Culture industries sometimes produce art. Pop music, for example, has a thread of art that runs through it, as does film and occasionally television. But that is not to say that the culture industries producing pop music and films produce art. They produce commodities, they are an industry, and any art that comes out of them is a by-product of the industry. Akira Kurosawa’s cinema is art – startling art at that – but it is also exceptional and not the norm of the Japanese film industry.
In the late 1970s, the greatest of all Japanese filmmakers was considered ‘un-bankable’ by Japanese producers, and had to go abroad to finance his films.
Such distinctions are important when we consider something like the Korean Wave. It is now one of a number of successful culture industry centres around the world. The first was Hollywood, still the dominant centre. The second, arguably, was London of the 1960s. Followers have included Bombay’s Bollywood and most recently Seoul’s Korean Wave culture industry. What do these have in common? First is the export of culture. Second, related to the first, is their location in portal cities and city regions. Portal zones typically develop in proximity to seaboards, great rivers or deltas, seas or lake systems. Many are co-extensive with insular, peninsula, or archipelago societies. Examples range from Taiwan and Singapore to the English and the Dutch, the various Baltic societies, the coastal zones of Australia and America, and Japan and Hong Kong. Portal regions are incubators of world cities that combine export industries and culture production.3 Export is the essence of a portal zone. The concentration of cultural production in these places is the obverse of that export role. A city that exports also imports. As a mirror of the export of commodities, these cities import people – more specifically they import talent, sometimes from overseas, sometimes from rural hinterlands. South Korea’s large-scale rural to urban migration is a typical example of the latter. Culture production thrives on such importation.
The impressive thing about the Korean Wave culture export industry is how quickly it boomed. The South Korean government began to invest in the entertainment industry in the late 1990s. There was a political dimension to this. Imports of Japanese cultural goods had officially been banned for decades, originally a nationalist response to the bitter history of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Importation of American films had also been restricted initially by the authoritarian Park administration, keen to discourage their democratic ethos. With the passing of time, trade protectionism and economic nationalism coalesced with these political motives. Starting in the early sixties, America began to press for liberalization of the film trade. While some notional trade liberalization took place in 1980s, tacit trade barriers remained effective. The administration of president Roh Tae-woo in 1988 took steps, this time successful, to liberalize the film import trade with the United States. Almost a decade later in 1996, local film production controls were also liberalized. Then in another major step in 1998, further restrictions on the importation of foreign cultural products including trade with Japan were relaxed in stages through to 2004. Irrespective of official policies, foreign films, games and music circulated widely on the black market in South Korea. But trade policy was driven by nationalist sentiment as much as by commerce or practicality. Consequently, in lock-step with liberalization, in 1998 a five-year plan was developed to build a South Korean entertainment industry. This was a way of satisfying nationalism, practicality and commerce in one hit. It proved remarkably successful, perhaps because it did actually manage to reconcile the competing interests of national pride, common sense and global export. Nationalism in a way was refocused. It moved from a puritanical model of cultural censorship and trade protection to a state-sponsored liberal model of international free trade based on the sale of pop culture, some of it quite libidinous. In the event, Korean pop music and melodramas rapidly found large audiences in China, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Singapore. The term Korean Wave itself was a Chinese coinage.
The reason for the success of Korean cultural exports naturally varied in different markets, but one overarching reason was that South Korea is an exporting nation. Much of its GNP comes from exports. Cultural commodities in that respect are no different from other commodities. Price was clearly a determinant in early export efforts. In the year 2000, Taiwanese television networks would pay US$1000 for an hour of South Korean drama compared to US$15,000–20,000 for a Japanese drama. Price competition is a key to entering markets, though not necessarily for long-term success in those markets. By 2005, South Korean melodramas like Winter Sonata commanded US$7000–15,000 per hour compared to US$6000–12,000 for a Japanese drama (Onishi 2005a).
Thus there were obviously product as well as market reasons for the success of Korean television dramas. One Korean executive summed it up this way:
The basic reason people love ‘Winter Sonata’ is that it is really similar to the dramas they used to make in the 1960s but they don’t make anymore. Most trendy dramas in Japan now target people in their 20s, so TV viewers in their 40s and 50s have nothing to watch. And those people are the ones with money to spend.5
Indeed, older viewers in Western countries, bombarded with the unpleasant voyeurism of young people’s ‘reality’ television, could only sympathize with the middle-aged Japanese – finally something to watch! And watch they did. Not only in Japan, but also in Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and as far afield as Uzbekistan, the appeal of the Korean melodramas captured large audiences.
