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This chapter explores the complexity of the impact of the Korean Wave in Japanese society and addresses the possibility of transnational dialogues through popular cultural connections. It first examines how the reception of other East Asian media cultures proves to be an opportune moment for Japanese audiences to critically review the state of their own lives, society and history. This is done by comparing the reception of the Korean Wave, and Winter Sonata in particular, with the fervent reception of Hong Kong popular culture in the late 1990s. It also investigates the representation of and audience responses to a popular Japanese TV drama series that for the first time deals with socio-historical issues about resident Koreans. The critical analysis of the impact of the Korean Wave on the social positioning and recognition of resident Koreans in Japan should not be taken as totally rejecting positive changes. Critique is a necessary detour to further the potentiality of the emergent change and to actualize transnational dialogue through media consumption.

This chapter ethnographically examines how young Korean women, from their late teens to early thirties, watched and related Japanese TV dramas to their daily lives. It first explores the ways in which the fans create or experience transnational consumption space, within which they negotiate their cultural or gender identities in an age of globalization. It then shows how their reception experiences have been hybridized as their self-reflexive reading becomes more inter-textual and intercultural, with an increasing propensity to select, compare and appropriate cultural products from various countries. Although Korean female fans of J-dramas physically reside within the boundaries of their nation-state, they have created a transnational imaginary space through their consumption of J-dramas. Korean women have managed their own identity politics by viewing and appropriating J-dramas.

It is the arrival of the Japanese and Korean TV dramas that provides the material basis for a discursive conceptualization of an “East Asian pop culture” sphere with an integrated cultural economy. The flows and exchanges within this East Asian pop culture sphere are reviewed. The penetration of Korean TV dramas into East Asian markets in the late 1990s is the consequence of felicitous timing. Section I of this book explores the political economy and current state of play in the television industry in East Asia. The essays in Section II are then concerned with transnational-crosscultural receptions of TV dramas in different locations across East Asia. Section III outlines the nationalistic reactions and negative “backlash”, which are at once political and ideological, that might be generated by massive cultural cross-border regional flows, of the Korean Wave. It is hoped that it offers to readers further empirical and conceptual insights into cultural globalization, which cannot be ascertained in existing US-centric analyses.

Since the 1990s, there has been dense traffic of pop culture routinely crossing the national and cultural boundaries of East Asian countries of Japan, Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore. The unequal traffic is predominantly from Japan and Korea into ethnic-Chinese dominant locations, which has a historically long and well established production, distribution and exhibition network; Japan and Korea are primarily production-exporting nations, while China and Singapore as primarily importing-consumption ones, with Taiwan emerging as the production centre in Mandarin pop music and Hong Kong remaining as the primary production location of Chinese languages cinemas. Japanese and Korean pop culture are translated, dubbed or subtitled into a Chinese language in one of the ethnic-Chinese importing locations and then re-exported and circulated within the entire Chinese ‘diaspora’. The structures and processes that engender this transnational flow are the foundational to the emergence of an East Asian regional media cultural economy that increasingly see co-production of films and television dramas.

This chapter explores how silent cinema in Japan provided an important context for the development of the historiography of kabuki in the early twentieth century and the role played by the playwright and theater historian Tsubouchi Shōyō in developing a history of Japanese drama that foregrounds gesture over voice. Beginning in the 1910s, Shōyō developed a conception of theatrical ukiyo-e prints as proto-cinematic and used this idea to argue for these prints as an archival record of theatrical gesture. At the same time, this conception of woodblock prints as a cinema-like archive deemphasized the role of the actor’s voice for which there was no equivalent record. Only in recent years have historians begun to explore the early history of sound recording of kabuki from the first decades of the twentieth century to argue for the role that these SP records might play in not only supplementing but fundamentally complicating a historiography of kabuki theater from which the actor’s voice has long been absent.

This chapter contains a translation of Brief Night, one of Kubota Mantarō's many dramas in the turbulent years between the tail end of the Meiji era and Japan's postwar reconstruction. Called “the poet of Asakusa” for his delicate portrayals of the common people of his native Tokyo neighborhood, Kubota's dramas are essentially elegies to a way of life that even in the Taishō era was on its way out. Brief Night is typical of his plays—in a nutshell, it is the portrait of a pampered son (Isaburō) of a now deceased shopkeeper; the young man's poor judgment and taste for the bottle bring about the ruin of his house. The drama focuses on the negotiated breakup of Isaburō's marriage to Ofusa.