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.”
President William Lai (賴清德) yesterday delivered an address marking the first anniversary of his presidency. In the speech, Lai affirmed Taiwan’s global role in technology, trade and security. He announced economic and national security initiatives, and emphasized democratic values and cross-party cooperation. The following is the full text of his speech: Yesterday, outside of Beida Elementary School in New Taipei City’s Sanxia District (三峽), there was a major traffic accident that, sadly, claimed several lives and resulted in multiple injuries. The Executive Yuan immediately formed a task force, and last night I personally visited the victims in hospital. Central government agencies and the
May 26 to June 1 When the Qing Dynasty first took control over many parts of Taiwan in 1684, it roughly continued the Kingdom of Tungning’s administrative borders (see below), setting up one prefecture and three counties. The actual area of control covered today’s Chiayi, Tainan and Kaohsiung. The administrative center was in Taiwan Prefecture, in today’s Tainan. But as Han settlement expanded and due to rebellions and other international incidents, the administrative units became more complex. By the time Taiwan became a province of the Qing in 1887, there were three prefectures, eleven counties, three subprefectures and one directly-administered prefecture, with
Among Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) villages, a certain rivalry exists between Arunothai, the largest of these villages, and Mae Salong, which is currently the most prosperous. Historically, the rivalry stems from a split in KMT military factions in the early 1960s, which divided command and opium territories after Chiang Kai-shek (蔣介石) cut off open support in 1961 due to international pressure (see part two, “The KMT opium lords of the Golden Triangle,” on May 20). But today this rivalry manifests as a different kind of split, with Arunothai leading a pro-China faction and Mae Salong staunchly aligned to Taiwan.
As with most of northern Thailand’s Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) settlements, the village of Arunothai was only given a Thai name once the Thai government began in the 1970s to assert control over the border region and initiate a decades-long process of political integration. The village’s original name, bestowed by its Yunnanese founders when they first settled the valley in the late 1960s, was a Chinese name, Dagudi (大谷地), which literally translates as “a place for threshing rice.” At that time, these village founders did not know how permanent their settlement would be. Most of Arunothai’s first generation were soldiers
RSS