Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris Berry
The accelerated mobility of capital, people, and commodities in the last two decades has enhanced media and cultural globalization in non-Western regions. The growth of digital communication technologies, transnational markets and industries, and cultural production capacity has animated many trajectories of popular culture circulation. The power of Western media content and infrastructures can still be felt globally. But outside of the United States, East Asia is already a productive network of media capitals (Curtin 2003) and communities, actively generating and consuming regionally produced shows, goods, and images. Iconic examples such as Hong Kong film, Japanese animation, Mandarin pop music, and Korean TV dramas have found unprecedented approval in the region. They invite material and social connections among people and businesses. These developments are the context that has made East Asian popular culture into a major site of research in the study of media and cultural globalization.
While its emergence fed off capitalistic, cultural, social, and political developments in East Asia, East Asian popular culture as a research and teaching subject also grew out of two decades of interactions between institutions and scholarly communities. Dialogues in workshops and conferences have resulted in numerous published documentations, analyses, and reflections on East Asian popular culture. Besides offering new perspectives on the issue of de-Westernization (Curran and Park 2000; Erni and Chua 2005; Chua 2004), many researchers have looked into the consequences of regional cultural flows (Shim, Heryanto, and Siriyuvasak 2010; Chua 2012; Berry, Mackintosh, and Liscutin 2009; Kim 2008; Otmazgin and Ben-Ari 2013; Fung 2013). Scholars have tracked national popular cultures as they made regional and global contacts, such as Japanese popular cultures (Iwabuchi 2002, 2004; Condry 2006; Allen and Sakamoto 2008), the Korean Waves (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008; Shim 2006; Cho 2005; Jung 2011; Kim 2013; Choi and Maliangkay 2014), and the rise of Chinese media cultures and markets (Curtin 2007; Fung 2008; Zhao 2008). Also found among this fast growing literature are specific interest areas including film and television media (Keane and Moran 2003; Morris, Li, and Chan 2006; Fung and Moran 2007; Davis and Yeh 2008; Choi and Wada-Marciano 2009; Yoshimoto, Tsai, and Choi 2010; Tezuka 2011), gender and sexuality (Berry, Martin, and Yue 2003; Martin, Jackson, McLelland, and Yue 2008; Kim 2012), and social media and digital culture (Hjorth and Chan 2009). These works have challenged West-centered media and cultural studies in the English language. They are the much needed coursework material for universities around the world interested in meeting disciplinary, multicultural, as well as neoliberalist agendas.
Building on the “regional turn” practiced by a fluid and dispersed academic network, this book offers a critical review of East Asian popular culture studies. We have commissioned chapters by researchers who offer contexts for and windows on studies of East Asian popular culture. Collectively, we are interested in developing cultural–historical, inter-referential, and theoretical approaches. First, we understand the manifestation of national and regional popular cultural forms in larger sociohistorical contexts like cultural globalization, structural interactions outside of East Asia, and colonial and postcolonial inscription. Second, we underline transregional interactions in inquiries into the production, circulation, and consumption of popular culture. We believe a comparative and inter-referential approach can reveal the relational constitution of popular culture experiences. Last but not least, we regard our research about East Asian popular culture as a theoretical “sounding board” that relativizes media and cultural concepts derived from Western experiences.
As a whole, this volume exercises an inter-Asian mode of scholarship in popular culture studies. Inter-Asian referencing, in the most basic sense, critically references the cultural and social knowledge of other Asian localities, acquired and rendered through scholarly analysis, policy writing, social discourse, cultural criticism, and documentation. When Chen Kuan-Hsing and his cohorts initiated the inter-Asian cultural studies movement around the late 1990s (Chen 1998), they advocated that scholars studying East Asian society and culture read each other’s work for theoretical intimations rather than empirical confirmation of Western grand theories. In the areas of political thought, gender, literature, and film, the continuous interactions between Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and South Korean intellectual circles have made a decolonizing and comparative mode of knowledge production an established method of inquiry (Chen 2010; Chen and Chua 2000; Ding and Martin 2000; Chen and Chua 2010; Baik 2010; Rajadhyaksha and Kim 2013; Chen 2014). The impact inter-Asian referencing has had over the last two decades can be felt in the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and also in numerous conferences, workshops, books, and special journal issues on East Asian popular culture.
