09/03/20 16:21:33 IkTlZ7dx
URLﾘﾝｸ(www.latimes.com)
If both teams win -- South Korea against Venezuela on Saturday and Japan over the U.S. on Sunday -- they will meet again in Monday's championship game.
But should that happen, a baseball title will be only part of what's at stake.
"Because of history," says Kim, a baseball writer with SportsChosun of Seoul, "there's bad memories."
That will happen when one country invades, then annexes, another, as Japan did to Korea,
leaving only when expelled after World War II. Even now the suspicions and distrust run deep, leaving the nations as reluctant allies.
But if the bad blood started with history, it also has become territorial and cultural. And the baseball field has not been immune to those tensions.
"It goes back to our history and tradition," agreed former Dodgers pitcher Jae Seo, who planted a South Korean flag on the mound at Angel Stadium
after his country beat Japan in the quarterfinal round of the 2006 WBC, a ritual the Koreans repeated -- much to Japan's anger -- after beating Japan again this week.
"It stems from our parents' generation and us," Seo said. "I'm sure that our next generation probably will feel the same."
"They have big bodies," Japanese outfielder Ichiro Suzuki, said through an interpreter.
"They play closer to American-style baseball than Japanese baseball."
In Japan, where ethnic purity has traditionally been revered, such comments smack of racism and ignore the fact
that many of the country's best players were -- and still are -- ethnic Koreans.
Masaichi Kaneda, for example, Japan's only 400-game winner,
and Isao Harimoto, the only player to get 3,000 hits, were both born to parents who were ethnic Koreans and are permanent residents of Japan but not Japanese nationals.