North Korea's Football Team Arrives in Japan for Asian Games
North Korea’s footballers stepped into Japan on Friday dressed like a statement.
White blazers. Pink ties. Blue trousers. Light blue shirts. National flags stitched crisply to their chests. As they walked through Osaka airport just after lunchtime, they were met not by silence or suspicion, but by song.
A large group of pro-Pyongyang supporters had gathered, waving North Korean flags and breaking into chants as the men’s team emerged from their flight from Beijing. Bouquets of flowers were thrust into players’ hands. The squad responded with waves from the bus windows, leaning out to high-five well-wishers pressed up against the barriers.
It was a scene that felt almost surreal, given the backdrop.
A rare opening
Japan does not normally allow North Koreans to enter the country, part of its sanctions over Pyongyang’s nuclear and missile programmes. The two countries have no diplomatic relations, and political contact remains frozen.
Sport, though, has carved out a narrow corridor.
Exceptions have been granted for the Asian Games in Nagoya-Aichi, which officially open on September 19 but begin early for several sports, including football. More than 100 North Korean athletes are expected to compete across 14 disciplines, marking another step in the country’s gradual return to the international stage after years of isolation.
North Korea pulled out of global sporting competition during the pandemic, disappearing from calendars and qualifying lists. The comeback started at the Asian Games in China in 2023, continued with an appearance at the Paris Olympics, and now extends into Japan—historically one of the most politically charged destinations for any North Korean delegation.
Football at the front
The men’s football team will be among the first from North Korea to kick a ball in anger at these Games. Their campaign opens on September 16 against China, a fixture that instantly drops them into a high-profile spotlight.
On the women’s side, the stakes carry a different flavour. North Korea’s women have built a formidable reputation at youth level, collecting titles and headlines across age groups. Their senior squad arrives in Japan with that pedigree behind them and a demanding schedule ahead.
They are due to land in the evening, joining a tournament in which they face Bangladesh on Monday before a politically and emotionally charged group match against South Korea on September 21. That fixture will not just be a contest of tactics and talent; it will carry the weight of a divided peninsula, played out on neutral soil in a country that has its own fraught history with both Koreas.
A fanbase in exile
Inside Japan, support for the visitors is being carefully orchestrated.
A pro-North Korean group in Tokyo has urged residents—many of them ethnic Koreans with ties to the North—to turn out in numbers and back the athletes. Choson Sinbo, a pro-North Korean publication based in Japan, has gone a step further, publishing a video that turns cheering into a kind of rehearsal.
In it, smiling students from Korea University demonstrate chants and songs, showing how to roar on the teams and when to raise the volume. They encourage fans to wear red—the colour of North Korea—inside Japanese arenas and stadiums, transforming small pockets of seating into loud, visible enclaves of support.
For a few weeks, that noise will cut through the politics.
North Korea’s teams now step into a tournament framed by sanctions, history and suspicion, but once the whistle blows in Nagoya-Aichi, only one question will matter: how far can they push this unlikely return onto Asian sport’s main stage?
