Transnational Convergence of East Asian Pop Culture

Seok-Kyeong Hong, Dal Yong Jin, Seok-Kyeong Hong, Dal Yong Jin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000351330
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

This book observes and analyzes transnational interactions of East Asian pop culture and current cultural practices, comparing them to the production and consumption of Western popular culture and providing a theoretical discussion regarding the specific paradigm of East Asian pop culture.

Drawing on innovative theoretical perspectives and grounded empirical research, an international team of authors consider the history of transnational flows within pop culture and then systematically address pop culture, digital technologies, and the media industry. Chapters cover the Hallyu—or Korean Wave—phenomenon, as well as Japanese and Chinese cultural industries. Throughout the book, the authors address the convergence of the once-separated practical, industrial, and business aspects of popular culture under the influence of digital culture. They further coherently synthesize a vast collection of research to examine the specific realities and practices of consumers that exist beyond regional boundaries, shared cultural identities, and historical constructs.

This book will be of interest to academic researchers, undergraduates, and graduate students of Asian media, media studies, communication studies, cultural studies, transcultural communication, or sociology.

1 Introduction

The making of East Asian cultural space

Seok-Kyeong Hong and Dal Yong Jin

The transnational flow of popular culture in East Asia has continued over the past several decades. In the early 21st century, East Asia has become a major hub for cultural flow due to Japan, Korea, and China having rapidly developed their cultures, both popular and digital, as well as their cultural markets. Various forms of integrated production and consumption are rapidly developing in East Asia. Hong Kong cinema of the 1980s, Japanese animations and J-pop of the 1990s, and the success of the Korean Wave (Hallyu) starting in the late 1990s are some distinctive examples of transnational cultural convergence. In the 2000s, the development of cultural industries and subsequent transnational exchange in Japan and South Korea (hereafter Korea) were emulated by China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong, which led to great interest in the transnational flow based on the development of pop culture in East Asia.

More specifically, since the beginning of the 21st century, there has been an active development of the exchange and convergence of East Asian pop culture—referring to the new collective condition represented by the reciprocal merging and penetrating within the once-separated practical, industrial, and business aspects of popular culture under the influence of digital culture—as well as the subsequent possibility of an East Asian pop culture community. The introduction of Japanese pop culture in East Asia in the late 1980s catalyzed the subsequent emergence of Korean pop culture in the same region since the late 1990s. Ever since, the transnational exchange of East Asian pop culture has kicked into high gear. In other words, there is no doubt that the transnational convergence of East Asian pop culture started with the introduction of Japanese culture in East Asia (Iwabuchi, 2006, 2013). Japanese manga and anime have especially become some of the most significant cultural content representing Japan around the globe (Steinberg, 2017; Suzuki, 2019). However, Iwabuchi (2006) claimed that the spread of Japanese manga, anime, and music (J-pop) in Taiwan, Indonesia, and other East Asian countries ignited intra-Asian cultural flows is limited because Japan-centered pop culture mostly failed to flow into China or Korea, although there were some programs that unofficially flowed from Japan to these countries. Considering China and Korea, who both have a history of war and colonization with Japan, only opened the gates to Japanese culture in the late 1990s, Iwabuchi’s claim toward cultural community in East Asia centered on Japan is inevitably limited. It is certain that ever since Korea and China openly accepted the flow of Japanese culture in the late 1990s, the cultural convergence of East Asia through transnational exchange grasped the attention of the global academic world (Otmazgin, 2013); however, this transnational exchange is still restricted to only a few countries.

The theory of a China-centered flow of popular culture within East Asian countries also has its limitations. As Chua Beng-Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (2008) emphasized, cultural exchange called ‘Pop Culture China’ has long existed in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. However, because only a few TV programs and films have been exported beyond the Greater China region to countries like Japan and Korea, the claim for a pan-Chinese East Asian convergence of popular culture did not receive much spotlight, besides exceptions from a few relevant countries. Japan and China have developed their own cultural influences in East Asia; however, their attempts are limited as they mainly penetrate only a limited number of East Asian countries.

