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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 unpacks the meanings of “the invasion of the Korean wave” by exploring the three genres of public discourses on the Korean wave. It points out that the most dominant genre of the public discourse on the Korean wave articulates globalization with economic nationalism, which derives its legitimacy from disembodiment, rationality, calculation, and competition for self-interests. The second discourse on the Korean wave is articulated as cultural nationalism, with the Korean drama and the Korean man as the other. The third discourse on the Korean wave takes on a feminine form, addressing to female readers/consumers how women consume affectively Korean dramas, and particularly, that of the body of male stars. This chapter ends with a re-reading of the fan discourse through Martin Heidegger's notion of “technology” in the hope of transforming the existing public sphere which leaves women no place to speak. It is noted that Heidegger's reading of technology might be a starting point to think about the strategies of transformation.

This chapter examines the rise of the “Korean Wave” in the new millennium in terms of governmental and corporate support. It also empirically investigates the government support, investments of chaebols (Korean conglomerates), and processes of capital accumulation in the media sector. In order to account for the growth of Korean popular culture into an export industry and its international appeal, it reviews the trajectory of Korean popular culture industries linking them to global and local political economic relations and the domestic cultural environment. It concentrates on cinema and television dramas for its analysis of the development of Korean popular culture. For a start, the government policies and domestic conglomerates' business moves that helped transform the Korean cinema industry are presented, taking account of the global political economic context. It is noted that even the Korean government did not have a clear vision for popular cultural exports.

This chapter examines South Korean drama and its rapid penetration into regional markets. Since the late 1990s, Korean popular culture has established a presence in Mainland China, Hong Kong SAR, Taiwan, Vietnam, and Japan. Korean television dramas have been at the forefront of the so-called Korean Wave, or hanliu, which has diversified the media and cultural landscape in Asia, in turn challenging the unilateral, top-down flow of globalization.

This chapter critically examines three competing positions on the Korean Wave or Hanryu in South Korea developed by the South Korean government, cultural producers and critical intellectuals; namely, neoliberalism, state-centric nationalism, culturalism cum post-colonialism. It reviews a diverse range of issues regarding the rapid diffusion and growing popularity of South Korean cultural products across Asia by employing a critical and culturally nuanced approach. It aims to provide alternative, nonnationalist ways of envisioning the flow of South Korean popular culture across Asia so as to further inter-regional cultural understanding and dialogues. It then raises several thought-provoking issues and problematics on the emergence of Hanryu. Looking at the recent circulation of Hanryu discourses through the cultural studies lens presents new forms of explanation of translocally consumed cultural texts as well as new problematics that need more than critical discursive intervention.

This chapter outlines what the Korean Wave has been like in Japan and tries to situate the Winter Sonata phenomenon within a Japanese context. It illustrates how the fans are actively involved in various cultural practices such as organizing fan meetings, learning Korean culture and language, and participating in Winter Sonata fan tours in Korea. It also argues that the emergence of new cultural subjectivities of middle-aged housewives and their political possibilities should be taken seriously in their own right. It specifically asks how Winter Sonata was being watched and talked about by the individual fans. It is difficult to judge whether Winter Sonata will produce better political relations between Korea and Japan. However, it is clear that a significant number of middle-aged women, who have often been marginalized and even looked down upon as merely media consumers, have started a variety of interesting cultural practices after the phenomenon.

Authenticity and nationality are closely linked for fans of South Korean popular culture in China, as well as for the Korean cultural establishment. Bringing gender into the equation, this chapter focuses on the mainly young female fans of Korean boy bands and idols. It was in 2000 that South Korean pop music became fashionable in China, as part of a regional phenomenon commonly dubbed “Korean Wave.” The chapter discusses the role of Korean cultural industries in supporting Korean popular music as part of a broader national promotion, and their complex relationship with agencies in China and the fans who reworked it into “an intensely pleasurable, intensely signifying popular culture” that undermined the intended messages of nationalism and regionalism. The conflicting notions of gender, authenticity, and modernity throw up new questions about alterity within East Asia. The chapter draws on the work of Cho Hae-Joang on Hanliu discourse, and Kōichi Iwabuchi's work on fans' self-reflexivity and transnational consumption.

