Rivals Japan And South Korea Face Off At Olympics Amid Chilly Ties

So if a Korean and Japanese athlete speak to each other, what language do they speak? We had a Japanese exchange student in the 1990s. She spoke Japanese, English, and was working on Chinese. Interestingly, she also worked very hard on writing traditional Chinese characters. She said the characters meant about the same thing in Japanese and Chinese, but represented different words. Sort of like having a single character represent "house" in English and "casa" in Spanish. My guess, the athletes spoke English.

I had also found that on visiting the Republic of China, Taiwan the discomfort and dislike of many of the Chinese citizens towards the Japanese. Many had very bad memories remembering the evil done to Chinese citizens during WWII and hadn't forgot.I didn't have to guess, they expressed that very clearly. Perhaps not so much with younger people but older citizens who may have remembered that or heard about it from their parents. It can certainly take a long time for those perceptions to pass when You consider what did happen to both China and its citizens during that time period. Time does change things but it doesn't happen overnight.

Wow, there is a lot of history and racism in that competition.