The sparring sessions played out almost like short dramas or ballets. For instance, a boyfriend and girlfriend are assaulted by three toughs in black jackets, and together they send the creeps reeling.

| Sometimes the demonstrations were funny, as when the boyfriend who’d had to rely on his girlfriend’s fighting skills for protection picked up a stick and popped one of the fallen attackers in the stomach with it.

| “I want to show the (North Koreans that the United States) is not missiles all over, not tanks all over,” Jung said. “The Midwest, it’s beautiful here … I want to show the real U.S., not the political U.S.”

| But he also wants to show North Koreans to Americans.
The United States does not have normal diplomatic relations with North Korea. Sporadic negotiations are ongoing, but contact between citizens of the two nations is extremely rare.

| Yet Jung’s personal crusade to warm the countries’ relationship has come full circle.
He was born in 1942 in Ulsan, on the southeast corner of the Korean peninsula. He immigrated to the United States 36 years ago, has trained 4,600 black belts here and owns the New Life Fitness Center.

| The 65-year-old has visited North Korea several times and took a delegation of martial arts specialists there in May 2006. In the capital city, Pyongyang, he organized a tae kwon do demonstration that drew a crowd of 2,400.
Though he insists he is a “tae kwon do person, not a political person,” he longs for the reunification of Korea and sees the North Korean demonstrations here as an important way to ease the international tension.
The tae kwon do demonstrations drew 4,000 in Los Angeles and 1,000 in San Francisco, Jung said. Later this week, the team will be in Louisville, Kentucky, and Atlanta.

| Tomorrow he said they’ll cook Korean barbecue at Palisades Kepler State Park west of Mount Vernon.
Kim Hyong Park, the secretary of the Korean Tae Kwon Do Committee in North Korea, was standing backstage before the performance. He was wearing a red pin with former President Kim Il Sung’s picture on it.
He said seven days is not enough time for him to decide what he thinks of the United States, but he said Americans have been very kind.
“We are martial artists,” he said. “We came here to show and to build friendship.”