Director – Kim Hyun-seok – 2002 – South Korea – Cert. – 104m
***
In 1905, as the Japanese take over the running of their country, a small group of Koreans form a baseball team to defeat the Japanese – from LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runsin cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th
A lightweight sports comedy loosely inspired by historical events, this is set in 1905, by which time the Japanese were moving to occupy Korea. Lee Ho-chang (Song Kang-ho) is playing soccer on a local plateau when the ball goes off the edge and into the local YMCA missionary compound below. While retrieving the ball, he is confronted by US-schooled baseball enthusiast Min Jung-rim (Kim Hye-soo).
Much comedy is derived (albeit not that successfully for Western audiences) from Ho-chang’s taking a romantic liking to her, even though she has not the slightest interest in him, preferring (when he turns up later in the narrative) Japanese-schooled Oh Day-hyun (Kim Joo-hyuk) who is already highly skilled at baseball, which arrived in Japan in 1872, some 30 years before it came to Korea. Also in the team is bespectacled Ryu Kwang-tae (Hwang Jung-min), whose bureaucrat father is collaborating with the Japanese administration.
After a protest in which Jung-rim’s father kills himself as a protest against the ULSA treaty, which turned the formerly sovereign Korea into a protectorate of Imperial Japan, a scroll bearing a romantic poem Ho-chang has sent to Jung-rim is mistakenly read out as her father’s will, while groups of mourners beat themselves to express grief.
The YMCA team turn up at their practice ground to find themselves initially barred from it by the Japanese Imperial Army, who have requisitioned the site for military use, but then their commander (Masato Ibu) recognises Day-hyun as a schoolmate of his officer son Hideo Nomura (Kazuma Suzuki), who convinces him the Emperor might be better served by letting the Japanese baseball team defeat the Korean.
The remainder of the narrative builds up to the big baseball match on the pitch in Seoul between the two, after which the commander plans to have Jung-rim and Day-hyun arrested, but it doesn’t quite work out like that. Not least because Ho-chang misses the train to Seoul and pretends to be a government official in order to secure a horse used only for official emergencies…
The opening 20 or so minutes is by far the weakest section, relying heavily on the sort of knockabout comedy that cropped up in Hong Kong movies of the late 1970s and 1980s, as for example in scenes featuring Moon Lee in (rather better) action horror Mr. Vampire (Ricky Lau, 1985). There is also action in the form of a mysterious assailant frying to kill, or at least intimidate and demoralise, potential Korean resistance fighters at night.
As it proceeds, however, however, the piece settles in to its fiercely nationalist story of Koreans standing up to the occupying Japanese forces.
Further highlights include a photographer taking a group photo of the newly formed YMCA Baseball Team, who are promptly required to perform a song at a local ceremony held in their honour, and incidental scenes of poor locals cutting blocks of ice from a frozen river.
It may not quite be Korean cinema’s finest hour, but it provides a fascinating example of an attempt at a Japanese-bashing, audience pleaser.
YMCA Baseball Team plays in LKFF, the London Korean Film Festival 2025 which runs in cinemas from Wednesday, November 5th to Tuesday, November 18th.
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Trailer (LKFF 2025):