Heart and Seoul is not in Tokyo

13 April 2012

The giant billboards in Yokohama proclaim this as the "City of the Final" yet, as the world rushes by on its teeming streets at a million miles an hour, you can't help wondering if they ever bother to stop and try to remember 'the final of what?'

Then to Seoul, the city of the opening game, and suddenly there's a vision of how it could be. Gigantic screens dominating gigantic tower blocks display a blurred blanket of red flags greeting a Korean goal against France while, down below in the plaza and even on the busiest highway where drivers are grinding to a halt just to gape and shriek, everyone's put life on hold as they mirror the ecstatic scene.

Could this tale of two cities also be the prelude to a tale of two World Cups, both like no other before and both with their own quite individual feel? One in Japan which, for all its neon hype, perhaps can't and won't truly embrace it as anything more than a passing novelty juggernaut; and the other in Korea, which looks ready to rejoice in being the focal point of a global happening.

Hopefully, I've got it wrong about Japan. After all, tickets there are sold out, television never stops hyping the message of how important this is - yet what the average sumo fan makes of documentaries on prewar Argentinian football is anybody's guess - and you just know, while being reminded of how it once felt when your train always arrived exactly on time, that organisationally they'll get it right.

Yet only now, as the alien invasion from around the planet starts in earnest, will we really see if a nation will be prepared to drop its natural guard and mingle as perfect party hosts. A few days there last week could only persuade you that they're finding it hard to convince themselves that they're going to love this strange circus. A survey in the Yomiuri Shimbun newspaper found that only one in three Japanese cared in the slightest about the event and you can't hide that degree of apathy.

Okay, so they're wild about Becks and the fortunes of Hidetoshi Nakata and his boys, because for the moment the event is being loudly sold as the new rock 'n' roll with this pair as sexy lead vocalists. Japan v Sweden last Saturday night was a sell-out because the World Cup's cool, trendy and Western.

Yet Nakata, comparing Japan with his life in Italy where the footballing culture is ingrained with depth and real passion, is not the only one who's expressed his "greatest fear" that the country will discard the fashion item as soon as the hosts get knocked out, just as America did in 1994.

There are tell-tale signs. Saturday's match was in Tokyo's National Stadium, yet this will be the first World Cup where a host nation's most important city doesn't stage a game in the actual competition. And if you don't take the festival to the country's heart, then why expect a country's heart to be really in the festival?

Instead, the port of Yokohama, an hour down the road, will stage the showpiece, yet there the event seems invisible. Their real football fraternity, fans of J-League leaders Yokohama F Marinos, were forced to trek into the countryside to watch them play Uruguay in the shadow of Mt Fuji last Saturday. About 50 lads bounced around chantingthe rest of the crowd might have been in a library. Surreal.

In conversation, people's curiosity only seems to centre on what hooligans are like and, as the first thing I'd seen on TV there was a policeman outside Highbury discussing crowd control methods, it was little surprise to discover why the incessant coverage might have come to obsess them.

PRINCE TAKAMADO, a cousin of the Emperor, fears these exaggerated concerns about hooligans could lead ordinary Japanese to avoid contact with all foreigners, thus widening rather than breaking down the culture chasm. Visitors, he felt, might think their hosts were "cold-hearted".

So far, there's been genuine warmth. At the Nigerians' base in Kanagawa, players enthused about how they'd appreciated the efforts to make them feel at home. Still, it's different here in Seoul. There's no forced conversations about the World Cup. There's only one topic here, and it's not baseball.

Maybe that sensation will prove a bit misleading - after all, there are still 200,000 tickets left unsold here, including a reported 10,000 for tomorrow's opening fixture - yet there's so far been an exuberance from Seoul to Suwon to Seogwipo which suggests it means more to one nation than another.

Japan can be blase, knowing how it feels to be the centre of global events. Korea, which has long forgotten since it staged a great Olympics here, looks glad to remember again. And, of course, they're desperate to be seen to do it all better than their neighbours.

After all the dismal politicking and civil war in its corridors of power this week, FIFA's prayer must be that both home teams make it through to at least the first knockout stage. It's still their best chance of making a bold gamble pay off, of proving that two hosts without football in the blood can still provide one great World Cup experience.

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Heart and Seoul is not in Tokyo

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