S. Koreans may see North's footballers as sisters, but opposite isn't true
When North Korea’s Naegohyang Women’s FC arrives in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, this weekend for next Wednesday’s AFC Women’s Champions League semifinals, South Koreans will witness something rare: Young North Koreans walking openly among them again.
The visit itself rings historic bells. This will be the first North Korean women’s football team to compete in the South since the 2014 Incheon Asian Games. It will also mark the first sports delegation of any kind since the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.
That last date is highly significant because it was then that the portcullis came down on inter-Korean exchanges.
It is worth explaining how that happened. Nobody on this side could see it coming — such was the earnestness with which rapprochement was being pursued — but it was Kim Yo-jong’s exposure to the South during those subzero days in Gangwon Province, ironically the world’s only divided province, that appears to have crystallized reality for North Korea’s number two.
It must have seemed to her that, in the race to be the real Korea, the North’s revolution had crashed and lay sprawled, skis flailing in the air, watching in dismay as its rival sped toward gold.
Confronted by the astonishing transformation wrought by the “corrupt puppets” of Namjoson, as they call people here, she knew there and then that the 50 million fashionable and individualistic South Koreans would never be theirs.
She went home and the rest is history. Inter-Korea dialogue and exchanges ended, and her brother, leader Kim Jong-un, declared an end to the founding national aspiration of reunification. South Koreans are foreigners, he told his people. Because they want to “unify” — i.e., absorb — us, they are hostile, armed and dangerous.
Given this, how might South Koreans feel seeing North Koreans for the first time after all these years? Not politically. Emotionally.
When we think about it — and we rarely do — South Koreans are psychologically incapable of viewing North Koreans the way they view other foreigners. A Japanese athlete, a Chinese tourist or a European visitor can simply be themselves: Outsiders, familiar or unfamiliar, but comprehensible.
North Koreans occupy a category entirely their own. They are not foreign, but neither are they compatriots.
They are something stranger: kin separated by history, frozen in national memory and burdened with unresolved meaning.
For decades after the horrendous war, South Koreans were intensely fearful of anything Northern. Images of North Korea’s founder, Kim Il-sung, were banned here for years. Northerners appeared as fanatics, enemies capable of emerging without warning from tunnels or submarines. Older generations remember school drills, anti-communist education and television dramas that portrayed Northerners as cursed relatives, fellow Koreans corrupted by evil.
The relationship resembled a biblical tragedy. Brothers divided against brothers. Cain across the border, seething, forging ploughshares into weapons and out for blood.
Then South Korea changed. As the country became wealthier, more democratic and more confident, fear evaporated. In its place came confidence and this gave birth to pity, yearning and paternalism. North Koreans became suffering cousins awaiting rescue.
“Join us,” the South seemed to say. “You belong with us. We will not hurt you.”
This emotional framework became so deeply rooted in South Korean consciousness that reunification itself came to feel almost metaphysical — less a political choice than a moral destiny.
But this footballing moment may help us recognize something uncomfortable: They don’t want to unify. History has moved on. The problem is, we haven’t been talking about this and so have not have moved on with the times.
Lest we’ve not been paying attention, Kim Jong-un has been systematically dismantling the very concept of reunification for over two years now. At first, many assumed the shift was rhetorical. It is now clear that it is structural. Pyongyang has revised laws and state doctrine to redefine the two Koreas not as temporarily separated members of one nation but as two hostile states. Last month, it changed the constitution.
This matters because identities are not eternal. They are taught.
A generation of young North Koreans is now growing up under a fundamentally different narrative from the one their parents and grandparents knew. They are no longer being educated as incomplete Koreans awaiting national restoration. They are being taught that they are citizens of a sovereign state that must defend itself from a foreign rival across the Demilitarized Zone.
For South Koreans, this creates an emotional contradiction that, difficult as it may be, must eventually be confronted. And this month’s football tournament may reveal a glimpse of that reality.
When the North Korean players enter the stadium in Suwon, South Korean spectators will almost certainly give them a warm welcome. It may be somewhat muted because the government wants to appear as unthreatening as possible. But emotionally, the old yearning will be there. South Koreans will see them not as representatives of another country, but as sisters held hostage by dictatorship.
In fact, although I have no polling evidence to make the claim, I’ll bet a majority of South Koreans will secretly want the North Koreans to win the semifinal against Suwon FC Women.
That is because, for South Koreans, the emotional weight attached to their presence far exceeds the sporting occasion. Every smile, gesture and expression will be scrutinized for signs of hidden familiarity or distance.
Do they envy us? Do they like K-pop? Do they fear us? Do they think of us as fellow countrymen?
These are not questions South Koreans ask of Australian or Japanese athletes. But they cannot help asking them of North Koreans because the division in the peninsula remains as an unfinished business in their minds, regardless of what the Kims in Pyongyang now say.
But that might all change over the next few years. Soon, ordinary South Koreans will encounter young North Koreans not as symbols of reunification or relics of the Cold War, but as citizens of another state forming its own distinct identity.
It might take a while, but it will come.
Michael Breen (mike.breen@insightcomms.com) is the author of "The New Koreans.” The views expressed here are his own.