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.”
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