As South Korea’s national soccer coach prepared to play Japan in a 1954 World Cup qualifier, President Syngman Rhee, who’d been liberated, with the rest of Korea, from Japan’s brutal colonial rule in 1945, had some advice should the Koreans lose: «Don’t think about coming back
As South Korea’s national soccer coach prepared to play Japan in a 1954 World Cup qualifier, President Syngman Rhee, who’d been liberated, with the rest of Korea, from Japan’s brutal colonial rule in 1945, had some advice should the Koreans lose: «Don’t think about coming back alive,» he supposedly told the coach. «Just throw yourself into the Genkai Sea.»
There are sports rivalries, and then there’s Korea vs. Japan — an often toxic mix of violent history and politics, with a (un)healthy dose of cultural chauvinism and envy mixed in.
The fierce grudges over historical persecution and a thousand perceived national and cultural slights cannot be untwined from the sports for many Koreans. These swirling emotions were front and center Wednesday as a combined team of North and South Koreans played regional power Japan in women’s hockey.
Both had yet to win a game these Olympics. Both desperately wanted that win to come against their rival. But Japan pulled it out in the end, defeating the joint Korean team 4-1.
«We did our best,» South Korean forward Park Jong-ah said after South Korean fans showered her team with stuffed animals in the moments after the loss.
The two Koreas share much, not least language and culture, but they’ve also been divided for seven decades and are still in a technical state of war. Just weeks ago, there were real fears of military conflict here. More than any temporary cooperation on the hockey ice, then, it may be their shared hatred of Japan — and the near universal perception that Tokyo has never fully apologized for or acknowledged its colonial evils — that joins them most forcefully.
The last time the Koreas were unified, in fact, was during Japanese rule from 1910 to 1945. The end of WWII saw the division of the peninsula into a U. S.-backed south and Soviet-backed north.
In the South, this history can sometimes feel fresh.
Weekly demonstrations have gone on for more than two decades in front of the Japanese Embassy in Seoul by an ever-dwindling number of the thousands of Korean women forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military during the colonial era.
