Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture

Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, Chris Berry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317285007
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the 1990s there has been a dramatic increase in cultural flows and connections between the countries in the East Asian region. Nowhere is this more apparent than when looking at popular culture where uneven but multilateral exchanges of Japanese, Korean, Taiwanese, Hong Kong and Chinese products have led to the construction of an 'East Asian Popular Culture'. This is both influenced by, and in turn influences, the national cultures, and generates transnational co-production and reinvention.

As East Asian popular culture becomes a global force, it is increasingly important for us to understand the characteristics of contemporary East Asian popular culture, and in particular its transnational nature. In this handbook, the contributors theorize East Asian experiences and reconsider Western theories on cultural globalization to provide a cutting-edge overview of this global phenomenon.

The Routledge Handbook of East Asian Popular Culture will be of great interest to students and scholars of a wide range of disciplines, including: Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Communication Studies, Anthropology, Sociology and Asian Studies in general.

Part I
Historicizing and spatializing East Asian popular culture

1
Historicizing East Asian pop Culture

Younghan Cho

Over the past few decades, East Asian pop culture has drawn a tremendous amount of attention from not only regional producers and audiences but also academia: many scholars from Asia and the West have contributed to the ongoing debates and discussions on this topic. It is particularly noteworthy that Asian cultural studies scholars have been conducting their research in the cities in which they live, based on their own experiences and those of their neighbors. The volume and diversity of these experiences and discussions suggest that it is an opportune time to conduct broader and more theoretical research on East Asian pop culture. As Chen Kuan-Hsing and Chua Beng Huat suggest, we need to “work longer, further and deeper” (2007, 5) in order to better understand East Asian pop culture and its significance as one of the major inter-Asian trends.

This chapter aims to historicize East Asian pop culture by tracing regional flows of pop culture, from Hong Kong films and Japanese animation, dramas, and pop music in the 1980s and 1990s to the Korean Wave and the emergence of Pop Culture China in the twenty-first century. Rather than describing the genres, artists, and other innumerable historical details that make up the pop cultures of East Asia, the primary purpose here is to develop a historical narrative of East Asian pop culture vis-à-vis its influences, both American and those internal to the region. I suggest understanding East Asian pop culture as a series of regional flows of popular culture, which I will call “pop flows.” Constructed through consuming, copying, and referencing both American and regional pop cultures, pop flows help us to articulate East Asian pop culture as both the historical accumulation and temporal coexistence of these diverse influences. Finally, the chapter attempts to delineate a distinctive element of East Asian pop culture, which I refer to as “double inscription.”

In historicizing East Asian popular culture, I am particularly interested in raising fundamental questions about cultural theory and building new conceptual frameworks to address those questions. Rather than applying Western-oriented concepts to East Asia, I attempt to develop an alternative framework through historicizing regional cultural experiences, based mainly on assessments and explications of critics in the region.¹ As Chen has contended, “What we need are rather alternative frameworks for reference. … The emergence of an inter-Asian public sphere … would be the beginning of that shift and multiplication of our frames of reference” (2001, 86–87). In tracing the history of East Asian pop culture, this study revisits questions such as “Can we overcome the dichotomy between Western theory and Asian reality?” and “Can Asia be the location of theory?” (Shih 2010, 471).

The articulation of East Asian pop culture needs to be accompanied by a set of empirical questions unique to each country, each locale, each group, and each genre of pop cultures under consideration, but framing this research as “East Asian” makes it inherently comparative in nature. Furthermore, it is

impossible for the comparative study of all active consumption processes across different objects and times of analysis to be undertaken by a single scholar who is able to traverse not only national-spatial boundaries but also cultural linguistic barriers across the whole of East Asia.

(Chua and Cho 2012, 489)

Collaborative research efforts, especially inter-Asian academic efforts, are essential for the discursive construction of East Asian pop culture as an object of analysis and theorization (Chua 2004). Along with the other empirically based essays in this anthology, this study seeks to contribute to the ongoing critical and theoretical engagement with the complexity of East Asian pop culture. Therefore, this project aims not only at historicizing East Asian pop culture through regional pop flows, but also at reconsidering salient aspects of modern East Asia by using pop culture as an entry point.

