ABSTRACT
The trajectory of the history of Korean sport has been a complex amalgamation of Western influence, Japanese colonialism, Korean nationalism and modernity connected with international sport events. The main drive for introduction and promotion of sport in Korea in the late nineteenth century came from the Westerners, particularly the Young Men’s Christian Association (YMCA). Since the Japanese annexation of Korea in 1910, sport in colonial Korea served as crucial sites for “imagining and re-imagining the nation.” Stadiums remain battlegrounds between Korea and Japan and titillate national sentiment in a post-liberation era deeply entrenched in colonial memories. To Koreans, a match victory against Japan is about national pride – a compensation for 35 years of colonial rule. On the other hand, the booming popular culture of the Japanese empire presents a more complex relationship between the coloniser and the colonised. Colonial Korean sport reflected the maturity of a mass culture deeply imbricated with globalisation in relation to metropole. Most Korean Olympians were by-products of colonial modernity given the fact that education, sport facilities, a sizable fan base and the mass media constructed by colonialism played a major role in producing world-class Korean athletes. We must view sport as a colonial hegemony in which colonialism, nationalism and modernity are negotiated, contested and recreated across and beyond the one-dimensional dichotomy of colonial repression/exploitation versus Korean resistance.
