SEOUL, May 31: Asia lifted the curtain on its first soccer World Cup on Friday, with an opening ceremony blending hi-tech and tradition and calls from the hosts for global peace and an end to the scourge of terrorism.

But the ceremony, in South Korea’s capital Seoul, was also marked by jeers and whistles for FIFA President Sepp Blatter, who has been at the centre of a bitter power struggle for control of world soccer’s governing body.

The leaders of Japan and South Korea, co-hosts whose relations have been strained by the legacy of Japan’s colonial occupation of the Korean peninsula, joined hands to launch the world’s top sporting event.

South Korea’s president, Kim Dae-jung, officially opened the tournament in the city’s 64,000-seat main stadium.

“Through these football matches, humanity will become one, transcending racial, cultural, ideological and religious differences,” Kim told the packed stadium and a live television audience estimated at at least 500 million.

“I hope the whole world will reaffirm the precious value of world peace and security and the overall prosperity of human beings,” he said, speaking in Korean.

Japanese Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi, leader of a country still deeply mistrusted by many Koreans for its harsh military occupation of the peninsula from 1910 to 1945, looked on.

Underscoring the message of peace, the two men joined hands and raised them aloft.

The elaborate opening ceremony, staged at a cost of $8 million, included 32 giant triangular drums — one for each team taking part — and a symbolic coming together of the Japanese and South Korean flags.

As well as projecting the themes of harmony and understanding, the ceremony was also a chance for South Korea to burnish its international image.

It annoys South Koreans, who pride themselves on their high-tech telephones and super-fast Internet access, that many people abroad identify their country only with Cold War tensions and a fondness for eating dogmeat.

France are 7-2 favourites to retain their world crown, which they won on home soil in 1998, followed by Argentina at 4-1.

Apart from being the first co-hosted World Cup, the finals are the first to be held outside Europe and the Americas.

It is also the richest World Cup on record.

Television broadcasters have paid more than $800 million to show the tournament, 10 times what was paid for the 1998 event in France. Fees from sponsors eager to tap a huge audience are likely to double the television revenue.

With so much at stake, South Korea is taking no chances with security at the tournament, the world’s biggest sporting event since the September 11 suicide attacks on the United States.

Some 420,000 police will be on guard, anti-aircraft missiles have been deployed near the stadiums and fighter jets will scour the skies.

“This is the World Cup of Safety,” Prime Minister Lee Han-dong told Reuters on Thursday.

Seoul was in holiday mood in the hours before the game. The streets were garlanded with footballs in all guises — as lanterns, as cakes, as bouncing digital images and even as pork chops — and the official song of the month-long finals, “Live Together Forever”, blared endlessly.

Over the next two weeks, there will be as many as four matches a day in the first stage of the knockout tournament.

They will be played in 20 stadiums in Japan and South Korea — at least twice the number used in previous cups — with the final played in the Japanese port city of Yokohama on June 30.—Reuters