In this regard, cultural community in the East Asian region has been fully actualized since Korean pop culture began to spread to other East Asian countries, and later beyond regional boundaries (Hong, 2013; Jin, 2016). As Jin (2002) emphasized, Hallyu or the expansion of Korean pop culture into Asia and the global markets began in the late 1990s. Based on the increasing Korean Wave trend in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Singapore, the simple exchange of cultural products such as television programs and films led to the actual formation of an East Asian cultural community that included the exchange and sharing of capital, labor, and scripts (Jin & Lee, 2012). Korea has significantly shifted its regional integration as Japan and China have pursued similar policies to develop their own popular culture after the global popularity of Hallyu. In fact, Cool Japan policy has similarly pursued the formation of cultural communities through the spread of Japanese culture in East Asia in the 2010s. Likewise, China, seeing the success of Hallyu, aims to form a regional commonality in East Asia that transcends the boundary of Greater China, and it is developing its soft power policy.

Under this circumstance, the need for research on popular culture that is shared and circulated in East Asia, which accounts for more than one third of the world’s population, is ever more escalated. The main context of this book regards the historically constructed conditions of the formation of a common popular culture, including digital culture in East Asia, and its direction.

Major goals of the book

With the rapid growth of East Asian cultural flows, several scholars have undertaken substantial research on pan-East Asian cultural flow and collaboration, and case studies are accumulating. However, writing this book, from preparation to completion, is unique and has been a thoroughly collaborative process between its co-researchers. This is what sets this book apart from other directed books, which are usually composed of chapters collected from a call for papers discussing mutual themes at hand. Initiated by Seok-Kyeong Hong, with a long-term collaboration with Dal Yong Jin, this book received institutional aid from SNUAC (Seoul National University Asia Center) for a year of preparation and two years of collective academic activities. Over the course of eight months in 2016, eight seminars were held by six researchers from six different universities located in three different countries (three from Korea, two from America, and one from Canada). During this first year of preparation, the core problematic of the book was discussed and shared, and an outline of the chapters and content was shaped. In addition to the chapters to be written by the six co-researchers determined at this stage, more researchers were selected through five international conferences held during the two following years (2017–2018).

These scholars have paid special attention to the transnational cultural exchange processes of East Asia. Although the dramatic development of Hallyu triggered a great amount of research on the transnational production/consumption of culture in East Asia, there still remains a lack of literature that attempts to systematically integrate this phenomenon into the universal theories of cultural industry (see Hong et al., 2017; Yoon & Kang, 2017). On the one hand, in cultural industry studies led by American, British, and European scholars, Asia is either boxed away or is studied by only a small group of experts, resulting in an alignment of theories that do not address each other. On the other hand, while Hallyu studies, Japanese pop culture studies, Chinese media studies, and Asian fandom studies have garnered a great quantity of literature, most of the literature consists of case studies that cannot actually be connected to general culture industry theories. However, today’s cultural industry of East Asia, in which Japan-Korea-China are connected and rapidly joined by other East Asian countries, shows a scale and dynamism that exceeds the North American-European market in terms of its size and creativity. Such dynamism is closely related to the digital culture of this region, making theories on East Asian convergence culture possible.

