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South Koreans wave flags showing a unified Korean peninsula while cheering the North Korean women’s national team

The North Korean national women’s ice hockey team entered South Korea on Apr. 1, while the South Korean national women’s soccer team reached Pyongyang via Beijing on Apr. 2. Since the reciprocal visits of sports teams attending international events represents a resumption of inter-Korean exchange, which was cut off after the closing of the Kaesong Industrial Complex in Feb. 2016, attention is focusing on how this will affect inter-Korean relations in the future. Another major question is whether North Korean athletes will attend the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Olympics.

This is the first time for a North Korean sports team to visit South Korea in two years and six months, since the Incheon Asian Games in Sept. 2014. The last time a South Korean sports team played a game in North Korea was in Aug. 2015, when more than 80 people (including players and staff from Gyeonggi and Gangwon Province teams) competed in a boys’ soccer tournament in Pyongyang.

There are some eyebrow-raising aspects of the North Korean women‘s hockey team visiting the South. The North Korean men’s hockey team did not participate in a Division 2 Group B tournament organized by the International Ice Hockey Federation (IIHF) held in Seoul in 2007. That was during the presidency of Roh Moo-hyun (2003-2008), when inter-Korean relations were not as poor as they became during the subsequent presidencies of Lee Myung-bak (2008-2013) and Park Geun-hye (2013-2017).

But with tensions high because of a series of missile tests, North Korea abruptly decided to let its women’s hockey team visit South Korea. After arriving at Incheon International Airport on Apr. 1, the athletes walked between rows of policemen to board a bus outside the arrivals area, but their expressions were cheerful. Some of the athletes even felt comfortable enough to smile and wave inside the bus.

Looking just at the game of soccer, this is the first time in 27 years that South Korea’s national team has managed to play a game in the North. The last such game was an “inter-Korean unification soccer game” held in Pyongyang on Oct. 11, 1990. The South Korean men‘s and women’s national teams had gone to Pyongyang together to play friendly matches as part of an effort to create a reconciliatory mood between North and South. While there have been matches between the North and South Korean teams in Seoul or overseas since then, they haven‘t played each other in Pyongyang. The South Korean national soccer team under coach Huh Jung-moo was in the same bracket as North Korea in 2008 during the third Asian qualifying rounds for the World Cup in South Africa, but it played its away matches not in Pyongyang but in Shanghai because of North Korea’s refusal to raise the South Korean flag.

The South Korean government does not seem to be ascribing much significance to the reciprocal visit. “All this means is that the North Korean team was allowed to visit the South and the South Korean team to visit the North in accordance with international regulations since these were previously scheduled international sporting events,” said an official at South Korea’s Ministry of Unification. Furthermore, North and South Korea were not even in direct contact about the reciprocal visit. All the arrangements, including making notifications about the teams’ visits and providing for their safety, were handled by the IIHF and the Asian Football Confederation, which organized the two events.

By Kim Chang-keum and Jung In-hwan, staff reporters

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