Cultural Studies and Cultural Industries in Northeast Asia: What a Difference a Region Makes

12 - Reconsidering Cultural Hybridities: Transnational Exchanges of Popular Music in between Korea and Japan

Reconsidering Cultural Hybridities 213 Cultural Studies faces a crisis in Japan. About ten years have passed since it was “imported” from the United Kingdom following two key events: Tokyo University’s 1996 international conference that included five pioneering British scholars, including Stuart Hall,1 and the publication by two leading academic journals, Shisōand Gendai Shisō, of a special issue on Cultural Studies. The term Cultural Studies has been acknowledged as a new interdisciplinary domain that draws on and brings together a wide variety of scholarly perspectives ranging from literary criticism to sociology, history, philosophy, anthropology, and media studies. It is true that much fruitful research has been achieved. Indicative of the importance of Cultural Studies, most of its seminal texts have been translated in Japan over the last decade. However, when looking back over the political and academic situation in Japan, it is undeniable that the political project of Cultural Studies has largely failed. In politics, a number of issues have conspired to give birth to a new conservative and ultra-nationalist regime whose key leaders include the former prime ministers Koizumi Jun’ichirō and Abe Shinzō and the Tokyo Metropolitan Governor Ishihara Shintarō. These issues include the ongoing long-term economic recession dating to the early 1990s, as well as the social instability caused by a series of disastrous events, in particular the 1995 Kobe earthquake, the subway terrorism of cult religious group Aum Shinrikyō, and the militarized global atmosphere emerging in the wake of the bombing of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. Importantly, the new conservative politics has gained enthusiastic national popularity thanks to a 12 Reconsidering Cultural Hybridities: Transnational Exchanges of Popular Music in between Korea and Japan Yoshitaka Mōri 214 Yoshitaka Mōri successful populist mainstream media strategy. By contrast, it is extremely hard to find a critical space from which Cultural Studies practitioners can now intervene. In the academic world, through the process of neoliberal restructuring under Koizumi’s regime, almost all traditional disciplines centered on the humanities — never mind new areas like Cultural Studies — are virtually dying because they are not seen as “useful” either for the government or for industry; and more importantly, students no longer find them very “attractive.”2 Cultural Studies may survive as long as it deals with trendy issues such as globalization, digital culture, animation, TV games, mobile technology and so on, but it can be neither too critical nor political.3 The university is now subsumed by and subscribes to the logic of market capitalism. For students, it is merely a transitional point where they prepare to go into the business world. In general, the university hardly resembles an independent space where anything, regardless of economic utility and function, can be studied. In this difficult condition, the “cultural” is gradually coming to be regarded among critical intellectuals in Japan as less important than the political and the economic. For instance, issues concerning an emergent neoliberalist class structure, in which the rich and poor are polarized, dominate policy discussions. In these, the appearance of the freeter, the new class of so-called “freelancers” composed of young and poor people stuck in a series of lowincome part-time jobs and unable to break into regular employment, are viewed as socially problematic. At the level of global politics and foreign affairs, the military is being reconstructed under the aegis of United States hegemony, and along with it, North Korea and China — the new antagonists — become the target of problem-solving agendas. Not that any of these questions can be ignored, but the exclusion of “culture” in such debates signals a major shift in thinking, one that gives little place for the “critical turn” that approaches like Cultural Studies offers. In addition to the backlash against the “cultural,” there are problems within Japanese — and to some extent Korean — Cultural Studies. First, only a few critical studies of popular culture have been seen so far. Instead, most research focuses on colonial history in relation to Korea, China, and Okinawa, on less-known avant-garde styled literature and films, or on overtheoretical postmodernist/deconstructionist arguments. While I appreciate most of these arguments, I must admit that they are not always open to the public, promoting instead a narrow insider-ism. Second, critical studies of popular culture remain underdeveloped. Most studies of popular cultural genres including manga comics, animation, TV dramas, and popular music Reconsidering Cultural Hybridities 215...