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Eastern Clasico : Japan Korea Rivalry And The 2002 Fifa World Cup

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Eastern Clasico: Japan-Korea rivalry and the 2002 FIFA World Cup
Joshua S. Manalo It is not new for East Asia to host a major international sporting event. Tokyo hosted the Game of the XVII Olympiad, more commonly known as the first Olympics in the continent of Asia in 1964 — and will be hosting it again in the year 2020 (Olympic Movement, n.d.). Japan then could have hosted the sporting event more than two decades earlier but it was cancelled due to its imperialist expansion and subsequently, the Second World War (Collins, 2008). Korea also hosted the event in 1988. But in the advent of the twenty-first century, the region saw another international competition — more popular than the Olympics as many say — in its soil. This time, it was held in two states, the first and probably the only of its kind in any international sporting event. Japan and South Korea — geographically separated by a body of water, the former an insular archipelago that aspired to be a Pacific superpower in the preceding century and the latter a peninsula that was a battlefield throughout its history, in a geopolitical hotspot with a technically-at-war states claiming an entire peninsula and an area of maritime territorial disputes, and with people fuelled with national determinism — hosted the 2002 Football World Cup of the Switzerland-based Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the world governing body of the said sport. The first World Cup of the new century featured various

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