Morning Hot Reads: Bridging the Divide

The L.A. TIMES looks into the implications of the upcoming Dodgers-Padres games in South Korea under the header, "Baseball diplomacy: How Shohei Ohtani, Yu Darvish bridge the Japan-South Korea divide." When the Dodgers landed in South Korea for their two-game season opening series against the Padres last week, Ohtani's picture was plastered all over the front pages of many Korean newspapers, leading journalists to dub the star P/DH "the most beloved Japanese athlete in Korea." For a Japanese athlete to be embraced by South Koreans to this degree is "extraordinary, considering the history between their countries." Wounds remain from Japan’s "brutal 35-year occupation" of Korea in the early 20th century. Such widespread admiration of a Japanese player "would have been unimaginable as recently as 15 years ago," when baseball games between Japan and South Korea were "as politically charged as soccer games between Argentina and England or India and Pakistan."

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