For those working on popular culture analysis, inter-Asian referencing is more than an academic endeavor. It is built into cultural–industrial practices like coproduction and multinational casting. Ordinary citizens also construct their identities using inter-Asian references, since negotiating with popular culture from another country often has consequences for one’s own conditions. Given these reasons, we feel it is time to make a critical review of studies on East Asian popular culture in order to tease out the epistemological and methodological issues particular to the area: What is East Asian popular culture? How do we access this cultural materiality and knowledge construct? Why is it crucial to understand it from a regional position?
Before explicating the thematic details and arguments of the sections and chapters, let us define the scope of the book. The notion of “East Asia” is based on a cultural–historical construction and negotiation rather than a fixed geography. The book principally covers South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. While internal diversities and mobilities are addressed whenever needed, the nation-state receives more attention than these other aspects. Yet given the porous boundaries of nation-states, we find it important to name the diverse East Asian political and cultural realities. As for the “popular culture” covered in the book, chapters discuss selected media culture (television, cinema, pop music, fashion magazines, stars, and idols), industrial and economic activities (film festivals, online streaming economies, live venues), as well as creative and informal cultural forms and practices such as social media, mass-produced painting, fandom, girl culture, and queer media.
This book is organized according to the following themes: (1) historicizing and spatializing East Asian popular culture, (2) media culture in national specificities and inter-Asian referencing, (3) gender, sexuality, and cultural icons, and (4) the politics of the transnational commons. Below, we briefly discuss these themes and highlight key issues raised in the respective chapters.
How does one begin to comprehend the formation of East Asian popular culture? In this first thematic inquiry, we turn to history, specifically, popular culture histories. The emergence of East Asian popular culture is overdetermined by modernization, colonization, cultural globalization, capitalism, and neoliberalism. We mention these sweeping historical forces not to imply that East Asian popular cultures are the inevitable consequences of Westernization and Americanization. On the contrary, these are relevant yet insufficient grounds for explaining the particularities of these popular cultures or their active circulation within the region during the past thirty years. The chapters under this theme offer cultural–historical and spatial narratives that illuminate East Asian popular culture as disjunctive cultural geographies.
In Chapter 1, Younghan Cho contends that East Asian popular culture had multiple and successive origins. From the 1960s to the present, popular cultures from the United States, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and China have formed a mélange of recurring regional popular culture flows. Western and inter-Asian cultural traces—the idea of double inscription—underpin this genealogy and result in uneven regional cultural formations. In dialogue with several authors in this volume, including Cho, Koichi Iwabuchi (Chapter 2) maps out a mode of knowledge production which creatively engages the Western presence in East Asian modernities so as not to fall into a never-ending call to de-Westernize media and cultural theories. His proposal, inter-Asian referencing, encourages scholars to practice reciprocal learning in the region and to refine uses of local terminologies with translocal applicability. The necessary hybridization involved becomes the lynchpin in Doobo Shim’s narrative (Chapter 3) of the Korean Wave since the 1990s. Like the Japanese and Hong Kong popular culture flows that preceded it, the Korean Wave grew into a regional phenomenon due to complex structural interactions between and within countries in the region, for example, the U.S. military and cultural presence during the Cold War, cultural policies made by the South Korean government, and a network of U.S.-influenced creators and entrepreneurs. As China rose, the Korean Wave further cashed in on the monetization of culture through format trades, remakes, and coproduction. Though not a major structural factor in Shim’s chapter, regulatory and deregulatory measures have consequences for the hybridization of popular culture.
State regulation also plays a role in Kelly Hu’s historicizing of subtitling groups in Chapter 4. Throughout her career, Hu has followed fan communities and fan labor in unruly technological and capitalistic circumstances (Hu 2004, 2005). Subtitling groups involved in file sharing and in contractual relations with online streaming platforms occupy a space of affective labor. Their interests may tentatively align with the state and with businesses, which benefit from the kind of flexible accumulation the groups allow. Hu’s chapter reminds us that the history of East Asian popular culture overlaps with the history of deterritorialized cultural labor. Engaging with a different kind of spatialization, Youna Kim in Chapter 5 provides nuanced narratives of the diasporic experiences of East Asian sojourners in London. Digitally nested in ethnic media atmospheres, the Chinese, Korean, and Japanese women in Kim’s research harbor nationalistic yearning and ambivalent feelings towards the diaspora—a location with both cosmopolitan charm and Western racism. Crucially, Kim’s work underlines affect as something that has greatly influenced the East Asian cultural imaginary.
