When an NBC Olympics analyst irritated South Koreans over the weekend by crediting Japan for helping the country step toward the future, he waded into an intricate web of friendship, unease and outright enmity among Northeast Asia's four nations — the two Koreas, Japan and China — and the United States.
The political relationships in this patch of Asia are complex and fraught with the weight of history — and the blood of hundreds of thousands. That history defines this part of the world.
And given that these Pyeongchang Games are followed by Summer 2020 in Japan and Winter 2022 in China, they define the Olympics, too, for the next four years.