Samurai Blue vs Taeguk Warriors: Rivalry & Reconciliation

Asian football expert John Duerden takes an in-depth look at a 70-year arc of history that has seen the fierce rivalry between these two nations expressed through football and the World Cup.

June 2018

Japan and South Korea have had a good few World Cup battles over the years without ever meeting in the tournament itself. It would be an explosive fixture. Even low-key games between the two can provide high-level controversy.

Take the 2013 East Asian Cup clash. Both teams fielded experimental line-ups a year out from the World Cup with the overseas-based stars all absent. Played not in Seoul’s World Cup Stadium but in the old Olympic Stadium on the south bank of the mighty Han River in the shadow of the Gangnam skyscrapers, there was something of an old-school feel to the clash, though the Lotte World Tower — rapidly rising next door to become the fifth-tallest building in the world by its 2016 completion — provided a stark reminder that times were changing.

History was the theme of the game. Japanese fans had smuggled Rising Sun flags into the away end, aware of the reaction it would cause to the citizens that now live in the country above which it fluttered from 1910 to 1945, a period of brutal colonisation. At the other end, the home fans held a larger portrait of an independence fighter (he is not seen that way in Japan) who had assassinated a high-profile Japanese official in 1909. The main Korean supporters group, the Red Devils, also unfurled a banner that read: “A nation that forgets its past has no future.” Outraged that their handiwork was confiscated at the end of the first half, they sat down in silence for the rest of the game in protest.

Just a normal clash then. The rivalry between these two nations is the biggest and bitterest in Asia. Everything is there: the history between the two countries, the geographical proximity, the similar-but-different cultures and the fact that for much of modern history in Asian football, they have been two leading powers of the continent. There are other rivalries such as Iran and Saudi Arabia, Malaysia and Singapore, and North Korea and South Korea, but while they have their own feelings and foibles, they do not quite tick all the boxes. Nippon and Hanguk have been doing that for quite some time.