June 2

Nothing obsesses modern Korea more than its international image. Korea desperately wants to be taken as seriously as Japan, the one Asian nation that has gone completely from "developing" to "developed" and settled into a French- or German-style long-term recession. That's why, when FIFA announced that Japan would host the next World Cup, Korea mounted frantic and incessant protests. Somehow football's governing body was convinced that the games should be split because Japan occupied Korea in the first half of the 20th century. I can't follow the logic in the argument — Germany is to be the host in 2006, and neither France nor Poland has complained — but football is a game of passions, and Korea got half the games. The final match — the world's most widely watched sporting event — will still be in Japan, but Korea will nevertheless be getting a whole lot of attention.

Korea's been getting ready for this since before we arrived. They've built new stadiums, prettied up subway stations, printed large numbers of match schedules in Korean, and generally behaved like very anxious hosts who are about to receive space aliens in great numbers. They've done a few things right and a lot of things wrong. On the positive side, they've generated enormous enthusiasm among their own people — one of my kindergarteners informed me that the final would be between Korea and France. Their own soccer team has improved enough that in recent friendlies it tied England and lost to France by only one goal, though it's worth noting that reigning World Cup champion France was just defeated by lowly Senegal.

But not everything has gone quite so smoothly. Ticket sales were managed disastrously, so that the tickets were sold in confusing rounds and largely snapped up by the Koreans themselves. Hotel reservations were briefly taken out of the hands of the hotels and given over to a British firm, but by the time the spaces were listed as available, the deadline for reserving them was already past. In the end, the hotels were given back control over their rooms, but only after they'd spent a month turning away potential business during the World Cup month because they had no rooms available. Hotels are facing less-than-average occupancy for June. Then there's been the ongoing dog-meat situation. FIFA wanted Korea to clamp down on its illegal dog-meat trade, which prompted enthusiasts to suggest that they would sell dog-meat soups and beverages outside game venues. Knowing how Korea works, it's likely that some foreigner will end up eating dog completely by accident, which is very not good. Meanwhile, you can get a World Cup T-shirt at just about any subway station, but you can't get a bus map. Likewise, English is considered important enough that it's used for official announcements at the games, but none of the five channels broadcasting the games have English commentary. Considering that the games are spread widely across two countries and that tickets are expensive (and nearly impossible to purchase), most fans will only be going to a few games; they'll probably want to watch the rest of them in their hotel rooms, and they won't be happy when they find out they'll be watching in Korean, with even the scores presented in Korean script. As for me, I watched the opening ceremonies and was completely baffled. An English explanation of the dancing monsters with TV heads might have helped, but then again it might not have.

Yesterday I went into Seoul and saw largish numbers of these World Cup foreigners. They were shoving and being shoved through the crowds on Insadong, which has been turned into a lively festival space for the duration of the games, at least on weekends. Never have I seen so many exhausted, befuddled white people here in Korea, and it was even more startling to hear European languages — Dutch, Danish, German, French — rather than just English. Jenny claims she even saw some Poles, who were looking hot, as Poles tend to when you spot them anywhere south of Paris, and also a little frightened: they're the opponents in Korea's first game, and hospitality has limits.

It's hard not to feel like all these foreigners are invading my turf. It's not like I've begun to blend in here or anything, but I've gotten good at looking like I know what I'm doing. I can get around, I can buy things, I know a smattering of Korean pleasantries and shopping words. But now all these nincompoops have arrived, and I look like an idiot by association. Lately Koreans have responded with dropped-jaw shock when I answer basic Korean phrases or use the correct forms of "hello" and "goodbye" automatically. And everyone asks me hopefully whether I'm here for the World Cup — "Walled Cop?" they grin. They're disappointed when I tell them I'm a teacher. On the other hand, I keep getting free stuff. At the galleries on Insadong yesterday, I was given innumerable posters and exhibition catalogues, and I was flatly refused whenever I tried to pay for them. I witnessed no fewer than three live musical performances and was fed several different mystery beverages, all for free. I even had a small bottle of baeksaeju, Korea's not very good traditional rice wine, shoved into my hand despite my protests.

