He plays like Rooney but behaves more like Beckham. He loves his cars, his rap music and his clothes, and changes hairstyles more often than you can say “Kim Jong Il.” North Korea striker Jong Tae Se is not your average North Korean.
Born and raised in Japan, the 26-year-old forward has never lived in communist North Korea, and says he has no plans to. He loves to shop, snowboard and dreams of marrying South Korea’s Posh Spice — none of which would be possible in impoverished North Korea, one of the most isolated countries in the world.
But he wears the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea jersey with pride, and is moved to tears when he hears the country’s anthem. The boy from Nagoya could become North Korea’s biggest international soccer star since Pak Doo Ik scored the goal that knocked Italy out of the World Cup in 1966.
“He is Japanese but isn’t a Japanese, he is Korean but is playing on the North Korean squad, he is a North Korean national but lives in Japan — all these things are very difficult for the world
to understand,’’ Shin Mu Koeng, a friend and his biographer, said Monday from Tokyo.
North Korea is back in the World Cup for the first time in 44 years. They were the mystery team in 1966, and they’re the mystery team in 2010. Very little is known about the team of sheltered players, most in their early 20s with limited international experience.
Jong, witty and personable, with a dazzling smile, cheeky personality and talent for making goals, gives lowest-ranked North Korea a bit of star power as they face teams from Brazil, Portugal and Ivory Coast stacked with big names.
Jong is quickly becoming his team’s biggest personality and most powerful asset, setting himself apart on and off the field, from his fashion sense to his playing style.
On the pitch, Jong is fast and aggressive, North Korea’s leading scorer with 16 goals in 24 international matches. His impressive play earned him comparisons to England’s Wayne Rooney among South Korean media.
He collects sneakers and considers himself a bit of a fashion hound. Last Wednesday, he was sporting gelled hair. By Thursday he had shaved it all off. And he’s not shy about admitting that he cried like a baby watching South Korea’s most famous soap opera, Winter Sonata.
This is how he sees himself in five years: driving a car worthy of a rap star, with a pop star like one of the singers from the Wondergirls — South Korea’s version of the Spice Girls — on his arm, and playing for a big-name club in Europe.
Jong could have played in South Korea or Japan, but he chose North Korea.
Born in Nagoya to an ethnic Korean family, he inherited his father’s South Korean citizenship but was raised and schooled in his mother’s pro-North Korean community.
He is among Japan’s nearly 600,000 zainichi, ethnic Koreans who live in Japan as long-term residents, many of them third- and fourth-generation descendants of laborers or conscripts who have lived there since Japan’s 1910-1945 colonial rule of Korea.
Their first language may be Japanese, but Jong and midfielder An Yong Hak were raised within the zainichi community, attending Korean-language schools and pledging allegiance to North Korea founder Kim Il Sung and current leader Kim Jong Il.
Still, Jong’s zainichi background sets him apart. He says he never travels without his iPod, laptop and Nintendo, much to the curiosity of teammates from a country with only one state-run TV channel where such luxuries are reserved for top officials.
Jong has said he admires his North Korean teammates’ passion for soccer, and noted that they are largely indifferent to money and materialism.
“He had many doubts, but as he trained with the North Korean
players, he saw their pureness,” said Shin, whose biography about Jong was released in South Korea and Japan. “They never complained about the inadequacies and they did their absolute best. They were playing for their team and for victory, nothing else.’’
On his blog, he wrote from Johannesburg that he was filled with renewed awe for the power of football and the role he can play in the sport.
“Yesterday, I clarified a new goal and dream,” he wrote in Japanese last week. “Instead of sticking within the line of national boundaries, I’ll be acclaimed in the wider world as a player who tore down such high and invisible walls.”
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
Approaching her mid-30s, Xiong Yidan reckons that most of her friends are on to their second or even third babies. But Xiong has more than a dozen. There is Lucky, the street dog from Bangkok who jumped into a taxi with her and never left. There is Sophie and Ben, sibling geese, who honk from morning to night. Boop and Pan, both goats, are romantically involved. Dumpling the hedgehog enjoys a belly rub from time to time. The list goes on. Xiong nurtures her brood from her 8,000 square meter farm in Chiang Dao, a mountainous district in northern Thailand’s
Located down a sideroad in old Wanhua District (萬華區), Waley Art (水谷藝術) has an established reputation for curating some of the more provocative indie art exhibitions in Taipei. And this month is no exception. Beyond the innocuous facade of a shophouse, the full three stories of the gallery space (including the basement) have been taken over by photographs, installation videos and abstract images courtesy of two creatives who hail from the opposite ends of the earth, Taiwan’s Hsu Yi-ting (許懿婷) and Germany’s Benjamin Janzen. “In 2019, I had an art residency in Europe,” Hsu says. “I met Benjamin in the lobby
April 22 to April 28 The true identity of the mastermind behind the Demon Gang (魔鬼黨) was undoubtedly on the minds of countless schoolchildren in late 1958. In the days leading up to the big reveal, more than 10,000 guesses were sent to Ta Hwa Publishing Co (大華文化社) for a chance to win prizes. The smash success of the comic series Great Battle Against the Demon Gang (大戰魔鬼黨) came as a surprise to author Yeh Hung-chia (葉宏甲), who had long given up on his dream after being jailed for 10 months in 1947 over political cartoons. Protagonist