Olympic Shorts

When anonymous troublemakers recently issued vague threats against the Japanese for being too friendly with South Korea, the irony could not have been more resonant: Japan and Korea have been the most serious of enemies for more than a millennium. The last of Japan's invasions on the peninsula ended up with Tokyo colonizing its neighbor from 1910 until 1945, forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese beliefs, Japanese words, even Japanese names. In fact, the man given the honor of carrying the torch into the Olympic stadium was, symbolically enough, Sohn Kee Chung, the Korean who won the 1936 marathon running reluctantly under a Japanese name and flag and who became a symbol for Korea's resistance.

This year the rivals may well vie for dominance in table tennis and baseball. But the focus of their feud will come in the Japanese sport of judo, where Korean and Japanese judoka should fight it out for the gold in three events. One Japanese, Shinji Hosokawa, came out of retirement specifically to face his Korean nemesis, Kim Jae Yup. To make matters even more interesting, the largest group of foreigners at the Games is, of course, from Japan -- eager, no doubt, to see how often Nippon can score an ippon.