Transnational convergence of East Asian Pop Culture

2016

長崎大学総合環境研究, 2006

Using highly advanced media technology, Asian cultural exchanges became very active since the latter half of the 1990s. Firstly, Japanese "trendy dramas" were favorably welcomed in Asia because they could show young people's problems in an Asian context against the background of a modernized city. These dramas have projected an image of Japan as an idealistically westernized country. Due to the popularity of Japanese culture such as manga, TV dramas, and movies, there seems to have risen a fear that it might be too influential in Asia. However, Japan is based on Western-style modernization, and originally Japanese media companies had the intention of exporting program-making formats to Asian countries rather than the cultural products themselves. A Taiwanese TV drama, Meteor Garden, based on a Japanese manga story was imported back to Japan and soon created a boom here. Also, Korean dramas have been received with enthusiasm in Japan as well as in other Asian countries. Because of "familiarity with Confucianism and ethnicity" in this area, cultural products go beyond the borders of nations and genres, contributing toward Asians seeking for identity in the "diasporic public sphere," which media has been creating worldwide.

Southeast Asian Studies, 2014

Popular Culture Co-productions and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia Nissim Otmazgin and Eyal Ben-Ari Singapore and Kyoto: NUS Press in association with Kyoto University Press, 2013, x+276p.The recent growth of Asian media markets coincides with the emergence of an academic area which can be labelled as (inter-)Asian media and cultural studies. English-language academic publications such as Trajectories: Inter-Asian Cultural Studies (Chen 1998) and Recentering Globalization: Pop- ular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism (Iwabuchi 2002) may be given credit for launching this new academic field. Its further development was subsequently enabled by the publication of a string of academic volumes, including Rogue Flows: Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic (Iwabuchi et al. 2004), Asian Media Studies (Erni and Chua 2005), and East Asian Pop Culture: Analyzing the Korean Wave (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008), among many others.The publication of Popular Culture Co-productions and Collaborations ...

Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 2016

This article focusses on Chua Beng Huat’s work on the East Asian pop culture that became more prominent in East and Southeast Asia from the 1990s, when the circulation of multilingual and multi-format pop culture started to exceed linguistic, ethnic and national boundaries. It argues that Chua’s work indicates that the pop-cultural production and innovation that support the globalisation and regionalisation processes in East Asia need not be national in origin but can hail from different national origins – and this despite the existing political realities of the region and its history of political fractures. He cautions, though, that the national-popular can also be marshalled to defeat the border-crossing potential of an inter-Asian pop culture. What is the ‘Asia’ imagined or being represented in such cultural production? Chua’s work is also distinctive in that it deals with the political and economic conditions that underpin mainstream pop consumption as a socio-cultural phenomenon, instead of examining consumption as identity politics. The article concludes by noting the significance that Chua as in institutional builder has played in enabling the study of East Asian pop culture in the region.

Social Transformations: Journal of the Global South, 2013

ACR North American Advances, 2012

Cultural Studies, 2011

This study questions the term “East Asia” by investigating its usage in South Korean mass media and academic discourse about the Korean Wave and by reframing the Korean Wave as a source of new definitions of the cultural geography of East Asia and East Asian sensibilities instead of its current designations as either an empty signifier or a profitable market. Reframing the Korean Wave as a set of seminal iterations of East Asian pop culture includes its multiplicity and historicity, which enables the delineation of the cultural geography of East Asia as neither a unilateral nor fixed topography but rather something that is constantly reimagined via pan-Asian pop cultures, materialized through actual encounters, and reinvented through shared historic pasts and modernizing desires. Examining East Asian pop culture also helps to illuminate current structures of feeling in East Asia (“East Asian sensibilities”). The study concludes with suggestions for future collaborative works and theoretical endeavors, which are imperative for the establishment of East Asian pop culture as an object of analysis.

Drawing New Colour Lines: Transnational Asian American Graphic Narratives, 2014

2014

In popular culture, Hong Kong is probably the most “Japanese city” outside Japan. It is home to a wide variety of Japanese popular cultural products and a regional base to many of the Japanese music and television companies who expanded their operations in the city since the early 1990s. Hong Kong’s emerging middle class, especially the younger generation, has enthusiastically accepted Japanese contemporary culture and lifestyle, making the city one of the biggest destinations for Japan’s cultural exports. Based on fieldwork surveys and interviews, this paper looks the organizational aspect of popular culture in Hong Kong during the heydays of Japanese popular culture in the 1990s and early 2000s. The investigation focuses on the industrial structure and strategies used by Japanese music and television companies to enter Hong Kong, their efforts to promote their products and services, and their reaction to the challenge of piracy. Beyond analyzing the Japanese case, the paper introduces a new framework to examine the transnational expansion of other popular cultures within the East and Southeast Asian region, highlighting the role of companies and promoters in this process.

A discussion of what I learned, during my Fulbright year, about American popular culture in Japan. Includes text from the original Fulbright proposal.