The Korean Wave was greeted with the usual naïve expectations of soft power. Here’s a classic example of journalistic credulity from February 2005:
For the past 100 years, Korea and Japan have enjoyed the bitterest of relationships. A harsh colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, in which the Japanese tried to suppress and even eliminate Korean culture, led to years of anger and acrimony. Following independence in 1945, Japanese culture was largely banned in South Korea, while prejudice against Koreans was the norm in Japan. But over the past year, Korea and Japan have grown enamored with each other’s culture in a way that would have seen [sic] scarcely possible just a short time ago. (Russell 2005)
So old antagonists hug and make up? Let’s see … in October 2005 the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, one of the great Japanese leaders, visited the Yasukuni Shinto Shrine – the nationalist war memorial, where Class A war criminals responsible for Japanese war atrocities are buried. In response the South Korean government promptly shelved a summit meeting in December between the prime minister and Korea’s president planned for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Busan, South Korea.
In 2002, Japan and Korea co-hosted the soccer World Cup, and Korea advanced further than Japan in the competition. Some Japanese were happy with this, and others disapproved. While thousands of middle-aged Japanese women mobbed Korean melodrama stars, the popularity of Sharin Yamano’s manga Hating the Korean Wave captured another side of national feeling:
The book centers on a Japanese teenager, Kaname, who comes to have a ‘correct’ understanding of Korea. It begins with a chapter that says South Korea’s soccer team cheated to advance in the 2002 World Cup; subsequent chapters show how Kaname realizes that South Korea owes its current success to Japanese colonialism. ‘It is Japan who made it possible for Koreans to join the ranks of major nations, not themselves,’ Nishio [Kanji Nishio, a scholar of German literature and honorary chairman of the nationalist Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform], says, claiming that Japan even gave Koreans their identity because ‘they had no pride in their history’. (Onishi 2005b)
The proposition implied here is not that Japanese opinion was ‘for’ South Korea or ‘against’ South Korea during the 2002 World Cup. It was both. As Victor Cha notes, ‘The two countries competed so vigorously for the rights to host that they frightened FIFA officials into choosing neither solely; then after that, they virtually ignored each other as co-hosts’ (Cha 2002: 4). It would be foolish to suggest that antagonism between Japan and South Korea was not severe. And yet the Japanese still managed some grace: ‘After their national team was eliminated, the overwhelming team favourite among Japanese was the Cinderella South Korean team. Polls showed as high as 60 per cent of Japanese rooted for Korea’s advancing to the Cup final’ (ibid). That does, however, beg the question of the other 40 per cent of Japanese. In the end, though, arguing about whether Sharin Yamano was the exception or the rule is beside the point. For what is exhibited here are two incommensurable logics. One of the logics is that of Realpolitik, in this case the ‘distribution-of-spoils’ politics of FIFA. The other logic, that of distraction or diversion, is displayed in sports entertainment. It is perfectly possible for both to be represented strongly in national attitudes, just as it is possible, indeed normal, for national attitudes to be contradictory.
When looking at Japan’s contradictory pop culture love and pop culture demeaning of Korea, we could simply say that the Japanese have conflicted attitudes towards Korea, just as there are some Americans who like the French and others who dislike them. Yet, in the end, ‘likes and dislikes’ have little political traction and little impact upon culture industry markets. Opinion polls often show America to be widely disliked throughout the world, but this dislike has no discernable effect on the popularity of its films and music. In fact there is a plausible argument that the idea of crashing planes into the World Trade Towers on 9/11 – the ultimate criminal act of anti-Americanism – was borrowed from endless images of the like in Hollywood films. Public opinion is overrated as a determinant of politics, not least because of its inherently contradictory nature. This is especially so in matters of high politics, when the fate of nations is at stake. Strong partisan views may influence the course of events and may dramatize political developments but such views are rarely decisive in the great turning points of history.
cont. @
http://publications.epress.monash.edu/doi/full/10.2104/cc100015#fn1
In the late 1970s, the greatest of all Japanese filmmakers was considered ‘un-bankable’ by Japanese producers, and had to go abroad to finance his films.
