Photo: Kyoto International High School baseball team celebrates their championship victory. Credit: Hankyoreh.
On August 23, Kyoto International High School defeated Kanto Daiichi High School, 2-1, to become the first Korean school to win the National High School Baseball Championship in its 106-year history. The game was one for the record books, as it was the first time that two schools from Kyoto and Tokyo, the old and new capital of Japan, met in the championship game. With the two teams taking a 0-0 pitcher’s battle into extra innings. Kyoto International prevailed by scoring two in the top of the 10th and giving up just one run in the bottom of the 10th.
Kyoto International is one of around 70 Korean schools in Japan, most of which were established shortly after the end of Imperial Japan’s colonial rule of Korea to educate ethnic Korean children, who were excluded from attending Japan’s public schools. Most Korean schools in Japan are subject to significant formal and informal discrimination, in many cases because they are suspected of consorting with North Korea. In 2013, the conservative Abe Shinzo government ended government subsidies for Korean schools in Japan, excluding them from Japan’s guaranteed free high school education system.
In the 1990s, as student enrollments plummeted, Kyoto International High School came close to closing down altogether. Baseball saved the school, which set out to revive its fortunes by fielding a competitive baseball team that would make it a school of choice for aspiring athletes across Japan. The early days were discouraging: the Kyoto International team lost one 1999 game by a score of 34-0. But as the school grew to be a national powerhouse, the 61-member baseball team has become a sustaining force for the small school, which has 22 middle school and 138 high school students.
Although all members of the baseball team save one are ethnic Japanese rather than Korean, Kyoto International’s status as a Korean school caused a controversy in Japan. The high school baseball championship - also known as the Summer Koshien - is highly popular and prestigious, with nearly 4k schools competing to be among the 49 to reach the finals, every game of which is broadcast on national television. One longstanding Koshien tradition is to play the school anthem of the victorious team on television.
Kyoto International’s school anthem is in the Korean language, and its first verse is: “The land of Yamato, across the East Sea, is the ancient site of dreams for our hallowed ancestors. Oh our comforting haven, where day and night we perfect our body and virtue, the school of Korea.” When the Japanese TV station NHK aired the song, however, the subtitle changed the lyrics from “the East Sea” to “the sea in the east,” refusing to use the Korean name for the body of water between Korea and Japan, and also changed “the school of Korea” to “the Korean-Japanese school.”
Many in Kyoto celebrated Kyoto International’s win regardless of its Korean school status, particularly because the school is the city’s first Koshien champion in 68 years. More than 1k Korean-Japanese organized to attend the final match in person. However, trending online posts in Japan called the school anthem “political propaganda,” and the school’s principal said he received numerous threatening phone calls after the championship.