America in East Asian pop culture

This section briefly sketches America’s influence on Asian pop culture during the second half of the 20th century. After World War II, America “crafted its regional strategic influence partly through the promotion of cultural understanding of America” (Chua and Cho 2012, 485). One aspect of this new strategic initiative was the dissemination of American popular culture throughout the region. American pop culture was not only well received and quickly absorbed by Asian consumers, but it was also appropriated by cultural producers in East Asia. Examples range from Hollywood’s influence on Asian filmmaking to the impact of American rock ’n’ roll on Asian popular music. Even today, the Americanness of East Asian pop culture is a “constant source of public discourse in Asia, with reference to the effects of ‘Westernization’ and ‘cultural contamination’ of the local” (Chua 2008, 74). The degrees of Americanization have varied in different parts of the region as well as over time, but during the 1950s and 1960s it was impossible not to recognize the American origins of East Asian pop cultures. Nearly every expression of pop culture in East Asia was influenced by the aura of America as the symbol of the modern or superior Other.

At the same time that East Asian nations were establishing their independence in the immediate postwar period, American hegemony was becoming a prevalent and influential force in the region. During the following three decades, the world was plunged into the Cold War— although it was anything but “cold” in Asia with the Korean War in the early 1950s—and the Vietnam War of 1958–1974. According to the prevailing Cold War logic, the struggles of these and other Asian countries to establish political and economic sovereignty and form new national identities were predicated on continued economic growth and resistance to Communism. Under such conditions, it is no surprise that America, a colonialist superpower, was both directly and indirectly engaged in cultural politics in East Asia, particularly through the use of anti-communist propaganda (Chen 2001).²

During the Cold War era, pop cultures in East Asia became contested realms in which American interests both co-opted and clashed with national governments in the region. Initially, the region’s pop cultures were officially supported because they efficiently disseminated anti-communist propaganda (Yoshimi 2003).³ Under the supervision of the ongoing American military presence, and often with its direct financial support, many governments installed broadcasting and entertainment systems that were crucial both in propagandizing anti-communist ideas and in building national ideologies. From the start, these systems embraced American formats, programs, operating rationales, and so on. Moreover, because of the obvious American origin of these technologies and cultural products, they were treated as symbols of modern life or modern style (Yoshimi 2006). In the process of nation-building, therefore, national governments in the region actively embraced American-flavored pop cultures, and these were in turn welcomed and enjoyed by the East Asian general public.

As pop culture became more prevalent in people’s everyday lives, however, the same national governments became wary of the sexual, individualistic, and even liberal ideologies that they believed were spread as a consequence of various American pop-cultural influences (Chua and Cho 2012). Their concerns included exposure to immorality, sexuality, violence, and progressive political ideas. Therefore, pop culture was also decried across East Asia as evidence of the decay of each society’s moral and ethical standards, and it was often regarded as a threat to the authority of the government. Thus, in East Asia, America often “serve[d] as a metaphorical siren song against which a balanced economy must seal its ears” (Garon and Maclachlan 2006, 14). Such patronizing government attitudes collided with the populist approach of local consumers. This conflict reveals the complexity of the connections between East Asian pop cultures and Americanization, and it can also be used to trace the expansion of American hegemony during the nation-building stages of many Asian countries.

After seventy years of steady interaction with the local, this penetration of American pop culture into both the production and consumption sides of the East Asian pop cultural space has become almost seamless—as seen most recently in the domination of American television formats in East Asian television. In this regard, Anthony Fung suggests the idea of global (dis) continuity to describe “the degree of continuity of the modes and structures of operation of transnational cultural corporations, which conventionally dominate in the transplant from West to Asia in which local adaptations and modifications arise” (2013, 2). As the world of mass entertainment has become globalized and national boundaries have become more porous, the status of American pop culture in East Asia has been transformed. No longer curious and new—or degenerate and corrosive—American music, films, and television are now seen as cultural products to be actively mimicked, appropriated, and even banalized. The result is that today it is often difficult to discern the boundaries of American influence in East Asian pop cultures (Chua and Cho 2012). Nonetheless, it is still true that East Asians recognize, either implicitly or explicitly, both the direct and indirect influence of American culture on Asian pop cultures (Ang 2004).⁴