Such distinctions are important when we consider something like the Korean Wave. It is now one of a number of successful culture industry centres around the world. The first was Hollywood, still the dominant centre. The second, arguably, was London of the 1960s. Followers have included Bombay’s Bollywood and most recently Seoul’s Korean Wave culture industry. What do these have in common? First is the export of culture. Second, related to the first, is their location in portal cities and city regions. Portal zones typically develop in proximity to seaboards, great rivers or deltas, seas or lake systems. Many are co-extensive with insular, peninsula, or archipelago societies. Examples range from Taiwan and Singapore to the English and the Dutch, the various Baltic societies, the coastal zones of Australia and America, and Japan and Hong Kong. Portal regions are incubators of world cities that combine export industries and culture production.3 Export is the essence of a portal zone. The concentration of cultural production in these places is the obverse of that export role. A city that exports also imports. As a mirror of the export of commodities, these cities import people – more specifically they import talent, sometimes from overseas, sometimes from rural hinterlands. South Korea’s large-scale rural to urban migration is a typical example of the latter. Culture production thrives on such importation.
The impressive thing about the Korean Wave culture export industry is how quickly it boomed. The South Korean government began to invest in the entertainment industry in the late 1990s. There was a political dimension to this. Imports of Japanese cultural goods had officially been banned for decades, originally a nationalist response to the bitter history of Japanese colonialism in Korea. Importation of American films had also been restricted initially by the authoritarian Park administration, keen to discourage their democratic ethos. With the passing of time, trade protectionism and economic nationalism coalesced with these political motives. Starting in the early sixties, America began to press for liberalization of the film trade. While some notional trade liberalization took place in 1980s, tacit trade barriers remained effective. The administration of president Roh Tae-woo in 1988 took steps, this time successful, to liberalize the film import trade with the United States. Almost a decade later in 1996, local film production controls were also liberalized. Then in another major step in 1998, further restrictions on the importation of foreign cultural products including trade with Japan were relaxed in stages through to 2004. Irrespective of official policies, foreign films, games and music circulated widely on the black market in South Korea. But trade policy was driven by nationalist sentiment as much as by commerce or practicality. Consequently, in lock-step with liberalization, in 1998 a five-year plan was developed to build a South Korean entertainment industry. This was a way of satisfying nationalism, practicality and commerce in one hit. It proved remarkably successful, perhaps because it did actually manage to reconcile the competing interests of national pride, common sense and global export. Nationalism in a way was refocused. It moved from a puritanical model of cultural censorship and trade protection to a state-sponsored liberal model of international free trade based on the sale of pop culture, some of it quite libidinous. In the event, Korean pop music and melodramas rapidly found large audiences in China, Japan, Vietnam, Taiwan, Indonesia, and Singapore. The term Korean Wave itself was a Chinese coinage.
The reason for the success of Korean cultural exports naturally varied in different markets, but one overarching reason was that South Korea is an exporting nation. Much of its GNP comes from exports. Cultural commodities in that respect are no different from other commodities. Price was clearly a determinant in early export efforts. In the year 2000, Taiwanese television networks would pay US$1000 for an hour of South Korean drama compared to US$15,000–20,000 for a Japanese drama. Price competition is a key to entering markets, though not necessarily for long-term success in those markets. By 2005, South Korean melodramas like Winter Sonata commanded US$7000–15,000 per hour compared to US$6000–12,000 for a Japanese drama (Onishi 2005a).
Thus there were obviously product as well as market reasons for the success of Korean television dramas. One Korean executive summed it up this way:
The basic reason people love ‘Winter Sonata’ is that it is really similar to the dramas they used to make in the 1960s but they don’t make anymore. Most trendy dramas in Japan now target people in their 20s, so TV viewers in their 40s and 50s have nothing to watch. And those people are the ones with money to spend.5
Indeed, older viewers in Western countries, bombarded with the unpleasant voyeurism of young people’s ‘reality’ television, could only sympathize with the middle-aged Japanese – finally something to watch! And watch they did. Not only in Japan, but also in Malaysia, Thailand, Hong Kong, and as far afield as Uzbekistan, the appeal of the Korean melodramas captured large audiences.