In the end, free stuff may be much of the point of the government's carefully orchestrated Walled Cop hysteria. As with the Olympics in 1988 (about which, mysteriously, I have heard hardly a whisper from Koreans), it may ultimately be a financial loss, but it's been a fantastic excuse to upgrade the country's infrastructure, and the worldwide attention serves to advertise how far Korea has come. For all the individual losses faced by hotels, shops and corporations, Korea, Inc. will probably come out ahead.

Of course, the biggest issue was and is prestige. It's worth remembering that Korea was a colony and Japan its master less than a century ago; Koreans have the same inferiority complex that you find in India, Africa, the Middle East, except they have it towards the Japanese. Koreans very much want the world to see them as equal to Japan, and to see them as "dynamic" and "the hub of Asia." I expect that the games will be at least a partial success in that respect. Japan has come across as stiff and sullen, going on ad nauseum about the precautions it's taking against soccer hooligans; Korea, meanwhile, has been incredibly eager to please. And Japan is stuck in an endless recession, while Korea's economy is booming. Yes, Korea is the poorer nation, but it's also the one that feels like it's on a roll. I don't think World Cup will suddenly make Korea as important as Japan, but it will remind people, briefly, that Korea is here, and that Koreans are capable of working very hard and getting big things done.

June 30

Forty-nine percent of Koreans are Christians, but that hasn't stopped them from going over to devil worship with a collective enthusiasm that would make Anton LeVay wet his pants. Specifically, it's the Red Devils they're worshipping — Korea's national football team, along with its Dutch coach, Gus Hiddink, who has been awarded honorary citizenship and granted free first-class flights for life on Korean Air. And for what it's worth, the actual mascot is a traditional Buddhist demon, so another 47 percent of the population has been given a fair chance at apostasy.

Korea is not a football nation. Americans tend to imagine that football — what we call soccer because we don't like it — is beloved everywhere else, and only Americans are lucky enough to have real sports like basketball and Temptation Island. The truth is more complex. Yes, football is a sacred pagan cult across much of Europe and Latin America — Honduras and El Salvador once went to war over a World Cup match — and it's widely popular in Africa and the Middle East. But there's a reason Asia has never before hosted the World Cup: no one here much cares. India, China, Malaysia, Indonesia, Australia — football is insignificant in all of them. In fact, Japan is the only nation east of Afghanistan where there's a real enthusiasm for the sport. Young Japanese have been following the Spanish and English leagues for years now, as well as supporting their own local teams; it's a sort of rebellion against their stiffer baseball-loving parents. Crowds of Japanese turned out to support various teams other than their own, and England's charismatic captain, David Beckham, was treated like a Beatle, unable to leave his hotel room without guards to push back the mobs. It was this passion that earned them the 2002 World Cup in the first place.

South Korea got its World Cup for entirely different reasons, largely nationalist ones, and it's only since then that the Koreans en masse have shown any interest in the sport. You can tell they're new to football because they only have two chants. They care about their national team — no, they are obsessed with it — but they don't care about the sport itself, which has given their intense support an unsettling edge.

At first, of course, it seemed reasonable enough. South Korea is a host nation, after all, and its people ought to exhibit some passion for the team, even if they haven't followed the sport before. I was rooting for the Red Devils right along with everyone else — for the sake of Korea's national pride, I hoped the team would make it to the second round before being dismissed. But when Korea played the United States, I mostly prayed that there would be no controversy. After all, we're still hearing about Apollo Anton Ohno, the short-track skater who knocked over the Korean and won the gold in Utah this year; when Ahn Jung Hwan scored his equalizing goal against the United States (the final score was 1-1), he promptly performed a pantomime of short-track skating.

Of course, Korea did make it to the second round. They got there by defeating Portugal in a bizarre game that involved the sending off of not one but two Portuguese players, which meant the Koreans had eleven players to Portugal's nine. It was a less than decisive way to advance, but the Koreans were understandably ecstatic. And anyway, it was hardly the only upset of the first round: favorites Argentina and reigning champions France were both knocked out, while Senegal and Turkey moved on.

