blog:An early start
Masutatsu (Mas) Oyama was born Yong I-Choi on the 27th of July, 1923, in a village not far
from Gunsan in Southern Korea. At a relatively young age he was sent to Manchuria, in
Southern China, to live on his sister’s farm. At the age of nine, he started studying the
Southern Chinese form of Kempo called Eighteen hands from a Mr. Yi who was at the time
working on the farm. When Oyama returned to Korea at the the age of 12, he continued his
training in Korean Kempo.In 1938, at the age of 15, he travelled to Japan to train as an
aviator, to be like his hero of the time, Korea’s first fighter pilot. Survival on his own
at that age proved to be more difficult than he thought, especially as a Korean in Japan,
and the aviator training fell by the wayside.
