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This book discusses the discipline of Cultural Studies and its use to analyze the cultural industries in Northeast Asia. It opens with a section considering the discipline itself—perhaps even treating it as a kind of cultural industry in its own right. The book considers the challenges and possibilities that arise from its use in the context of Northeast Asia and when studying it from outside the region, and then follows with essays that use Cultural Studies approaches to analyze cultural industries and their products in Northeast Asia, focusing on film, music, new media, popular culture, and piracy.

The meeting point of global Intellectual Property (IP) norms and local culture produces an unsettled process of globalization. The global and the local might merge, but they often conflict, and their intersection then mirrors another clash, between trade and culture. This chapter argues that Global Copyright regime (G©) should be evaluated on the background of a complex set of local factors that form each country's cultural field, instead of an exclusive legal or economic inspection. The main factors to be considered are the legal system of a country taken as a whole, its economy, its unique cultural features, and the political situation of the country. No less important is the dynamic interaction of these factors. G© should be evaluated not only by studying the law in the books, but also by exploring the law in action. The case of Israel serves as an illustration of the general framework.

This chapter discusses in detail cognitive-cultural capitalism, and its impacts on economy and society. It starts by defining what cognitive-cultural capitalism is, and how it has made changes to the contemporary economy and in the traditional white-collar/blue-collar principle of employment. It reveals the impact of changes made (social and physical) by adapting this type of economy in metropolitan areas. It explains the typical life of cognitive-cultural workers in the creative city and beyond.

Chapter 5 acts as a fulcrum for the book, examining Dickens's attitudes to culture and the machine, looking forward to the importance of machines to Dickens's afterlives, and back to the real and symbolic importance of machines in his own day. At the heart of the ambivalence about Dickens in literary criticism from his own day to ours is an association between Dickens's fictional work and the machine, informed by the opposition between the machine and the idea of culture influential in Victorian and subsequent cultural theory. This chapter argues that Dickens occupies a threshold position in cultural history, his aesthetics and philosophies informed by both a mechanical and an organicist conception of art that is more obvious outside the loud and therefore limiting oppositions of Hard Times. Walter Benjamin's classic essay, ‘The Work of Art in The Age of its Technical Reproducibility’ was revolutionary for its ability to think positively about the effects of ‘technical reproducibility’ or ‘mechanical reproduction’ on art, in ways that both illuminate and echo Dickens's working assumptions. The constructive use of mechanism is often linked in Dickens's writings to the work ethic, and figures largely in his depiction of cultural industry, particularly in David Copperfield. This chapter argues that in Dickens's writing and in his vision of writing, a ‘mechanical notion of interiority’, in which the mechanical constitutes not the opposite of feeling but a form of affect, is a recurring preoccupation.

This chapter examines how the World Trade Organization’s (WTO) General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS) treats international trade in audiovisual services. Negotiations in the WTO have pitted proponents of a trade perspective (which holds that audiovisual services should be subject to progressive trade liberalization like any other sector) against those advocating a cultural perspective (which rejects the trade perspective because of audiovisual services’ special cultural significance). The chapter considers the politics of these trade negotiations and other settings (bilateral, regional, multilateral) and argues that the cultural sector must be supported without causing undue distortions to international trade. After tracing trade disputes in the audiovisual sector, it discusses the current international trading regime for the cultural industry and looks at the status of the film industry in Canada, Mexico, and Korea.

This chapter examines the media as institutions and processes within the capitalist mode of production and thus as instances of that systems world which it was the purpose of the Enlightenment project to make transparent and thus bring more fully under human social control. It focuses on a critique of currently dominant Information Society thinking in examining the implications for emancipation, and thus in particular for media policy, of analysing the media from the perspective of the steering system of money and with the tools of political economy.

Recent studies have identified the increasing prevalence of adaptations in modern entertainment, especially in film, television, and theatre. However, the modern surge towards this current ‘adaptation culture’ is not yet thoroughly understood. This chapter suggests that by combining the relatively new discipline of adaptation studies with that of the cultural industries, it is possible to understand better the reasons for the current surge of adaptations. By taking this approach, and imposing an industrial production-context on studying adaptations, adaptation practices are revealed to be a labour-saving strategy for artists, employed increasingly since the late 1980s by artists and companies in the cultural industries.

This book has investigated the political economy of Japanese popular culture in East Asia as well as the role of Japanese popular culture in the construction of the East Asian region. By analyzing the expansion of Japanese cultural industries into East Asian markets since the late 1980s, the book has demonstrated how Japan's popular culture products, agents, and industries contribute to the regionalization of East Asia. This final chapter summarizes the book's main findings and discusses its implications. It first explains why Japanese popular culture has been successful in East Asia and how that success has affected popular culture markets and governments in the region. It then considers how expansion of Japanese cultural industries is likely to affect the regionalization process in East Asia in both the short and long terms before concluding with some analytical and theoretical insights about the relationship between popular culture and the process of regional formation.

While PIFF sought to serve as a showcase for Asian cinema by strongly evoking transregional Asian identities, the festival also strove to promote the national film industry as a gateway to the global market for Korean films. This chapter reveals many of the tensions between national and local aspirations that helped shape PIFF's regional profile.

