The Unclosed Door: South Korea’s Postcolonial Sport as a Revanchist Reaction to Japanese Imperial Legacies

Abstract

Located in geographical proximity, South Korea and Japan have been closely linked culturally and historically. Both countries set importance on maintaining close political and strategic ties with the USA while they also share a common geopolitical concern about the North Korean threat. More than anything else, the two nations have in common their profound bilateral economic reliance. However, the dominant South Korean perception of the Korea–Japan relationship seems to be dominated by anti-Japanese sentiment. The primary source of this feeling of animosity is the memory of Japan’s colonial occupation of Korea during the first half of the twentieth century. The bitter memory of colonial violence persists for the ex-colonized and animates the potency of this continuing animosity: an enmeshing cobweb of recollections of past persecution. Furthermore, the threads of this hostility grow steadily stronger as the ex-colonizer appears to deem itself to have little responsibility for the ex-colonized’s historic wounds and legitimate claims for compensation. Nowhere does anti-Japanese sentiment come more vividly alive than in sport contests between the two countries. They meld together present South Korean anger with past humiliation. This essay explores the nature of South Korean sport in the postcolonial era with specific reference to Japanese imperial legacies. A central question is, ‘How has South Korean handled the cultural legacies of Japanese colonialism and imperialism?’ Further questions include: what constitutes South Korean postcolonial sport? How is it best defined? What is it that makes up South Korean’s postcolonial national identity? The notion of postcolonial sports revanchism arguably serves as a useful heuristic device, in spite of being only a partial description of South Korean postcolonial consciousness, to describe ways in which with reference to sport, South Korea has dealt with Japanese imperial legacies. This essay is an attempt within the wider context of this Collection to explore the role of modern sport as not only a form of past political resistance, rejection and resentment but of present revanchism occasioned by the specific purposes, policies and practices of past Japanese cultural imperialism. This essay will explore the role of sport as a form of twentieth and twenty–first South Korean postcolonial revanchism as a direct result of twentieth-century Japanese imperialism and its legacies.