In the Round of 16, Korea came up against Italy, who were clearly the most attractive team in the tournament. They all looked like Armani models and had expensive haircuts, and I must admit I was rooting for them, not the Koreans. I was glad that the Red Devils had made it to the Round of 16 — just as good as the Japanese, who by then had been eliminated — but now I was ready for it to end. I was sick to death of the same two football chants, particularly when they came spontaneously from my students at inappropriate moments. Even more, I was sick of Korean nationalism, which too often involved ranting about the evils of Japan.

But I was disappointed. Again Korea eked out an upset victory against an undermanned opponent, the Italians having lost a player in the second half. To be fair, the Italians looked sloppy all tournament, and in their game against Korea they seemed to think their one early goal was good enough, settling back to play defense for the rest of the game. It was a poor performance by the Italians, and they might well have lost even without help from the referees. And the next morning, the Italians showed themselves to be poor sports indeed: the owner of Perugia's team declared that he was firing Ahn Jung Hwan, the Korean star who scored the winning goal against Italy, because Ahn had "ruined Italian football." (He has since apologized for this outburst and offered to keep Ahn on the team.)

By the time the next game rolled around, I was rooting for Spain with surprising intensity. For the first time I experienced football the way fans around the world do, as a brutal period of anxiety in which the clock becomes your nemesis. In this case, I wanted it to slow down. Spain put the ball into the Korean goal twice, but both times it was called back by the referee: once because the ball had supposedly gone out of bounds (it hadn't), and once for a penalty that simply wasn't visible to the naked eye. But surely the Spanish would do it again, and then it would count, and that would be the end for Korea. I sorely wanted to see the Koreans humbled. Okay, so they'd gone one better than Japan. It was time for them to remember that until three weeks ago most of them didn't understand the offside rule. It was time for them to take the loss with dignity and go back to feeling small.

I was surprised at my own vindictiveness, but not that surprised. Korea's xenophobia was running rampant. Student activists wanted to turn the tournament into a protest against the United States, and the anti-Japanese sentiments had begun seriously to grate on me. I actually got into an argument with one of my classes over whether Japanese people their own age were "bad." Yes, I told them, I know about the occupation, but what did young Japanese people have to do with that? And yes, the Japanese killed 400,000 Koreans, but that was a piddling amount compared to the 2 million they themselves killed during the Korean War. Were Koreans bad? I could get no more than an agreement that the North Koreans were bad, and then they were back again on 1910, when "Japan eat Korea."

The Spanish goal never came. The game went into overtime, and then to the penalty shoot-out phase, in which each team has five chances to kick the ball into the goal from a short distance away, with no one but the goalkeeper defending. It was a nail-biting affair, but in the end the Spanish missed. The Koreans moved on to the semifinals, having defeated three European sides, each time with the help of controversial refereeing. UEFA, the European football organization, was calling for an investigation. So far there's been no indication of any orchestrated wrongdoing, and it's worth noting that up to that point, Korea was the most heavily penalized team in the tournament. Still, the Korean side had won only one match — their first, against Poland — in which all of the opposing team's players were on the field at the end. They drew against the United States, beat a nine-man Portuguese team and a ten-man Italian one, and then lost 2-0 to the Spanish, except that the referee canceled those goals.

But somehow the victory over Spain changed everything. A few minutes after the game, my friend Graeme called me and suggested that Jenny and I should go watch the celebrations in downtown Anyang. We did, and the pure joy was infectious. A sea of red-clad Koreans filled the streets, banging on drums, shooting firecrackers, singing, dancing, riding on the tops of cars. No Asian team had ever gone this far in the World Cup; from here on out any further success would be icing, but the Koreans felt that by beating Spain they had already taken the cake. There was a certain humility in this. The Koreans were satisfied now; they didn't need the trophy, though they still wanted it badly.