In East Asia, formal and informal modes of transnational exchange and collaboration—ranging from coproduction to piracy—have coexisted to make and move various media products. This has made so-called “national media” both a problematic category and a limiting methodology. Media culture tethered to traditional areas of communication like film, television, and music have reconfigured significantly across national borders due to consumer practices, state measures, and trade agreements. Social media—the new media of our time—while being decentralized, are known to create internalizing echo chambers that constrain consumption practices.
How do media rearticulate dynamic national imaginations in the context of transnational awareness and connections? How have transnational and transborder cultural traffic reworked the notion of media? This section considers these questions with regard to four areas of media culture in East Asia—film, television, popular music, and social media. In each area, two or three chapters make their inquiries from specific media and territorial sites. Furthermore, they consider the meanings of media in the context of new modes of de-territorialized production and circulation. The juxtaposition of the chapters as omnibus units is meant to highlight and encourage knowledge production within a comparative and inter-Asian framework.
Writing on film from South Korea, the Chinese-speaking world, and Japan respectively (Chapters 6a, 6b, and 6c), Soyoung Kim, Chris Berry, and Aaron Gerow present new film historiographies based on national encounters with transnationalizing forces. According to Kim, colonialism, the Cold War, the IMF financial crisis, migration under Northeast Asian neoliberal-ism, and expansion into the Chinese market have had multiple and varied effects on how cinema is understood in South Korea. “Phantom cinema” evokes a postcolonial desire for a canon based on the lost silent films of the colonial period. Trans-cinema reconfigures Korean cinema in the context of digital platforms and alternative spectatorship. The multi-nationalized space in recent Korean blockbusters can be regarded as a kind of affective mobilization.
In a similar vein, Berry (Chapter 6b) outlines for Chinese-language film successive transnationalized historiographies. Chollywood, in particular, is the manifestation of a current transborder assemblage—marked by trade agreements, transborder employment, the decline of studios in provincial capitals, and the creative clustering of production. In contrast to South Korea and the Chinese-speaking world’s active industrial negotiation with the world, Gerow (Chapter 6c) argues that Japanese cinema displays a recurring confined worldview despite its increasingly multilingual and multinational output. This shift towards a singular, looped narrative that seemingly exists outside transnationalized reality is ineluctably reinforced by Japan’s comparatively insular media environment.
Compared to film, bordercrossing television in East Asia is a more recent phenomenon. Each manifestation—adaptation, coproduction, subtitling, distribution, consumption, and so on—has its own unique set of technological, policy, ideological, and historical conditions. Both of the two chapters on television address the ideological underpinnings that facilitate the flow of television drama in East Asia. In Chapter 7a, Anthony Fung addresses a range of bordercrossing television cases in East Asia. These include Hong Kong TV broadcasters’ domestication of Japanese TV drama, the transborder consumption of Hong Kong television in Guangdong, China–Hong Kong coproductions, television remakes of Korean films in Hong Kong, and successive, hybrid drama adaptations of a Japanese comic book into respectively, a Taiwanese, a Japanese, a Korean, and then a Chinese drama. In each case, gender, capitalistic, and state ideologies are at play, often yielding conservative representations such as women’s lack of freedom and state-sanctioned modernity.
Hsiu-Chuang Deppman’s chapter (7b) undertakes a close examination of the popularity of the Korean TV drama My Love from the Star and the Japanese TV drama Hanzawa Naoki in East Asia during 2013 and 2014. It critiques the representation of Confucian ethics, such as the affirmation of wen (erudite masculinity), the virtue of the father figure, and filial piety. In the series, such moral high ground serves to justify capitalistic behavior.
In considering how popular music crosses borders in East Asia, Hyunjoon Shin (Chapter 8a) and Miaoju Jian (Chapter 8b) propose different spatial approaches—one as spatial-geographical mapping, and the other as site-specific para-narratives. As the exemplar of East Asian pop music in the twenty-first century, K-pop is often explained as a national pop music gone global. Going beyond the business rationale, Shin renarrates K-pop from at once a globally subaltern and a regionally dominant position. With multiple Asian-market considerations, K-pop evolved into a cosmopolitan sound by adopting global music industry styles, the visual currency of idols and dance, and international collaboration influenced by the United States and Japan.
In contrast to Shin’s global approach, Jian traces the micro-histories of two small, legendary urban music venues in Taipei and Beijing—Underworld (1996–2013) and D22 (2006–2012), respectively. For periods of time, both live venues grew independently into indie music hubs. Their stories, juxtaposed in Jian’s work, illuminate the internationalization of indie music styles as well as the turn to cultural governance, which eventually diluted the subcultural energy in both scenes.
