About the Project
North East Asia continues to be a powerhouse of economic and social development, despite extremely serious ongoing security tensions. However, there is also growing evidence that a vigorous cultural import and export trade within the region (in such commodities as comics, cinema and TV dramas) has potential to create a shared popular culture. The widespread diffusion of the Internet, and the concomitant enthusiastic take-up of blogging, is creating new cultural communities among the consumers of these commodities. The struggle for leadership between Japan and Korea in the sphere of the culture industries provides a fertile field for the study of soft market power versus hard national power. The competing national discourses of the 'Korean Wave' (hallyu) and Japan's 'Gross National Cool' indicate that there is a battle over soft power in the East Asian region.
As each country successively generates a consumer economy and a rising middle class, East Asian cultural industries have burgeoned. Japan was followed by the four NIES (South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore). and later Malaysia, China, Thailand and Indonesia. Japan developed a vibrant popular culture, a homegrown, locally consumed culture largely independent of the US. It was a hybrid culture, re-made in Japan, having absorbed US popular culture intensively since the Occupation, and building on the earlier phase of enthusiasm for Western popular culture in the 1920s. Japan as the first non-Western country to modernize and westernize, was a pioneer leading the way, showing other Asian countries a model. This model was viewed ambivalently because of Japan's colonizing and imperialistic behaviour, but even under those circumstances it was a model which could not be ignored, even after liberation following Japan's defeat in 1945. In the postwar era, Korea and China found other models, to be sure, and sources of support for their modernizing projects. However, Japan's outstanding economic success made them look again to Japan for inspiration as well as for material support.
Regardless of official policy towards Japan, Japan's consumer culture and cultural industries were viewed positively, and were in demand by youth with growing spending power in South Korea and China, as well as Taiwan, Malaysia and elsewhere.
This project will investigate and analyze the effects of transnational flows of information, mediated cultural texts between Japan, Korea, China and Taiwan over the past decade or so, specifically:
- the role of Seoul and Tokyo as cultural traffic nodes in the transnational transmission of various cultural texts, their mutual appropriation and influence, and the creation thereby of a shared popular media culture in the East Asian region. Case studies will include the influence of Japanese comics and anime, and the international reception of Korean television dramas and cinema, and the consequent construction of national and transnational identifications by various audiences;
- the potential of a shared popular culture for overcoming some of the security and diplomatic tensions in the East Asian region;
- the role of audiences and fans of this shared popular culture, as new power holders who are creating new configurations of media power, through blogs and other media;
- the relation between the transnational consumption of popular culture, and official discourses of soft power, in particular the soft power competition through appropriation of popular culture in both Korea and Japan for cultural diplomacy (hallyu vs. Japan's GNC);
- the use of cheap accessible popular media such as Internet blogs and comics for unofficial hate discourse, such as the I Hate Hallyu (Ken-hanry) comic series in Japan, which does not surface in TV dramas;
- the role of the growing exchange between academics in these nations in creating a shared intellectual framework of cultural studies and media studies, and the reception of cultural studies and postcolonial studies in the region.