The emergence of East Asian pop culture

Since the early 1990s, East Asian cultural landscapes have been significantly transformed through increased integration, networking, and cooperation among various elements of the transnational cultural industries, including non-Western players. Such transformations engender both drastic and subtle reconfigurations within the pop cultures of East Asia: the “structure of transnational cultural power has been dispersed, but has also become more solid and ubiquitous” (Iwabuchi 2004, 6). Previously, East Asian audiences tended to prefer American pop cultural products to domestic or regional ones. However, so many elements of American pop culture have been so effectively routinized and integrated into East Asian cultural products and the everyday lives of people in East Asia that it is hard to discern the extent of American pop culture’s influence on local or regional pop cultures. Such transformations in the East Asian cultural landscapes have encouraged scholars to seriously grapple with the new configurations of East Asian pop culture vis-à-vis American influence. Chua comments, “the emergent reality of an East Asian pop culture is juxtaposed against the presence of Hollywood and other media cultures” (2008, 89). As such, it is still worthwhile to examine to what extent American pop culture is still influencing the burgeoning growth and flows of East Asian pop cultures that in recent decades have become part of the globalization of mass entertainment.

The strengthening of regional pop cultures in East Asia can be observed in terms of both production and consumption. The Asian economic crisis of the late 1990s “has not stopped intra-flows but has instead furthered the interaction and intra-flows among Asian nations” (Iwabuchi, Muecke, and Thomas 2004, 1). With regional trends being expedited by advancements in transportation and telecommunications technologies, East Asian audiences can almost instantly consume a wide variety of regional cultural products (Hu 2005). Notable regional flows include the extensive pan-Asian popularity of Hong Kong films from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s, Japanese pop culture in the 1990s, and South Korean pop culture, dubbed the Korean Wave, in the first decade of the 2000s.

The 1980s were the heyday of the Hong Kong film industry. Hong Kong films, particularly noir films, gained popularity not only from pan-Asian audiences but also fans on the other continents. Gina Marchetti and Tan See Kam attribute the global acclaim of Hong Kong noir films to the filmmakers, commenting that the vision of Hong Kong noir films “comes from postmodern Asia, not postwar America” (2007, 7).⁵ However, the success of the Hong Kong film industry “was tinged over with anxiety about the fact that Great Britain had agreed to relinquish sovereignty over the city to the People’s Republic of China in 1997” (Curtin 2013, 254). While the golden days of the Hong Kong film industry slowly waned as audiences in overseas markets did not develop affection for most films produced in the decade following the handover (ibid.), Hong Kong cinema still continues to exert its influence and demand its due respect.

Japanese pop culture in the form of animation, television drama, and J-pop dominated pan-Asian cultural circulation and consumption in the 1990s. Japanese cultural hegemony in East Asia was a result of both its economic prowess and the growing involvement of Asian countries in the global capitalist economy (Ching 1994). This spread of Japanese popular culture went hand in hand with the globalization of Japanese brands in durable goods (e.g. Sony’s Walkman), non-durable goods (fast-moving consumer goods), and cosmetics (Oyama 2009). Shinji Oyama suggests that the pan-Asian advertising of Japanese brands was the visible sign of the emergence of a regional commonality or sensibility, which was shaped mainly by Japanese media content (ibid.). The wide popularity of Japanese pop culture in the 1990s “precipitates (asymmetric) connections between people in Japan and those in modernized (or rapidly modernizing) ‘Asia’ … through popular cultural forms” (Iwabuchi 2002, 18).⁶

From the late 1990s, South Korean pop products had begun to draw significant regional audiences, a phenomenon referred to as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu in Korean. TV soap operas or melodramas led the expansion of the Korean Wave in Asia: Winter Sonata (2002) was a sensation among Japanese audiences and Jewel in the Palace (2003) made “the greatest impact on all the ethnic-Chinese locations in East Asia” (Chua and Iwabuchi 2008, p. 5). Later, the development of digital media forms has played a primary role in expanding “digital Hallyu,” in particular, “YouTube is a driving force of K-pop today” (Kim 2013, 8). John Lie suggests that “K-pop exemplifies middle class, urban and suburban values” and K-pop performers “exemplify a sort of pop perfectionism: catchy tunes, good singing, attractive bodies, cool clothes, mesmerizing movements in a non-threatening, pleasant package” (2012, 356). The Korean Wave is not only another (export) brand that is orchestrated with much support from the Korean government, transnational corporations, and pop-nationalism among South Koreans ( Joo 2011; Lie 2012...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Critical approaches to East Asian popular culture
• PART I Historicizing and spatializing East Asian popular culture
• PART II Media culture in national specificities and inter-Asian referencing
• PART III Gender, sexuality, and cultural icons
• PART IV The politics of the transnational commons
• Index