Going into the game against Germany, my feelings were no longer ambiguous. Jenny and I went with Suky and her family to watch it on a big screen at the local middle school. I wore my "Be the Reds" T-shirt like everyone else — the T-shirt vendors are the real winners of this World Cup — and I cheered for Korea. At half-time the score was still 0-0, and the crowd around us reacted as if they knew this might be their last hurrah. Fireworks were everywhere, and a circle of dancers beat on drums and Korean cymbals. It was very foreign and very beautiful, and we were reminded once again that we are living in a culture that is not our own.

It was also during half-time that Suky asked us if we knew what this day was. No, we said. "Today North Korea invaded South Korea," she explained.

Oh.

World Cup is about losing. It's not like the Olympics, where each event produces three medalists and there are dozens of events. In the World Cup, every team except for one has to lose sometime, and there's only one trophy. In the second half against Germany, Korea fought valiantly, but the Germans were relentless in their assault, and at last they scored a goal — the only goal of the match. It was the end of the fairy tale, the Koreans' turn to lose. They responded with dignity and pride in their team's achievements. The crowds in the streets — as many as 7 million people across Seoul — kept cheering long after the game was over, and there were no riots. When the Koreans lost, they lost well. But of all the days to lose, it must have been a hard one.

As we walked home from the middle school, I tried to console Suky, telling her how impressed I was both with the Korean team's performance and with Korea's success in hosting the games. I was lying a little — Korea made many mistakes in its management of World Cup, and despite much hoopla, tourism numbers were actually below the seasonal average because the Japanese stayed home to watch the games — but I did think Korea had much to be proud of nonetheless. After all, the team had done spectacularly well, and as far as I could tell, the tourists who came here enjoyed themselves. Even the non-English broadcasts were less disappointing than I expected them to be, and because of one SBS announcer's curious pronunciation, I will now always think of goalkeepers as "porkie-pie." Indeed, there was a strange poetry to it:

Hassan-Sas
Hassan-Sas
SHOOOT!
Porkie-pie
Cawnah keek

When a Korean mentions unification, of course, it has an additional meaning, even if the speaker didn't intend it. World Cup united the southern half of Korea — I think the South Koreans completely missed the irony of collectively dressing in red, going to mass demonstrations and shouting nationalist slogans in unison — but the northern half is still as far away as ever. The games have not been shown there. Instead the impoverished North Korean government has staged a massive Arirang Festival, a pageant of acrobats and singers and dancers that no one is watching; they may not have bread, but the government is at least providing a circus. Still, when the South Koreans played Italy, they waved signs and banners that said "Remember 1966" — the year in which the North Korean team defeated Italy.

Most of the time it's easy to forget that Korea is a divided nation, but World Cup brought South Korea's tangled emotions to the surface. I think much of the anger at Japan is simply transference of Korea's deeply felt guilt and shame, and also an attempt to blame someone else for the disaster of the Korean War and the subsequent division of the nation: it was the occupation that was the real disaster, goes the thinking, and the civil war would never have happened if the Japanese hadn't come. While that's probably true, it's like blaming the American Civil War on 17th-century slave traders; history is what it is, but people kill each other in the present. The South Koreans' guilt is perhaps deepened by the inequity of violence: the south lost 47,000, while the north lost 2 million. And by now, the fierce competition between the two Koreas is largely over, at least on the southern side. In 2001, South Korea threw away more food than North Korea produced; South Korea's economy has one of the best growth rates in the world, while North Koreans are fleeing to China in search of food. But that may only exacerbate South Koreans' sense of failure and helplessness: so many Korean people live under an oppressive regime, so many of them are starving and suffering, and the South Korean leadership can hardly orchestrate a sustained round of negotiations.

On the morning of the day when Korea would play its final match, north and south engaged in the fiercest naval battle in years, which left four South Koreans dead and another 20 wounded. That night the Red Devils looked exhausted, and so did their fans; Turkey scored a goal in the first minute and went on to win easily, 3-1. There is still the final to be played tonight between Brazil and Germany. But for Korea, World Cup is over.