OSAKA – Kyoto International, which won the national high school baseball tournament for the first time on Friday, is known for its roots as an ethnic school affiliated with South Korea with a current focus on multilingual and intercultural education.
At the Kyoto-based school, offering classes in Japanese, Korean and English, 61 out of its 138 students are members of its baseball club. Most of the current and former students are Japanese.
The school’s predecessor, Kyoto Chosen Junior High School, was founded in 1947 to provide education to Korean children, who came to Japan due to their parents’ employment or other reasons. Chosen, pronounced cho-sen, is an old name for Korea.
The school was approved by the Kyoto governor as a regular private junior high and high school with curriculum following the education ministry’s guidelines and opened under the current name in the early 2000s.
In the wake of the high school’s 2-1 victory over Kanto Daiichi High School in Tokyo at the historic Koshien Stadium in Hyogo Prefecture, celebratory posts appeared on social media from both Japan and South Korea.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol congratulated the school, writing on Facebook, “I hope South Korea and Japan can grow even closer through baseball.” He added, “Baseball is certainly great” because “it is very moving.”
Kyoto International high school players sing their school song after defeating Tokyo’s Kanto Daiichi in Japan’s summer national high school baseball championship final at Koshien Stadium in Nishinomiya in Hyogo Prefecture on Aug. 23, 2024. (Kyodo)
But there were also apparent ethnically discriminatory posts on social media, as the school song that was sung after their wins, whose lyrics are in Korean, contained the word “East Sea,” South Korea’s term for the body of water between Japan and the Korean Peninsula. Tokyo refers to it as “Sea of Japan.”
In 2021, when the high school made its debut at the spring invitational national baseball tournament, it released a statement saying, “Unfounded slanders were confirmed on social media and are hindering our educational activities.”
According to the Japanese Foreign Ministry’s website, South Korea began objecting to the naming of the Sea of Japan in 1992. The song has been sung since prior to that year, even before the name of the school became Kyoto International.
During TV broadcasts, when the song is sung, a subtitle with the wording “sea in the east” is displayed, based on the Japanese translation submitted by the school.
Related coverage:
Baseball: Kyoto International wins 1st national high school title
AloJapan.com