GANGNEUNG, South Korea (AP) – 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 versus Japan – an often toxic mix of violent history and 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 are front and center Wednesday as a combined team of North and South Koreans plays regional power Japan in women’s hockey.
Both have yet to win a game these Olympics. Both desperately want that win to come against their loathed rival.
“It’s not just me. If you’re a Korean, you feel it deep down in your heart that our team must always beat Japan in any sport,” said Choi Young-wook, 49, a South Korean. “It will be deeply satisfying if the joint team defeats them, because Japan doesn’t want the Koreas to be unified again.”