This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations. Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional conflict and reconciliations between Japan and Korea. Its contributors link several key areas of interest in East Asian Studies, including conflicts over historical memories and cultural production, grassroots challenges to state ideology, and the consequences of digital technology in Japan and South Korea. Taking recent discourse on Japan and South Korea as popular cultural superpowers further, this book expands its focus from mainstream entertainment media to the lived experience of daily life, in which sentiments and perceptions of the "popular" are formed. It will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese and Korean studies, as well as film studies, media studies and cultural studies more widely. Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

After World War II, Japanese popular culture was "banned" in Korea. However, despite the official ban, Japanese popular culture was introduced and circulated through hidden or unofficial channels. In fact, the author, born in Seoul in 1976, grew up watching the animated TV series Astro Boy with its theme song in Korean. He recalls that it was not until the 1990s that he learned that Astro Boy was produced in Japan.Why was Japanese popular culture banned? How did Japanese popular culture spread in Korea despite the ban and the changing political situation? This book analyzes the history of how Japanese culture has been accepted into Korean society, citing numerous animated and visual works as examples.Japan-Korea relations have undergone dramatic changes, and although Japan and Korea are increasingly linked in terms of politics, economics, and cultural production, the relationship remains fragile due to the colonial history of the two countries. This book is a unique attempt to rethink postwar Japan-Korea relations from the perspective of transnational cultural space.

This ambitious work provides a comprehensive, empirically grounded study of the production, circulation, and reception of Japanese popular culture in Asia. While many studies typically employ an interactive approach that focuses on the “meaning” of popular culture from an anthropological or cultural studies point of view, Regionalizing Culture emphasizes that the consumption side and contextual meaning of popular culture are not the only salient factors in accounting for its proliferation. The production side and organizational aspects are also important. In addition to presenting individual case studies, the book offers a big-picture view of the dramatic changes that have taken place in popular culture production and circulation in Asia over the past two decades. The author has gleaned information from primary sources in Japanese, English, and other languages; research visits to Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Shanghai, Bangkok, and Seoul; as well as insights of people with firsthand knowledge from within the cultural industries. From this broad range of source, he develops an integrative political economic approach to popular culture. Regionalizing Culture offers a dialectical look at the organization of cultural production, primarily at the structure and control of cultural industries, interconnections between companies and production networks, and relations between the business sector and the state. It traces the rise of Japan as a popular culture powerhouse and the expansion of its cultural industries into Asian markets. It looks as well at the creation of markets for Japanese cultural commodities since the late 1980s, the industrial and normative impact that Japanese cultural industries have on the structure of the local cultural industries, and the wider implications these processes have for the Asian region. The growing popularity and importance of Japan’s popular culture will make this book a basic text for scholars and students of popular culture as well as for those interested in political economy, media and communication studies, Japanese-Asian relations, Asian studies, and international relations.

Japanese popular culture is constantly evolving in the face of internal and external influence. Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan examines this evolution from a new and challenging perspective by focusing on the movements of popular culture into and out of Japan. Taking a multidisciplinary approach, the book argues that a key factor behind the changing nature of Japanese popular culture lies in its engagement with globalization. Essays from a team of leading international scholars illustrate this crucial interaction between the flows of Japanese popular culture and the constant development of globalization. Drawing on rich empirical content, this book looks at Japanese popular culture as it traverses international borders flowing out through such forms as manga consumption in New Zealand and flowing in through such forms as foreigners writing about Japan in Japanese and how American influences affected the formation of Japan’s gay identity. Presenting current, confronting and sometimes controversial insights into the many forms of Japanese popular culture emerging within this global context, Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan will make essential reading for those working in Japanese studies, cultural studies and international relations.

East Asian pop culture can be seen as an integrated cultural economy emerging from the rise of Japanese and Korean pop culture as an influential force in the distribution and reception networks of Chinese language pop culture embedded in the ethnic Chinese diaspora. Taking Singapore as a locus of pan-Asian Chineseness, Chua Beng Huat provides detailed analysis of the fragmented reception process of transcultural audiences and the processes of audiences’ formation and exercise of consumer power and engagement with national politics. In an era where exercise of military power is increasingly restrained, pop culture has become an important component of soft power diplomacy and transcultural collaborations in a region that is still haunted by colonization and violence. The author notes that the aspirations behind national governments' efforts to use popular culture is limited by the fragmented nature of audiences who respond differently to the same products; by the danger of backlash from other members of the importing country's population that do not consume the popular culture products in question; and by the efforts of the primary consuming country, the People's Republic of China to shape products through co-production strategies and other indirect modes of intervention.

The contributors to this book demonstrate empirically how Japanese public opinion is formed amid strained Japan–South Korea relations. Studying public opinion in Japan and South Korea is critically important for exploring the causes and consequences of the deterioration of the relationship between the two countries. Japan–South Korea relations are at their worst level since World War II. Faced with North Korea’s nuclear threat and China’s regional and global advances, Japan and South Korea are each allied with the US and function as key stabilizers within the Asia–Pacific "Pax Americana." These relations play a decisive role in East Asia’s international security. The contributors explore a variety of social scientific methodologies—both conventional quantitative surveys and experiments, as well as quantitative text analyses of published books and computational analyses of social media data—to disentangle the dynamic relationship between Japanese public opinion and Japan–South Korea relations. An invaluable resource for scholars of East Asian regional security issues.

Despite a growing literature on Japanese soft power and public diplomacy, little research quantifies its effects or orients it in policy discussions. This paper investigates the relationship of consumption of Japanese popular culture and opinions of Japan among mainland Chinese and South Koreans. Data from the 2008 Chicago Council on Global Affairs Soft Power in Asia public opinion poll is analyzed with OLS regression methods and shows a statistically significant association between frequent consumption of Japanese popular culture and a higher opinion of Japan. This association is dependent on the age of the respondent for South Koreans but not Chinese. These results suggest that Japan should seek to expand its popular culture throughout East Asia to increase its standing in the region. Additionally, fear of Japanese military strength and having met a Japanese person are found to be statistically significant and robust predictors of high feelings towards Japan, indicating other areas where Japan may focus attention to develop better relations.