This chapter examines neo-nationalist backlash expressed in popular culture and disseminated through new media. In July 2005, amid a furore, a hitherto insignificant Tokyo publishing house launched Yamano Sharin's Manga Kenkanryū. As the title suggests, Kenkanryū is presented as an oppositional vision to an allegedly blind enthusiasm for things Korean among Japanese followers of the “Korean Wave.” It seeks to counteract this infatuation by providing “the truth” about Korea, its history, culture, and Korean claims against Japan for restitution. Kenkanryū aims to educate its readers on a wide range of misdemeanours allegedly committed by Korea, which it describes as a “thoroughly depraved nation.” The manga seeks to demonstrate that “anti-Japan” sentiments and protests in Korea lack any legitimate historical basis, and that “correct” historical knowledge would enable Japanese people to be proud of their country's present and past achievements, and, thus fortified, to take a firm stance against any kind of “Japan-bashing” by their Asian neighbors.

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.

This chapter shows how Hunan Satellite TV, a regional station in the People Republic of China (PRC), succeeds in using Korean media as a vehicle to establish its footprint in the competitive national TV media space. The case of Hunan Satellite TV throws light on the dynamics that mediate the local with the national via the transnational, in an increasingly intensified “globality” where the development of communication technologies and the rise of East Asian media flows enable “local” or “regional” players to escape subordination to the national center. It then investigates how the local media plays a role in the transnationalization of the Korean wave, in the process of struggling for survival and success in a complex national and geo-political context where multiple political, economic and cultural forces converge. The case of importing Korean dramas revealed the process of how the local “transnationalizes” foreign media products to enhance its local national status: exploiting the indigenous, negotiating the political and the national, and fabricating the modern.

This chapter provides an empirical study of the Japanese women fans turned tourists who traveled to the shooting locations for Winter Sonata. It starts by describing the gender politics and the postcolonial situation of Korea as a historical tourist destination for the Japanese. It also covers the question of why women in particular are now traveling to Korea, facilitating and intensifying the Korean Wave. Next, the change in Japanese tourists' view of Korea following the change in gender dynamics and the boom in Korean popular culture since the 1990s is reviewed. It concentrates on the transnational consumption of dramas by Japanese women and what occurs in the process of a viewer turning into a tourist. Finally, it discusses conditions concerning Hanryu tourism and its place in the history of Korean tourism from the perspective of gender. In the history of Japanese tourism to Korea, tours to shooting locations in Winter Sonata meant the diversification of Japanese tourists to Korea, following the feminization of tourism in the 1990s.

This chapter explores cases of place promotion as mediated through Korean popular culture since the early 2000s, specifically television dramas and K-pop music. It explicates the alliance between cultural production and urban policies, then reveals the untold stories about Hallyu, or the so-called Korean Wave, referring to the overseas popularity of Korean entertainment products, including films, television dramas, pop music (K-pop), and online games. The chapter emphasizes that K-prefixed products and services are not abstract but manifested in and associated with specific places, thus engendering “K-places.” It reinterprets the Korean Wave by casting new light on the influence of Korean pop culture not only on commercial and economic life but also on the transformation of cities. By focusing on the spatial aspects and impacts of Hallyu, the chapter examines the ways Korean municipalities commodify and sell their urban and rural spaces to potential tourists by being represented in and associated with popular culture.

This chapter first discuses the rise of Korean popular culture and its dissemination in Asian countries, known as the Korean Wave, or Hallyu. It characterizes the Korean Wave into roughly two major historical developments: the Hallyu 1.0 era (approximately between 1997 and 2007) and the Hallyu 2.0, New Korean Wave, era (mainly from 2008 to the present). Although these two periods share some common phenomena, they are dissimilar in their major characteristics, such as the major cultural forms exported, technological developments, fan bases, and government cultural policies. It then sets out the book's purpose, which is to explore the recent evolution of Hallyu in a socioeconomic context alongside its textual meanings. The chapter then discusses the hybridity in Korean popular culture followed by an overview of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter documents recent developments characterizing the New Korean Wave in the realm of the broadcasting sector. It discusses television Hallyu as both transnational cultural production and transnational cultural flow. Admitting the continuing importance of dramas in the Korean Wave, it analyzes the growth of global formats, including audience competition shows, in order to understand the major characteristics of local formats in tandem with hybridity. In the realm of drama, it examines the change from ready-made dramas to format dramas in the New Korean Wave era. Then it investigates the ways in which Koreans consume the image of Hallyu and the way it is represented in Korean audition programs. Unlike the case during the early 2000s, the New Korean Wave has been heavily influenced by transnational participation and audiences. By employing a textual analysis of a few television programs within a historical context, the chapter also maps out whether localized global formats guarantee the creation of new cultural spaces.

