Seoul Letter/Tom Humphries: Nobody cares. The rainy season is here and people in red T-shirts are camping out for days to stake their spot for watching football on a big screen at the Kwanghwamun Intersection. Sure it's only rain.
Tomorrow night South Korea play Germany in the World Cup semi-final here in Seoul. In a nation where it is considered patriotic to forego all or some of your annual holiday, just about everything will grind to a halt for the day. Nothing will move.
Nobody cares. The opposition Grand National Party have agreed not to criticise the Government while the World Cup is on and the World Cup is stretching forever. On Friday the son of President Kim Dae-jung went to jail on charges of having received £1.5 million in bribes. It got a few paragraphs. So the lad was dipping, we all make mistakes.
Everything will stop tomorrow but it's been virtually stopped for a month now. South Korea came into this World Cup tetchy about how the Japanese had finagled the final game for itself, tetchy about the Japanese full stop. Their deputy chief World Cup organiser produced a best selling book called What I Have To Say To The Japanese. That was another time though. Since Saturday's defeat of Spain the South Koreans are planning on making Yokohama their own. Japan occupied Korea for 35 years from 1910 onwards. For Korea to occupy Yokohama next Sunday night would be revenge aplenty.
Nobody cares. In Beijing there are 21 North Koreans claiming asylum in the South Korean embassy. Along the 150-mile long 2.5-mile wide strip of demilitarised zone which sunders North Korea from South Korea the South Koreans are blaring broadcasts of their own matches.
"We are broadcasting the World Cup matches as part of our psychological warfare against the North," says Major Yoon Won-shik, spokesman at the office of South Korea's Joint Chiefs of Staff. "There has been no detectable reaction from the northern side." The North Koreans have their fingers in their ears. They are staging pageants and showing highlights of other games and broadcasting fixture lists with the South Koreans blanked out. That's getting a bit harder to do now.
Nobody cares. A 77-year-old woman died of a heart attack from cheering on Saturday. Two men died similar deaths when South Korea removed Italy from the tournament. The crowds on the streets are so great that minor injuries have begun occurring and in one outbreak of drunkeness in Taejon a teenager drove a truck into a lampost, killing two passengers. But hey, whaddya goin' do? It's World Cup time.
They face Germany tomorrow night and the Germans, troubled by the limitations of their own plodding style, have faces creased with worry. Firstly they appreciate that the South Koreans have learned how to digest European teams without difficulty.
Poland, Portugal, Italy and Spain have all gone down smoothly. Secondly, there is the Korean's manager Guus Hiddink. Guus is Dutch and he's smart and the Germans have never been comfortable with smart Dutch people. A huge orange banner has been erected in central Seoul by the Dutch Embassy. "Good Luck!" it says.
"It's a complete dream," said Hiddink yesterday about reaching the semi-finals. "The mentality of this team, to recover even when the going has been tougher and tougher, is outrageous, almost without limits."
Nobody cares. Some goon in Nike gave the national team pink jerseys instead of their traditional red ones. They should be the pink devils. Their fans should wear t-shirts reading Be The Pinks. But sure There'll be a million fans gathered on the intersection and its offshoots tomorrow. They'll be looking to add another few moments to the highlights reel which gets played over and over again on South Korean television. Every South Korean goal, every save.
Every celebration. And the obligatory Queen track. We Are The Champions.
A special truck will carry the 2,400 square metre Korean national flag that has been displayed at all matches so far from Gwangju to Seoul, to the brand new World Cup Stadium which the South Koreans only dreamed of playing in when this tournament began.
The flag weighs a ton and it takes hundreds of fans to help with its unfurling.
Nobody cares. Tourism is actually down this summer. The country that built so many beautiful stadiums and put so many "welcome" banners has been disappointed to find hotel occupancies down 10 per cent on last year, and tourist spending down by a similar amount. They expected almost three quarters of a million visitors to show up. They got fewer than 450,000, and 60,000 of those were Chinese and not inclined to spend, spend, spend. It's only money, though.
Network newscasters wear Korean team jerseys during broadcasts. Bars and meeting places are paralysed every time football comes on the television. There is football on the television all day long. The World Cup has never seen anything quite like it.
Nobody cares. Elsewhere, Turkey and Brazil will meet in the other semi-final. On Saturday night Turkey beat a Senegal team who hadn't taken the precaution of learning how to defend. Ilhan Mansiz scored just three minutes into extra time to give Turkey their win. They have a bone to pick with Brazil who beat them 2-1 in the opening round.
Turks are determined folk when it comes to revenge, which must be worrying to a couple of Brazilians, especially Rivaldo, whose left foot provided the winner in that game.
Three minutes from the end of that game, the Brazilian forward Luizao went down at the edge of the penalty area near the Turkish defender Alpay Ozalan. Even the madly partisan Brazilian media thought the penalty to be a gift from the gods. Rivaldo converted it and added feigned injury to insult minutes later when a ball was kicked into him and he reacted as if he had been the victim of an assassination attempt. A Turk got the red card.
But that's the other semi-final. Here in Seoul? Well, to be honest nobody cares.
