Japanese school for Korean students wins baseball tournament, sparking controversy. @fukada_yu2 / X

A Japanese high school that once served as an academy for students of Korean descent won the country's youth baseball tournament on Friday, receiving congratulations from South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol.

The annual high school baseball tournament attracts huge public interest in Japan and is broadcast live on television from start to finish, making it one of the most followed events on social media.

Many professional baseball players, including Dodgers slugger Shohei Otani, have emerged from this amateur sporting event, the largest and most important in Japan.

But the unstoppable campaign of Kyoto International High School, or Kyoto Kokusai, also faced online detractors who argued that a team with a Korean-language school song had no place in the popular Japanese tournament watched by millions each year.



As well as a long history of conflict between the two countries, dating back to the 16th century, relations, although improved in recent decades, still bear the scars of Japan's colonisation of the Korean peninsula between 1910 and 1945. A Korean victory in Japan would therefore be warmly welcomed by Koreans, but less so by the Japanese.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol celebrated the team's 2-1 victory over Tokyo's Kanto Daiichi High School.

"This miraculous achievement under difficult conditions has given pride and courage to Koreans in Japan," he wrote in a Facebook post.

"I hope that baseball will bring our two countries, South Korea and Japan, even closer together," Yoon said.



Kyoto International stood out this year with its Korean school song, which was played after each of the team's victories. The school was originally opened in 1947 to serve Korean students in Japan.

Their victory comes at a time when Japan and South Korea are trying to mend their historically tense relations, strained by memories of Japan's brutal rule until the end of the Second World War, during which hundreds of thousands of Koreans were brought to Japan, some forcibly, to work in the Japanese war effort.

Although Kyoto International's current student body and baseball team are predominantly Japanese, the institution's legacy remains a source of pride for Koreans in Japan and South Korea.

"Despite various criticisms, the fact that scenes of students proudly singing the Korean school song were broadcast nationwide ... gave courage and strength to us 'zainichi' (Korean residents in Japan) compatriots," Mindan, the Korean Residents Union in Japan, said in a statement.

Mindan said the team had "served as a bridge between Korea and Japan". For Japanese nationalists, however, the victories and Korean chants have not gone down well on social media, where, as is often the case, discontent is magnified exponentially by the anonymity or "distance" provided by these new means of interaction.

"I demand that Kyoto International High School be expelled from the Japan High School Baseball Federation," read one post on X.

"I really cannot stand that a Korean school song is played at the Japanese tournament with a 100-year history," said another.