Bordercrossing is the norm for ordinary users of social media in East Asia. In Chapter 9a, Dong Hyun Song delves into several key events of border control and border busting that have shaped the terrain of South Korean social media in the past decade. In Chapter 9b, Love Kindstrand, Keiko Nishimura, and David H. Slater identify the period following the 3/11 earthquake and disasters as a critical time during which netizens in Japan have reinvested themselves in the everyday life politics. However, this does not necessarily lead to the liberalization of social views and civil dialogues. Constrained by the Great Firewall, social media in China have evolved into their own unique architecture of linkages, as shown in Jens Damm’s chapter (9c). These chapters underscore the active creation of national and global imaginations in social media, but they also leave many unanswered questions, including whether or how social media activisms intervene in inter-Asian learning and common cultural historiography.
Gender and sexuality have been an integral part of inter-Asian referencing from the beginning, when the methodology was taken up and experimented with by practitioners in cultural studies, literature, film, and media studies. As an inherently transnational mode of research, inter-Asian referencing necessarily reformulates the study of gender and sexuality in non-nationalistic terms. In the previous sections, the lives of women in Kim’s study of digital diaspora (Chapter 5) and the media industries’ reworking of Confucian ideology in Fung’s and Deppman’s chapters (7a and 7b) have hinted at emergent issues concerning media culture, gender, and sexuality. In this section, we feature five chapters that deepen gender and sexuality theorization by reworking media and cultural iconography. Celebrities, stars, and cultural figures are more than special subjects in media and cultural studies; they are discursive, technological, and affective assemblages where industry practices, cultural histories, community expectations, and political expressions intersect.
In Chapter 10, Jocelyn Yi-Hsuan Lai calls for an inter-Asian approach towards East Asian star studies as more and more transborder celebrities are actively or inadvertently made in regional media industries and markets. Since stars often embody national and collective desires, media industries must attend to the discerning opinions of audiences and even non-audiences, and they should not naively believe in the power of marketing schemes like multiethnic casting.
In Chapter 11, Jinhee Choi analyzes 1920s fiction and Korean women’s magazine writing, both of which feature hybridized productions of Japan-influenced shōjo (girl) sensibilities. Her focus on this historical–cultural moment decenters a subcultural, Japan-centered shōjo discourse and contextualizes the mutual inter-Asian influences of the shōjo sensibility and iconography. Themes of homosocial relationships, inner reflection, death, and nostalgia are common in East Asian shōjo texts. The fluidity of female–female relationships also figures in queer media culture, the subject of Fran Martin’s chapter (12).
Martin conceptualizes queer popular culture as a media and cultural field contingent on the blurring of sexualities as well as hybrid media platforms. She alerts us to the fact that the impetus to make queer media products comes not only from underground and above-the-ground commercial gay and lesbian media platforms; mainstream media are also aware of the advantages of sexually ambivalent narratives. In the Chinese-speaking sphere of queer popular culture, she identifies two types of queer cultural forms among the wealth of film, television, fiction, manga, and other cultural productions—the schoolgirl romance and BL (boys’ love) culture. While schoolgirl romances idealize a nostalgic temporality and blurred sexual normativity, the BL scene, which includes the performance and consumption of BL manga and fiction, offers a space for predominantly straight women to imagine more egalitarian partnerships.
Sharing some common interests with Martin, Katrien Jacobs (in Chapter 13) draws attention to the connections between gendered fantasies and certain digital practices—archiving, making databases, posting, crossing the Great Firewall, linking to pornography, etc. Based on her observation of the Chinese pornosphere, Jacobs argues that the pornosphere allows social media users to explore desire and share queer fantasies. In the process of aligning themselves with particular Japanese porn stars, Chinese social media users often place local pornography and porn icons in a transnational, cultural hierarchy.
The last chapter (14) in this section looks at the cultural translation of star-based Korean masculinity in a Taiwanese men’s fashion magazine, Men’s UNO. In his analysis, Hong-chi Shiau uncovers a collective, Asian tone in the magazine’s discourse and representation of popular Korean film and television stars. Presented as having naturally sculpted physiques, being on good terms with other men, and valuing responsibility, the stars resonate with both consumerist meterosexuality and wen, the Confucian notion of erudite masculinity also discussed by Deppman in Chapter 7b.