This chapter discusses how Korean television dramas are produced, covering funding channels, sponsorship practices, and the ways the dramas cater to their export markets. It redirects attention to the industrial arena and analyses “why such stories are told in particular ways.” Rather than accounting for the popularity of Korean dramas, the chapter investigates how Hallyu has reconfigured their industrial dynamics and production practices. It argues that the Korean Wave has turned the Korean drama industry into a speculative field in which the industrial players have vested interests in export. Despite the independent drama producers' sizable numbers and mounting expectations of achieving a megahit in foreign markets, their industrial positions are marginal on account of their being exploited by the broadcasters' monopolistic power. Their suppressed status causes independent producers to engage in even more speculative practices, pushing them to seek more and more sponsors. The chapter then turns to demonstrate how the speculative nature of their business has, in turn, affected the production practices, forms of sponsorship, and storytelling methods typical of Korean television dramas.

This chapter examines the swift change experienced by the Korean film industry in conjunction with the Korean Wave. It investigates the primary causes of the roller coaster-like shifts within Korean cinema, including government cultural policies due to the significant role of the government in the midst of neoliberal globalization. It then maps out the nature of cultural hybridity in domestic films by comparing hybridized films between the Hallyu 1.0 era and the Hallyu 2.0 era. By textually analyzing film genres and themes of 240 films produced domestically between 1989 and 2012, the chapter explores not only the ways in which Korean cinema develops hybridity in domestic films, but also whether hybridity has generated new possible cultures that are free from Western influence. This eventually leads us to determine the major characteristics of hybrid Korean cinema in the Hallyu 2.0 era and its future direction in the global film market.

Drawing from the televisual simulacra of North Korea weapons provocations and projections of regime power, this chapter examines the emergence of a video-mediated nuclear North Korea in the new millennium within the broader frame of networked digital technologies that have facilitated South Korea media flows into the country. Military display and the more recent emergence of the leadership’s nuclear diplomacy can be evaluated as simulation, and is interrogated in the explicit context of a cultural moment when the people of the territorialised and retrenched nation-state of 21st-century North Korea are receptive to South Korean popular culture and neoliberal productions. This chapter highlights the opportunities and constraints of global media and information flows for the newly emerging society of 'transnational Korea' being built on capitalist imperatives and shaping hierarchical relations. Within this configuration, military display simulates state power at a historical moment when South Korea televisual media is the driving force behind prohibited North Korea leisure time. Mediated technologies then, and their capacity to meticulously steer the social, illustrate the uneasy relationship between work and play, state sovereignty and global flow.

This chapter investigates the role of the nation-state in the cultural industries and the Korean Wave in the context of the broader social structure of society amid neoliberal globalization. It articulates how the Korean government has developed the cultural industries and the ways in which the government has cultivated its cultural policies in global trade, such as export promotion, direct and indirect export subsidies and supports, and the promotion of the nation's cultural image abroad. It especially analyzes whether neoliberal ideologies, emphasizing a small government regime, have completely altered state interventionism, known as developmentalism, in the Korean Wave, leading to further discussion of the role of the nation-state. The chapter historicizes the Korean Wave phenomenon according to major policy shifts surrounding media ecology, driving the change and continuity of Hallyu over the past eighteen years.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief discussion of the so-called “Korea Wave” in Japan. In the first decade of the new millennium, a number of K-pop stars secured huge, devoted followings in Japan; Korean songs became a staple in Japanese karaoke and Korean dramas were broadcasted nightly on Japanese television. The chapter then sets out the book's three principal arguments. First, it challenges the prevailing historiographical characterization of imperial Japanese attitudes toward Koreans and their culture. The second argument attempts to explain this appeal: colonial access to Korea gave Japanese an opportunity to meditate intensively on their own historical and modern identity. Finally, following accepted anthropological wisdom of recent decades, it is argued that the acts of gazing and being gazed at fundamentally transformed both the observer and the observed. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter examines the transformation of K-pop in the early twenty-first century in a broader sociocultural context. It maps out whether hybridity has generated new creative cultures, ones that are free from Western dominance, or whether this trend eventually oppresses local music. The aim is therefore to investigate the different cultural stages and transition of popular music in Korea occurring within the unfolding logic of globalization and to interrogate the adequacy of cultural hybridity as a plausible framework to explain cultural phenomena currently under way. In particular, it analyzes the development of English mixed into the lyrics of Korean popular music in order to identify and examine several key factors involved in the rapid growth of K-pop and its influence in the New Korean Wave. From the perspective gained from the combined angles of critical cultural studies and textual analysis, new insights are generated into the emerging discourse of cultural hybridization in Korean popular music.