A place at the next football World Cup is not all that is at stake when Japan and North Korea meet on Thursday for the first of two qualifying matches, in a resumption of one of the fiercest rivalries in international football.
Despite the huge gap between the countries’ economies and the profiles of their domestic leagues, few expect the match at Tokyo’s national stadium to be a walkover for the Japanese, who are 18th in the Fifa rankings, 96 places above their opponents.
Meetings between the two countries have always been about more than football. On one side, a former colonial power allied to Pyongyang’s arch-enemy, the US; on the other, a dictatorship that has sent ballistic missiles over Japan and abducted dozens of its citizens.
Pundits expect the Samurai Blue to win in front of a highly partisan crowd, but they will be in unfamiliar, hostile territory five days later for the return leg at the 50,000-seat Kim Il-sung Stadium in Pyongyang. With a week to go before kick-off for that second match, it was not clear if North Korean supporters – mainly military and party elites – would be allowed to attend.
Geopolitics is never far away when the two teams meet. The qualifiers for the 2026 tournament, co-hosted by the US, Canada and Mexico, come soon after the North test-launched short-range ballistic missiles and the country’s leader, Kim Jong-un, oversaw a live-fire drill of nuclear-capable rocket launchers designed to target Seoul. The country’s million-strong army, Kim said this week, should “prepare for war”.
The visiting players, who were permitted to travel as an exception to sanctions barring North Koreans from entering Japan, will not be without support. Among the expected 68,000 crowd will be several thousand members of Japan’s 150,000-strong North Korean community, many of whom are descended from people forcibly brought to work in Japan during Tokyo’s 1910-45 colonisation of the Korean peninsula.
The 4,000 tickets for seats in the North Korean section of the stadium sold out immediately, while the pro-Pyongyang General Association of Korean Residents in Japan – North Korea’s de facto embassy – urged ethnic minority zainichi Koreans with connections to the North to cheer for the visitors.
Risa Ho, an ethnic North Korean living in Tokyo, said she would be supporting the visitors on Thursday. “I love Japanese footballers and I usually support Japan, but not when they play North Korea,” said Ho, who will be in the crowd at the national stadium.
“It’s complicated, and I feel a little bit conflicted, but when it comes to the national team I want to support North Korea,” added Ho, who predicted some frank exchanges between rival supporters on Thursday. “The political backdrop means these games always have an edge.”
As for the result, Ho predicted a 2-1 win for Japan, but believed North Korea would still make the World Cup finals. “North Korea is putting a lot of effort into improving its sports teams, and that includes football,” she said, adding that Kim, known for his love of NBA basketball, also followed football.
North Korea have historically punched well above their weight in international football. At the 1966 World Cup in England, the unknown team stunned Italy with a 1-0 win in a decisive group match, only to be beaten 5-3 by Portugal in the quarter-final after leading 3-0.
Their record against Japan suggests that the results of the two games are far from fait accompli for the Samurai Blue, who began their World Cup campaign with comfortable wins over Asian minnows Syria and Myanmar. In the two countries’ 20 meetings since 1975, the men’s senior teams have each won eight and drawn four.
Previous fixtures between North Korea and Japan have occasionally seen the mutual animosity spill over on to the pitch. The Japan U-23’s 2-1 victory over the North at the Asian Games last October was marred when members of the losing team clashed with match officials and security staff.
“I admit that our players were a little bit over-excited in the match, but that’s football,” North Korea’s coach, Sin Yong Nam, said afterwards. “But there are confrontations in football matches … I think our behaviour was acceptable.”
When the countries’ women’s teams played each other in Tokyo last month, North Korean fans turned a section of the stadium into a blanket of red, with some waving flags urging their players to “protect the dignity of the republic” – a reference to North Korea’s official name the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK).
Like other athletes from the secretive country, the players were confined to their accommodation, training ground and stadium, and banned from speaking to Japanese or South Koreans, according to the Asahi Shimbun newspaper.
Contests between Korean and Japanese teams can summon mixed emotions among younger ethnic Koreans in Japan.
“I was born and brought up in Japan, so to be honest, I knew the Japan players’ names and faces better than the DPRK players from seeing them on TV,” An Yong-hak, a former North Korean international, told Agence France-Presse this week.
“But I am an ethnic Korean, and my name is An Yong-hak. I thought of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea as my national team, and I always worked hard with that in mind.”
As North Korea attempt to qualify for their first World Cup since 2010, An attempted to play down the historical and political tensions that have made this one of the qualifying rounds’ most anticipated matches.
Recalling his team’s injury-time defeat against Japan in a World Cup qualifier in 2006, he held out hope that, whatever the result on Thursday, fair play will prevail.
“After that game we all shook hands and waved to the Japanese fans,” An said. “It was a great game that went beyond the result, and I hope this time is the same.”
Agencies contributed reporting