As the previous sections have suggested, intensified media and cultural flows in East Asia have set off cultural hybridizations and the desire to make new cultural historiographies based on ongoing mutual sharing. Much like the argument that the region effectively mediates the national/ local and the global (Ching 2000; Sinclair 2007), the circulation of media cultures in East Asia promotes people’s mutual understanding in a transnationalizing world. Even if they do not physically move across borders, many individuals in East Asia actively consume, circulate, interpret, and reuse information, images, and commodities that have crossed borders. Yet we should not assume a dialogic relationship would evolve as a natural or inevitable consequence of this mixing. Globalization is an uneven process, after all. Just as the critique of the simplified account of the meaning-making process in the thesis of cultural imperialism allowed for a more nuanced understanding of cultural flows (Sparks 2007; Hafez 2007), we also benefit by carefully analyzing the structural aspects of capital, geopolitics, and culture at the global level. This section investigates how various structural forces—such as marketization, national cultural policy, and nationalistic movements—both enable and disable shared cultural spaces.
Hesmondhalgh (2008) argues that global media conglomerates’ oligopolistic control over copyright and intellectual property accounts for their current cultural domination. In addition to noting the unfair distribution of profit, which exploits cultural labor at the bottom, Hes-mondhalgh also argues that strengthening the view of culture as property raises questions concerning cultural creativity and the cultural commons. Jeroen de Kloet and Yiu Fai Chow’s study (Chapter 15) of artists based in Dafen, China, whose main job is to make imitation (shanzhai) paintings of iconic Western artworks, responds to many of the issues raised above. By exploring the artists’ aesthetics and aspirations, as well as the circulation of their works, Kloet and Chow conclude that intellectual property is far from a stable global discourse.
In Chua Beng Huat’s chapter (16), the focus is on the twin forces of marketization and cultural policy, particularly how Japan, South Korea, and China compete to further national goals through the accumulation and exercise of soft power. Chua identifies state attempts—through official policy pronouncements, preferential regulations, etc.—to ride on the regional success of what began as media products for national consumption. Still, the fragmented nature of audiences, the backlash against imported programs, and persistent historical tensions continue to counter government attempts to use popular culture to further soft power.
Rumi Sakamoto’s study of the rise of cyber-nationalism in Japan (Chapter 17) is in direct dialogue with Chua’s chapter. Created within the larger context of neo-nationalism and historical revisionism, war representations in film and manga are contributing to the construction of patriotic discourse. As particularly affective forms of media, film and manga are well suited to accommodate multiple complex viewpoints and nuanced representations, yet the globalization of popular media also facilitates the rapid circulation of nationalist popular culture across national borders, which generates reactions and counterreactions, resulting in a vicious cycle of nationalism and jingoism.
The substantial increase in the number of international cultural events such as film festivals is another trend of cultural globalization that enables regional content creators and marketers to share and envision projects. At the same time, film festivals offer opportunities for city and nation branding. In Chapter 18, Soojeong Ahn uses the rise of the Busan International Film Festival (BIFF) to illustrate the complex alliances of interests and identities that form in a cosmopolitan trans-Asia film culture. The BIFF differs from other East Asian film festivals in that it actively promotes itself as a center of regional production rather than as a venue for art-house screenings. This branding process has transformed Busan from an industrial port city into a cultural hub with corresponding economic gains. It was the BIFF’s Asianizing strategy that has led to its rapid regional expansion.
In the final chapter, Iwabuchi reflects on the major hindrances to the advancement of trans– East Asian commons and regional dialogue. The international governance of cultural connection amplifies the voice of the nation, which tends to silence marginal voices within national borders. It is often argued that while the nation is still important as a local unit of administration and regulation, the national framework is too big and too small to handle the complex matters of transnational flows of capital, media, and people in our age (Benhabib 2002, 180). Given that much state cultural policy in East Asia is moving away from social democratization, researchers should consider how to advance the dialogic and participative potential of media culture connections across various divides. Iwabuchi proposes that, in order to achieve this, researchers must collaborate with social actors in various fields, including people from government agencies, media industries, NGOs, and NPOs, as well as directly engaging with activists and ordinary citizens.
The purpose of this book is not to simply celebrate the busy media and cultural exchange in East Asia. We wish to call attention to the potential and the limitations of popular culture flows and inspire intellectual intervention based on our accumulated and collective cultural resources.
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