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As Korea and Japan eye the World Cup, John Gittings in Seoul reports on a game of two halves
IT SAYS “2002 World Cup Korea” in shop windows, over bank counters, and on the in- flight screens of Korean Air. The official title of the event, carefully negotiated with the international governing body for association football, Fifa, is “2002 World Cup Korea-Japan”, but somehow the second bit always seems to get left off.
Officially the agreement to become joint hosts of the World Cup is the prelude to a new, warm feeling between Korea and the power which brutally occupied the peninsula for 40 years.
“It is the first project of fruitful collaboration between our two countries,” says Oh Jee-chul, who is in charge of the international sports bureau at the ministry of culture and sports. It is high time, he claims, that Korea and Japan – “near neighbours and yet so remote” – should cross the football threshold of the 21st century together.
But he adds less confidently: “We don’t yet know the real feeling of the Japanese.”
Some Seoul observers shake their heads with amazement that Korea gained the critical concession of its name being listed first. It almost makes up in Korean eyes for not hosting the final.
But mutual understanding did not exactly blossom in the Seoul media when the decision was first announced. One television station reported that, by being awarded the opening ceremony, Korean culture would demonstrate its superiority across the world before Japan got a look-in.
The South Korean president, Kim Young-sam, has been named chairman of the special government committee to oversee the preparations, and every one of his ministers has orders to become involved. A special law will provide for South Korea’s chaebols – the big business groups – to lend experts and give cash.
The number of venues is not yet clear: Japan says it will select 10 cities, Korea will have the same number, or perhaps one more.
There is also the tricky question of mascots. Fifa has suggested each country have its own emblem, but bridge-building Korea favours a single “symbolic animal” for joint use.
The structure for decision-making will be necessarily elaborate, but it will complicate matters even further if the whole of Korea, not just the South, joins the fray.
In contrast to its tough noises in other areas of Seoul-Pyongyang relations, the South Korean government says the North is welcome to participate in the event’s organisation. It may help that Dr Chung Mong-joon is leading the South Korean organisation. Dr Chung is a son of Chung Ju- yung, head of Hyundai (and a presidential candidate in 1992) who has in the past cultivated the North.
North and South played two football matches in 1990 in the spirit of “unification”. They even won the women’s team title for world table tennis in 1991 with a joint team, and got to the world youth soccer quarter finals. But the defection of Lee Chang-soo, a North Korean weightlifter who hopped off a train between events in Barcelona and Frankfurt in July 1991, put a blight on unification sports.
Oh is optimistic, but says there is a problem in the North with transport, telecommunications and hotels.
There would have to be direct access across the 38th parallel for fans of all countries, but the only way from Seoul to Pyongyang is a long dog-leg flight via Beijing.
Somehow the sound of “Here we go” across the demilitarised zone remains hard to imagine, even in the 21st century.