When anonymous troublemakers recently issued vague threats against the Japanese for being too friendly with South Korea, the irony could not have been more resonant: Japan and Korea have been the most serious of enemies for more than a millennium. The last of Japan's invasions on the peninsula ended up with Tokyo colonizing its neighbor from 1910 until 1945, forcing Koreans to adopt Japanese beliefs, Japanese words, even Japanese names. In fact, the man given the honor of carrying the torch into the Olympic stadium was, symbolically enough, Sohn Kee Chung, the Korean who won the 1936 marathon running reluctantly under...
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