This book agrees with the reality that transnational relations of mutual influence in the formation of pop culture have been established, and it hypothesizes that the amalgamation of pop culture mediated by digital culture is forming a “convergence culture.” Convergence culture, again, refers to the new collective condition represented by the reciprocal merging and penetrating within the once-separated practical, industrial, and business aspects of popular culture under the influence of digital culture. North American and European research shows that such condition is not fragmented into individual practices, but is rather embodied in a dominant logic made visible by the digital culture (Jenkins, 1992, 2006; Jenkins et al., 2013). Korean popular culture—driven by the growth of Hallyu in the midst of the dynamism of digital culture and empowered by its geopolitical position acting as a mediator between East Asian superpowers such as China and Japan—is now considered a powerful driving force of cultural convergence in East Asia. Korean pop culture, which was modeled after the Japanese pop culture industry and shaped by the active embrace of Western pop culture, is actively developing the Hallyu industry with the help of the Japanese and Chinese markets. As the countless remakes and format sales between Korea-China and Korea-Japan testify, Korea is acting as a mediator of pop cultural influence between the two superpowers, China and Japan. The pop culture space of East Asia—mediated by Hallyu and built by Korea, China, Japan, and the joint forces of other East Asian countries—is being shaped in large part by production systems (e.g., crossmedia, idol systems, etc.), consumption phenomena (East Asian fandom culture), and the powerful influence of the consumers on processes of production.

This book aims to observe and analyze transnational interactions of East Asian pop culture and current cultural practices, comparing them to the production and consumption of Western popular culture and providing a theoretical discussion regarding the specific paradigm of East Asian pop culture. In other words, this book is to identify and explain the huge cultural space constructed by Korea-China-Japan, becoming visible through the mediating efforts of Hallyu in midst of the transition, settlement, success, and failure of technologies of East Asian pop culture.

This book originally attempted to serve as not just an accumulation of case studies but as an active discussion of pop culture and cultural industry theories on East Asia. At the same time, it aimed to observe, analyze, and reflect theoretically upon the formation of an East Asian pop culture block and the ‘convergence’ and ‘de-convergence’ that occur inside. It would provide a theoretical paradigm and field of observation for a transnational understanding of the pop culture practices of East Asia in the future. However, later, we decided to extend the scope and twisted the original ideas a bit to include transnationality in East Asian pop culture and added a few more chapters, while eliminating some chapters so that this book collectively discusses not only the notions of convergence and de-convergence, but also transnational popular culture in the East Asian context.

Currently, research on East Asian pop culture industries as well as Hallyu studies is scattered among various field, genre, and regional studies. We expect this book to assemble and synthesize these scattered fields of research into a single coherent flow and shed light on the uniqueness and originality of the convergence culture of East Asia. In other words, this book seeks to examine the specific realities and practices of consumers that exist not only within East Asia but also beyond those regional boundaries, the cultural identities they share, and their historical constructs.

Transnational convergence of popular culture and digital technologies in East Asia

As was briefly discussed, since the 1980s, popular cultural products and digital technologies have crossed the national borders of East Asian countries, enabling a discursive construction of an “East Asian popular culture and digital technologies” as objects of academic analysis (Chua, 2006). East Asian countries, including Japan, Korea, and China, one after another, have greatly advanced their cultural content and digital technologies, and therefore, East Asia has become one of the major hubs that global cultural industry firms, policy makers, and consumers have to pay attention to. These countries have developed cultural flows within this region, and later beyond the regional boundary, which is unprecedented.

With the increasing regional penetration of local culture and digital technologies, several theoreticians developed different discourses, such as intra-cultural flow (Fung, 2007), cultural regionalization (Jin & Lee, 2012; Otmazgin, 2013), inter-Asian referencing Iwabuchi (2013), and inter-Asian frameworks (Cho & Zhu, 2019). However, only a few works (e.g., Chua & Iwabuchi, 2008) focused on the Korean Wave-driven pan-East Asian flows and collaborations. As Hong (2017, p. 67) aptly argues, “it has been more than a decade since Hallyu became one of the important topics in East Asian cultural studies,” and the emergence of Asian media and popular culture developed in the early 21st century has been much bigger than imagined. It has been remarkable as Korean popular music (K-pop), television programs, and webtoon-based transmedia storytelling such as Kingdom (2019) and Itaewon Class (2020) on Netflix have penetrated Western countries. As the recent popularity of BTS—a seven-member boy idol group in K-pop—and Parasite’s wins at the 2020 Oscars also prove, Korean popular culture has become g...