Soccer: Old divisions exposed in testy buildup to World Cup

By COLIN DONALD in Tokyo

With fewer than 100 days left until the opening ceremony, this year's Fifa World Cup in Korea and Japan is shaping to be the tensest and potentially most chaotic in the tournament's history.

Despite the best efforts of the host countries, well-placed observers have growing doubts that Japan and South Korea can generate enough mutual goodwill in time to save the event from unsporting recriminations and one-upmanship.

Fifa's gamble - the result of a compromise in factional football politics - to split the most-watched sporting spectacle on earth between two nations, now looks riskier than ever.

With two parallel and mutually suspicious organisations operating 1287km apart, the chances of a trouble-free tournament appear minimal.

"There's still a great deal of enmity and competition between the two hosts," says Duncan Castles, a football writer for Japan's Yomiuri news service.

"In transport and accommodation for the teams in particular, the Japanese and Koreans are way out of sync. This is a big problem as a lot of the venues, especially in Japan, are in the middle of nowhere."

Seemingly every petty detail has been haggled over by the Japanese organising committee and its Korean equivalent, revealing diverse attitudes as to what the World Cup is about.

Says Akihiro Naito, a leading Japanese sports writer: "Right now it is easy to get the impression that the event is being hosted separately by each country.

"The significance of the first co-hosting of the tournament will be lost if the partnership is in name only. The merits of co-hosting are yet to be seen."

To anyone who knows East Asian history, dividing the games between these near, but temperamentally contrasting neighbours was a recipe for trouble.

Divided by a 320km strait, and a far greater chasm of culture and language, their relations have never been better than cool.

Background historical quarrels, related to Japan's brutal 1905-1945 annexation of the Korean peninsula, have flared up time and again during the World Cup preparation period, most fiercely in a debate about Tokyo's refusal to block right wing-inspired school textbooks that gloss over Japanese atrocities in Korea.

Other issues have crowded in, from a fishing dispute to a row over the Japanese prime minister's visit to a shrine honouring war criminals.

Relations are so far from the friendship conceived at the time of Fifa's 1996 decision that the projected crowning event of the intended reconciliation, a first visit to Korea by the Emperor and Empress of Japan to coincide with the tournament, has been cancelled.

Both organising committees have struggled to maintain a facade that the World Cup is unaffected by these issues, but bad blood has been exposed in a myriad of gripes.

After the groups drawing ceremony held in Pusan, South Korea, last September, the Japanese side was furious that the presentation showed only views of Korea, and featured Korean traditional dancers.

"We asked several times for the programme to reflect the fact that the finals will be co-hosted" muttered a Japanese official.

"The ceremony gave the impression that the event is hosted by South Korea alone. They should have more consideration for us."

Having accepted South Korea's requests for equal opportunities to make presentations at a previous draw, the Japanese felt double-crossed.

South Korea meanwhile has been fulminating that Japan's World Cup poster contains a football pitch remarkably similar to a giant Chinese character for "Japan", also that the Fifa designated official title "Korea Japan 2002" had mysteriously become inverted on tickets printed in Japan.

Worse, the Japanese media criticised the predictable Korean outcry as "childish and hysterical".

The Koreans have asked that the first game to be played in Japan is not preceded by an elaborate ceremony designed to trump the official opening in Seoul a few days previously.

But it is not clear that Tokyo will respect this wish.

The Japanese media has been revelling in Korea's fury and embarrassment that Fifa officials, under pressure from Western animal rights activists, have asked traditional Korean restaurants to stop serving dog meat during the tournament.

As East Asia's economy sags, tension before the World Cup reflects differences in what each country expects from the event.

Dynamic and fiercely competitive, South Korea is unrepentant about using the World Cup to earn global prestige and trumpet its achievements as an economic powerhouse, particularly in the field of information technology.

Japan, enduring a long slump but snooty about its "different point on the development scale" to its former vassal, has no inclination to align itself with such aggressive self-marketing.

As far as any goal is discernible, Tokyo's economic priority in the World Cup is an extension of its now discredited, pork barrel priority of boosting local economies through vast public spending on infrastructural white elephants.

This has resulted in multi-billion yen state of the art facilities in remote parts of Japan, full of gimmicks - one stadium features a retractable pitch - whose purpose once the month-long tournament is over is obscure.

In Korea, public excitement is more palpable, as football has long had nationalistic resonances.

Should the Korean team defy most expectations and make it through to the final 16, the excitement could exceed even that of the 1936 All-Japan Football championship when the Korean team beat Japan 6-1.

This excitement will increase exponentially, of course, should Japan get knocked out in the first round.