‘When Sport Met Ideology and Colonial Bitter Memories’: The Impact of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics on North and South Korean Sports

Abstract

Over the course of the twentieth century, Korea underwent very unfortunate and tragic experiences from Japanese colonization to the Korean War and the split into two states, the communist North and the capitalist South. Consequently, it was natural that South Korea was subsumed into the Cold War and that South Korean society was filled with strong antiJapanese sentiments. It is beyond doubt that South Korean society has been characterized by anti-communism and anti-Japanese feelings. However, there were other complex aspects to the two most dominating political and social tenets in South Korea. It cannot be denied that the people residing in North and South Korea had a common ethnic background. This racial homogeneity impacted North and South Korean relations despite their different political and economic systems in an age of the Cold War where the global competition between the United States and the Soviet Union fiercely developed and rapidly spread to every field.