This chapter examines the commodification of popular culture in Japan as well as the capacity of the domestic market to manufacture and export anime, movies, video games, television programs, music, and manga. It first considers the structure of Japan's cultural industries and the process of cultural commodification based on examples from music, television, and manga in order to provide a broad picture of the Japanese popular culture markets. It then discusses the main features of popular culture production and the capacity of Japan's cultural industries for production, consumption, and export. It also explores the role of “freeters” and “otaku” in Japan's popular culture production, along with the Japanese government's involvement in the production and export of popular culture and its initiatives to support the sector. It argues that the structure and size of the domestic market and the experience of Japan's cultural industries at home have fostered the competitiveness of Japanese popular culture products abroad.

This chapter examines the political economy of Japanese popular culture within East Asia using an analytical model that combines a traditional political economic approach with an approach that takes into account characteristics specific to the popular culture market. It first reviews theoretical supports offered in the field and highlights their advantages and limitations. It then considers the relations between “popular culture,” “high culture,” and “cultural industries,” along with the ways in which cultural industries operate. It also explains the meaning of popular culture products and cultural commodities and discusses the differences between cultural industries and other industries. It shows that cultural industries have “special” characteristics—the strong focus on creativity and ease of technological access—that may explain the relative ease with which cultural industries in East Asia have been able to learn from and imitate the Japanese model to develop their own popular culture markets.

This chapter proposes a dual-mechanism model of innovation to understand the development of cultural and creative industries (CCIs) by bringing insights from culture and creativity research. First, we introduce the development and evolution of various countries’ CCIs, together with the challenges they currently encounter for future development. Second, drawing upon frontier research on culture and creativity and successful cases of CCIs, we introduce a dual-mechanism framework that pertains to the processes underlying the reciprocal relationship between culture and creativity and multicultural convergence to gain a more nuanced understanding of how CCIs develop. Lastly, we derive from this framework major propositions for overcoming the challenges faced by CCIs, and we propose future directions for further developments. This chapter demonstrates promising ways of applying culture and creativity research to industries.

This chapter details China’s evolving cultural policy toward Hollywood-represented transnational capital within the larger context of the state’s pursuit of a “socialist market economy,” its bid to join the World Trade Organization, and its film sector’s marketization and industrialization process. The author argues that China’s Hollywood policy has changed from containment to “competitive cooperation.” Hollywood is used as a convenient tool to achieve the state’s goal of transforming its cultural industries, including the film industry, to advance China’s soft power. The state retains control of the film sector through policy protection, quotas, and shareholding control. Concerned about strengthening the national culture and national identity and maintaining its legitimacy, the Chinese state is a key player in global communications and reinforces its authoritarian power by incorporating both market forces and global capital into the state mechanism.

This chapter examines the impact of Japan's cultural industries on local cultural industries in East Asia. Before assessing the influence of Japanese cultural industries on local cultural production and appreciation for Japanese products, the chapter considers the transfer of Japanese popular culture production formats to the culture markets of East Asia and their adaptation by local cultural industries, especially in Korea. It then looks at some of the Japanese formats that were transferred to East Asia through collaboration, including the production of Japanese-style idols, based on the Japanese notion of kawaii (usually translated into English as “cuteness” or “lovability”), and Japanese pop music or “J-pop.” It also discusses the Tie-Up strategy used in the marketing of Japanese cultural products, along with the Japanese origins of the so-called “Korean Wave.” Finally, it presents in-depth interviews with sixty-eight cultural industry insiders in East Asia to highlight the importance of Japanese cultural industries to the regionalization process in East Asia.

This book examines surfing and surfboard making as forms of creative production and local cultural heritage. Drawing on observations of thirty-three workshops and interviews with more than 130 workers from Hawaiʻi, Southern California, and east coast Australia between 2008 and 2012, the book tells the story of skilled artisans who grew to prominence from countercultural origins within the surfing subculture and their struggle for survival in an age of wide-scale mass production. It explores the dynamic international situation surrounding the surf industry and how small surfboard-making workshops survive in an increasingly global industry. It also highlights the darker side of surfboard production, from the exploitation of workers to sexism, and compares it to cultural industries such as fashion, music, film, design, and jewelry making. While surfboards and surfboard manufacturing raise issues of local culture and globalization, the book shows that they are also about ownership of heritage, corporate power, emotional labor, gender, class, and generational change.

This chapter examines the aims of sociocultural and political transformations in India that set the stage for the reimagination of the Bombay film industry as Bollywood. The Indian state implemented these reforms because of their desire to have a new and highly visible middle class. In particular, the changes in state policies toward the media and entertainment industries, as well as the creation of Bollywood as a global media industry, was shaped by a broader political discourse of cleaning and cleansing (safai) that played out at urban, national, and diasporic scales throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Hence, the state's effort to manage the cultural industries is part of a larger process of managing a wide-ranging set of spatial crises engendered by processes of economic liberalization and globalization.

This book examines the career of Mel Brooks as part of an academic dialogue — looking specifically at how he has survived working within the cultural industries from 1949 to date. It looks at Brooks from a new perspective — that of a long-term survivor in the cultural industries and as a specialist in adaptation. By studying his projects in film, theatre, audio records, and television, it suggests that Brooks has survived in what are regarded to be competitive and historically changing industries, primarily as a result of his own personal strategy — most simply understood as that of recycling content through adaptation. The materials and methods used in the study are also described.