Japan and South Korea Make an Oddly Sporting Pair

Screams echo off the cold stone walls of a basement torture chamber where a snarling Japanese soldier flogs the blood-soaked back of a Korean freedom fighter.

“Confess!” hisses the soldier as the Korean moans in anguish.

The scene plays out at a former Japanese prison here, now a museum dedicated to victims of Japan’s 1910-45 occupation of the Korean peninsula. Of course, the victims, their tormentors and even the blood at the popular tourist attraction are made of wax, and the dialogue is recorded, but at times the emotions seem all too real.

Many South Koreans resent that Japan has not done more to make amends for its brutal occupation, while many Japanese still look down on their former colonial subjects.

Now that Japan and South Korea are co-hosting the World Cup soccer championship, however, both will need to make an effort to ensure that any such discordant notes do not ruin the festivities. The games, which opened here Friday and close June 30 in Yokohama, Japan, will be a monthlong test for the sometimes unneighborly neighbors to prove that they can live up to the 21st century spirit of globalization.

With the games broadcast around the world and expected to attract a viewing audience larger than that for the Olympics, Japan and South Korea must be on their best behavior--a little like contestants on reality television locked in a room and forced to get along.

In fact, in 1996 it was viewed as almost a sick joke when the World Cup organizing committee compromised between competing bids from Japan and South Korea by picking both, resulting in the first co-hosted World Cup as well as the first to be held in Asia.

Soccer is widely considered one of the most nationalist of sports, and the pundits foresaw dire consequences.

“World Cup Pairing a Recipe for Disaster!” warned the Australian Financial Review, with the newspaper noting that for people who “spent most of the last 1,000 years on the battlefield cutting each other’s heads off ... [to be] forced to wear the same soccer jersey to host the World Cup is bizarre even amid the vagaries of the politics of international sports.”

Yet many South Koreans and Japanese believe that this challenge will be good for both countries, forcing them to confront the past. A poll by Japan’s Kyodo News and South Korea’s Yonhap agency found that 75% of Japanese respondents and 61% of those from South Korea believe that the World Cup will improve bilateral relations.

Even at the Sodaemun Prison History Museum, it was hard to find anybody this week with a cross word to say about the games.

“The World Cup will do good for both countries,” said Lee Soo Man, 74, a retired South Korean businessman, as he eyed the graphic exhibits of Japanese brutality. “Globalization is a world trend. We can’t get along by ourselves.”

The two countries, which have spent an estimated $8 billion on stadiums, infrastructure and other items, have an enormous stake in ensuring that the ghosts of history do not interfere with the show.

Friday’s opening spectacle in Seoul was designed around the motif of unity and harmony, with South Korean President Kim Dae Jung going out of his way to play the gallant host to Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi and Prince Takamado, a cousin of Japan’s emperor.

“This World Cup will provide new momentum for Korea-Japan relations,” Kim said Thursday while welcoming Takamado at the presidential residence here. “No country can be successful if it only clings to the past without making progress.”

The prince is making the first official visit to South Korea by a member of the Japanese imperial family since World War II. Although a proposal for Emperor Akihito to attend was shelved for fear it would be incendiary to some elderly South Koreans, the World Cup has prompted a flurry of other official visits and exchanges that would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

It was notable that at the opening ceremony, the World Cup theme, “Let’s Get Together Now,” was sung in the languages of both hosts; South Korean law still limits the playing of some Japanese- language pop songs, as well as Japanese computer games and some films.

Hundreds of cultural exchanges between South Korea and Japan have been taking place in conjunction with the World Cup: art exhibits, musicals, theater performances, tree-planting ceremonies. In Osaka, Japan, the entire contents of a Korean family’s apartment, down to the toilet paper, were put on display for an exhibit titled “Seoul Lifestyle 2002.” A corresponding exhibit--”Japan, Our Close Neighbor”--ran earlier this year at South Korea’s National Folk Museum.

In the neighborly spirit leading up to the World Cup, the two nations signed an extradition treaty--Japan’s only other such pact is with the United States--and agreed to work on system standards for mobile telephones.

And in a bombshell, the Japanese emperor announced at a news conference in December, at the time of his birthday, that he “feels a certain kinship with Korea,” in effect acknowledging that the imperial family is probably descended from Koreans.

Despite the dire predictions, there have been remarkably few public hitches in the organizing of events. True, there were squabbles over whether this was the “Korea/Japan World Cup” or the “Japan/Korea World Cup” (it is officially the former because the opening was here) and over whether various promotions looked too Korean or too Japanese. But the disagreements were quickly swept under the rug.

After South Koreans complained about a travel story in the English-language Japan Times last month that referred to prostitution and pollution in Seoul, the article was promptly removed from the newspaper’s Web site and a front-page apology was issued.

“The way the two counties have dealt with some of the minor irritants was handled pretty maturely,” said Munehiko Harada, a professor of sports management at Osaka University of Health and Sports Sciences.

“That said, once the gate has opened with this World Cup, it’s possible that it could slam shut again,” Harada said.

There are looming issues that might be hushed up during the games but not disappear.

South Koreans are still furious over the publication in Japan last year of a school textbook they believe glosses over human rights abuses by Japan during the occupation.

During the war, hundreds of thousands of Korean men were forced to work in mines and factories, while young women were sent to “comfort stations” to be used as sexual slaves by Japanese soldiers.

“Sports is one thing, but there are issues that are entirely separate and will not go away. After World Cup fever dies down, we will still have to deal with the textbooks,” said Cho Kwang, a historian at Korea University who is a member of a joint Japanese-Korean committee that deals with disputes over wartime history.

Also unresolved are the issues relating to the former “comfort women,” who feel they have never received an adequate apology or compensation.

Every Wednesday, some of the elderly women hold a vigil outside the Japanese Embassy here in protest that their concerns will be swept away in the pursuit of better relations.

On Wednesday, about the same time that Takamado was getting a VIP reception upon his arrival at Inchon International Airport, one of the elderly protesters collapsed in a heap of anguish outside the embassy, screaming: “Kill all the Japanese! You should compensate me for my youth!”

Another former comfort woman participating in the protest, Kim Soon Dok, 82, said she believed that the question of compensation and an apology should have been resolved before the World Cup. But she added quickly that she intended to watch the games on television.

“I have mixed feelings about the Japanese,” she said, “but the World Cup must be completely successful. It is a good thing. I won’t miss a game.”

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Demick reported from Seoul and Magnier from Tokyo.