The Korean Wave was greeted with the usual naïve expectations of soft power. Here’s a classic example of journalistic credulity from February 2005:
For the past 100 years, Korea and Japan have enjoyed the bitterest of relationships. A harsh colonization of Korea from 1910 to 1945, in which the Japanese tried to suppress and even eliminate Korean culture, led to years of anger and acrimony. Following independence in 1945, Japanese culture was largely banned in South Korea, while prejudice against Koreans was the norm in Japan. But over the past year, Korea and Japan have grown enamored with each other’s culture in a way that would have seen [sic] scarcely possible just a short time ago. (Russell 2005)
So old antagonists hug and make up? Let’s see … in October 2005 the Japanese prime minister, Junichiro Koizumi, one of the great Japanese leaders, visited the Yasukuni Shinto Shrine – the nationalist war memorial, where Class A war criminals responsible for Japanese war atrocities are buried. In response the South Korean government promptly shelved a summit meeting in December between the prime minister and Korea’s president planned for the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Busan, South Korea.
In 2002, Japan and Korea co-hosted the soccer World Cup, and Korea advanced further than Japan in the competition. Some Japanese were happy with this, and others disapproved. While thousands of middle-aged Japanese women mobbed Korean melodrama stars, the popularity of Sharin Yamano’s manga Hating the Korean Wave captured another side of national feeling:
The book centers on a Japanese teenager, Kaname, who comes to have a ‘correct’ understanding of Korea. It begins with a chapter that says South Korea’s soccer team cheated to advance in the 2002 World Cup; subsequent chapters show how Kaname realizes that South Korea owes its current success to Japanese colonialism. ‘It is Japan who made it possible for Koreans to join the ranks of major nations, not themselves,’ Nishio [Kanji Nishio, a scholar of German literature and honorary chairman of the nationalist Japanese Society for History Textbook Reform], says, claiming that Japan even gave Koreans their identity because ‘they had no pride in their history’. (Onishi 2005b)
The proposition implied here is not that Japanese opinion was ‘for’ South Korea or ‘against’ South Korea during the 2002 World Cup. It was both. As Victor Cha notes, ‘The two countries competed so vigorously for the rights to host that they frightened FIFA officials into choosing neither solely; then after that, they virtually ignored each other as co-hosts’ (Cha 2002: 4). It would be foolish to suggest that antagonism between Japan and South Korea was not severe. And yet the Japanese still managed some grace: ‘After their national team was eliminated, the overwhelming team favourite among Japanese was the Cinderella South Korean team. Polls showed as high as 60 per cent of Japanese rooted for Korea’s advancing to the Cup final’ (ibid). That does, however, beg the question of the other 40 per cent of Japanese. In the end, though, arguing about whether Sharin Yamano was the exception or the rule is beside the point. For what is exhibited here are two incommensurable logics. One of the logics is that of Realpolitik, in this case the ‘distribution-of-spoils’ politics of FIFA. The other logic, that of distraction or diversion, is displayed in sports entertainment. It is perfectly possible for both to be represented strongly in national attitudes, just as it is possible, indeed normal, for national attitudes to be contradictory.
When looking at Japan’s contradictory pop culture love and pop culture demeaning of Korea, we could simply say that the Japanese have conflicted attitudes towards Korea, just as there are some Americans who like the French and others who dislike them. Yet, in the end, ‘likes and dislikes’ have little political traction and little impact upon culture industry markets. Opinion polls often show America to be widely disliked throughout the world, but this dislike has no discernable effect on the popularity of its films and music. In fact there is a plausible argument that the idea of crashing planes into the World Trade Towers on 9/11 – the ultimate criminal act of anti-Americanism – was borrowed from endless images of the like in Hollywood films. Public opinion is overrated as a determinant of politics, not least because of its inherently contradictory nature. This is especially so in matters of high politics, when the fate of nations is at stake. Strong partisan views may influence the course of events and may dramatize political developments but such views are rarely decisive in the great turning points of history.
cont. @
http://publications.epress.monash.edu/doi/full/10.2104/cc100015#fn1
