GUANGZHOU, China — The countries technically remain in a state of war, but there were hearty handshakes on the podium between the South and North Koreans after the shooting competition.
And when a North Korean basketball player went down on the court, a South Korean opponent reached down to help him up, giving him a pat on the back.
Officially, the two Koreas aren't talking at these Asian Games. The nations remain locked in a political standoff over the March sinking of a South Korean warship, a deadly disaster that Seoul blames on Pyongyang but that North Korea denies engineering.
It's a far cry from 2002, when South Korea helped pay for North Korea to send cheerleaders to the Busan Asian Games, and 2006 in Doha when athletes from the two Koreas marched in the opening ceremony together as they had done at the Sydney and Athens Olympics.
South Korea didn't formally plan to reach out to the North Koreans in Guangzhou for any joint shows of unity as at Asian Games past, Unification Ministry spokeswoman Lee Jong-joo said in Seoul.
But on the ground, there are small signs of goodwill between athletes from the divided Korean peninsula.
Jang Dae-kyu of South Korea, who won gold and silver in pistol shooting, says he makes sure to say hello and offer congratulations when the North Koreans do well in competition.
"We're friendly whenever we meet at international competitions," he told The Associated Press. "We trade pins, ask after each others' families: 'How are you, how did you do in the competition, how old are your children now?'"
Teammate Hong Seong-hwan, who won two golds and two silvers in shooting at Guangzhou, said he doesn't think about politics when he meets North Korean competitors. He playfully pulled North Korea's Kim Jong Su onto the podium with him Wednesday.
"We're all athletes, we all compete together," he said. "And whether they're Japanese, Chinese or North Korean, we're friendly competitors."
Meetings at international events are likely the only chance Korean athletes have to interact.
When three years of warfare between the communist Chinese-supported north and the U.S.-backed south came to a halt with a truce in 1953, a heavily guarded buffer zone 2.5 miles deep went up at the border.
Ordinary Koreans on either side of the border have virtually no way to communicate. There are only a few official telephone hot lines between the Koreas — including one inside the demilitarized zone at the border and one between aviation authorities — and laws in both countries restrict contact.
South Korea bans citizens from traveling to the North without government permission, and few North Koreans are even allowed outside Internet access.
However, a decade of warming relations during the "Sunshine Era" of inter-Korean politics in the 2000s led to an unprecedented flowering of ties in sports and elsewhere.
At the 2000 Sydney Olympics, the two Korean teams walked into the opening ceremony together under a "unified Korea" flag, a practice they continued at the Asian Games in Busan and Doha. And as the Beijing Olympics approached, South Korean lawmakers proposed sending a joint cheering squad to China.
But the 2008 arrival in Seoul of a new, conservative government with a tough policy toward nuclear-armed North Korea put an end to most inter-Korean projects. Earlier this year, the sinking of the Cheonan warship, with 46 deaths the worst military attack on South Korea since the war, brought ties to their lowest point in a decade.
"No consultations have been made with North Korea. There's no atmosphere of dialogue due to the Cheonan incident," Lee Kee-heung, head of South Korea's Asian Games delegation, said earlier.
At a basketball qualifier pitting North against South, half the South Korean players turned their backs as the North Korean anthem played.
And at a women's soccer semifinal, North Korean fans, faces impassive, stayed firmly seated — breaking etiquette — during the South Korean anthem.
"Everyone knows the relationship between North and South Korea. We will do all we can and have no pity," tough-talking South Korean captain Jun Min-kyung said before the match that top-ranked North Korea won 3-1.
The fiercest competition, however, may have been in the stands, where the North and South Korean fans were seated in neighboring sections in Tianhe Stadium.
Several hundred South Koreans waved their national flag and screamed "Dae han min guk!" — South Korea — as dozens of North Koreans, who call their country "Chosun," yelled: "Chosun! Win! Win!"
While some South Koreans watched the North Koreans with curiosity, taking photos, the North Koreans paid their neighbors no attention. And though just a railing apart, neither side approached the other.
"We're not concerned about them; they have nothing to do with us. They're South Koreans, we're North Koreans," one fan from Pyongyang said as she waved a small flag. She refused to give her name.
A South Korean fan said he wasn't happy about sitting next to the North Koreans in a stadium packed with 36,000 other spectators.
"We don't really like it," he said with a grimace, putting a sports competition context to it. "But we dislike them all equally — the Chinese, Japanese and North Koreans. Football is football!"
He asked that his name not be used because of the sensitivity of the issue.
Perhaps the most promising show of inter-Korean cooperation at these games has been in the little-known sport of soft tennis, a game like traditional tennis but played with soft balls.
South Korea's Soft Tennis Association and the International Soft Tennis Federation donated $8,800 in rackets, balls, shoes and clothing to the North Korean delegation earlier in the week, officials said.
Two senior North Korean officials later dropped by to thank Seoul's soft tennis chief, Park Sang-ha, the association's spokesman Kim Tae-ju said. He said they regularly offer advice to the North Koreans, who have yet to win a medal in soft tennis.
"These types of sporting exchanges could certainly help generate an atmosphere of reconciliation," he said.
Jang, the shooting medalist, said it would good if the two Koreas could come together under one flag.
"We're one country," he said. "If we could live together peacefully, it would be a good thing."
Associated Press writers Kwang-tae Kim and Seulki Kim contributed to this report from Seoul, South Korea.