It was no surprise, that as their fellow Koreans in the south of their peninsula brace themselves to co-host with Japan the World Cup football tournament, the North Koreans issued a rare invitation to international journalists, to come to their tightly sealed country.

Visiting media were treated to a startling display of gymnastics and choreographed visual displays, from thousands of participants in a Pyongyang stadium that holds in excess of 50,000 spectators. The guests were then whisked through the North Korean capital’s wide boulevards, which are still largely free of motor traffic, to a sumptuous banquet and accommodation in a modern luxury hotel.

The message from the North Korean regime was that their country is “effectively the last” prosperous and dynamic bastion of the communist world, against the evils of capitalism, so eagerly embraced by Koreans to the south. Yet the truth is that North Korea’s people are starving because communist policies have ruined their agriculture, corruption has creamed off most of the wealth, and much of that which has remained has been devoted to attempts to create an effective nuclear weapons program. It is only international food aid, particularly that provided by the hated Americans, which has kept real famine from breaking out. In return, the North Koreans have allegedly suspended development of their nuclear weaponry.

However, the North Koreans would never admit these failings but, with the dogged determination of a society that has developed brain washing to an art, insist instead that a few thousand well-fed and well-drilled school kids represent the wider reality in their country.

Since there are widespread kinship ties between North and South Korea, it should not be surprising that in their way, the South Koreans also display an aptitude for staring truth in the back of the head. South Korea is a prosperous country with all the trappings of a democratic state. But it is also a highly regimented society, which has in the past suffered from considerable corruption among leading political and business figures.

Though they loathe to admit it, South Korea modeled its economic recovery on the model of the Japanese, Korea’s former colonial masters, in which it was hard to slip a cigarette paper between governments and big business. South Korea’s fall from economic grace has however been less dramatic than that of Japan, though for Korean workers the results have probably been far worse.

The country’s unions have always been militant, though their protests, along with once frequent demonstrations by white-shirted students in the streets of the capital Seoul, had an odd choreographed air about them, not dissimilar perhaps to the gymnasts last week in Pyongyang. Only infrequently have the protests turned truly violent, as when the army gunned down striking shipyard workers some 20 years ago.

When South Korea hosted the Olympics in 1988, threatened union unrest was largely settled when the government pressured the conglomerates, known as chaebols, to reach agreement with their workers. Now as the country prepares for another major international event, the hosting with Japan of the Football World Cup, there is further labor unrest. This time however the government has promised to crack down on strikers who seek to disrupt the event.

Foreign sports journalists have already seen and been mildly appalled at the extremely tough policing methods, which the authorities have readied for use against international football hooligans or terrorists. At the moment, it seems more likely that these intimidating police and paramilitary forces will have to be deployed against Korean strikers. Whatever else comes out of the South Korean/Japanese World Cup, the South Koreans run the risk of a major and possibly brutal confrontation with organized labor, at the very moment when the world’s news media are concentrated by the thousands in their country. It must be hoped that as in 1988, a settlement can be reached before industrial unrest gets out of hand.