SAN DIEGO — Nam Hyung Kim wants to make one thing clear from the start. "We don't hate Japan," the South Korean journalist insists.
But just the fact Kim feels the need to clarify that point suggests that, well, maybe there is more to the two countries' baseball rivalry than just baseball.
Not that the games haven't been compelling.
Last summer South Korea had to get by Japan twice to win its first Olympic baseball gold. Three years before that Japan handed South Korea its only loss in the first World Baseball Classic en route to the tournament title.
And now the rivalry is coming to Los Angeles, home to the largest Korean and one of the largest Japanese communities in the U.S.
The teams have already met four times in this month's second WBC, with Japan winning the most recent matchup, 6-2, Thursday to claim a No. 1 seeding for this weekend's semifinals at Dodger Stadium.
If both teams win -- South Korea against Venezuela on Saturday and Japan over the U.S. on Sunday -- they will meet again in Monday's championship game.
But should that happen, a baseball title will be only part of what's at stake.
"Because of history," says Kim, a baseball writer with SportsChosun of Seoul, "there's bad memories."
That will happen when one country invades, then annexes, another, as Japan did to Korea, leaving only when expelled after World War II. Even now the suspicions and distrust run deep, leaving the nations as reluctant allies. But if the bad blood started with history, it also has become territorial and cultural. And the baseball field has not been immune to those tensions.
"It goes back to our history and tradition," agreed former Dodgers pitcher Jae Seo, who planted a South Korean flag on the mound at Angel Stadium after his country beat Japan in the quarterfinal round of the 2006 WBC, a ritual the Koreans repeated -- much to Japan's anger -- after beating Japan again this week.
"It stems from our parents' generation and us," Seo said. "I'm sure that our next generation probably will feel the same."
Yet nobody in the baseball world really noticed the rivalry until South Korea suddenly shot to international prominence in the sport by beating Japan to win the bronze medal in the 2000 Sydney Olympics.
