S. Koreans may see North's footballers as sisters, but opposite isn't true

When North Korea’s Naegohyang Women’s FC arrives in Suwon, Gyeonggi Province, this weekend for next Wednesday’s AFC Women’s Champions League semifinals, South Koreans will witness something rare: Young North Koreans walking openly among them again. The visit itself rings historic bells. This will be the first North Korean women’s football team to compete in the South since the 2014 Incheon Asian Games. It will also mark the first sports delegation of any kind since the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. That last date is highly significant because it was then that the portcullis came down on inter-Korean exchanges. It is worth explaining how that happened. Nobody on this side could see it coming — such was the earnestness with which rapprochement was being pursued — but it was Kim Yo-jong’s exposure to the South during those subzero days in Gangwon Province, ironically the world’s only divided province, that appears to have crystallized reality for North Korea’s number two. It must have seemed to her that, in the race to be the real Korea, the North’s revolution had

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