My old high school tennis coach used to say before every match: “Don’t take anything onto the court, and don’t take anything off.” Or something like that. It’s been a while. The point was that all the hormone-driven, stress-induced, angst-ridden teenage crap we normally carried around with us wasn’t supposed to be in our heads during the match. Focus on serves, ground strokes and volleys. Coach Kellogg is big on this mental-game stuff.

So I’m a little curious what this soccer match scheduled for tomorrow here in Dalian will look like, considering the teams: China’s National People’s Congress and Japan’s Diet:

The match has been in the making for three years ever since Yohei Kono, speaker of the House of Representatives of the Japanese Diet, proposed the idea during a meeting with China’s top legislator Wu Bangguo in 2005 as a way of improving relations between the two countries, according to Sheng Huaren, vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress (NPC).

Rather than citing thorny diplomatic relations in recent years, Sheng said China took so long to accept the invitation because the NPC didn’t have a football team at the time.

Probably best not to bring up those “thorny diplomatic relations,” much as I’d enjoy seeing a legislator—any legislator—take a World Cup class head butt.

I suppose a more immediate concern might be what kind of a game we’ll get from two teams made up of middle-aged legislators who’ve been practicing for just over a month, but maybe that misses the point. Sport has a long history of bringing countries together, from ping-pong diplomacy to the Olympics. If two dozen out-of-shape lawmakers can help keep things calm in East Asia, I’ll resist the urge to poke fun (at least for a day or two).

Dalian is an obvious choice for China and Japan to meet up in a no-history-mentioned goodwill soccer game, given it’s history. This was, after all, Japan’s city for 40 years (and Russia’s for a decade before). Now it’s the go-to locale for outsourcing, drawing largely on a pool of Japanese speakers whose parents and grandparents grew up under colonial* rule. A large Japanese expat community still thrives here.

For better or worse, Dalian provides a longstanding link between the two nations. I tend to be optimistic about that.

*A good friend of mine recently disputed my labeling of Dalian as a colony, saying it was a concession, much like Qingdao and other treaty-ports. I should know this better, but if anyone has a definitive answer, drop a comment.

This entry was posted on Friday, October 12th, 2007 at 8:57 pm and is filed under News, the Dalian life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.