East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave

8. Popular Cultural Capital and Cultural Identity: Young Korean Women’s Cultural Appropriation of Japanese TV Dramas

Popular Cultural Capital and Cultural Identity 157 Introduction In 2004, the Korean government finally wrapped up the program that it had begun in 1998 of unlocking its doors to Japanese popular culture. It removed restrictions on Japanese movies and songs that had been previously banned to those under the age of 17, especially Japanese TV dramas that can now be accessed via cable or satellite TV channels. It took six years for the Korean government to completely generate its policy of openness towards Japanese popular culture, reversing a decades-old ban that had been in place since its liberation from Japanese colonial rule in 1945. Although the inflow of Japanese popular culture had been officially restricted until 2004, it had been informally imported into Korea. While Japan’s popular culture has profoundly affected the narrative forms of Korean television via informal routes of copying (Lee, 2004), there have been informal circulations of Japanese popular cultural products in Korea, which have generated spontaneous acts of fandom. In particular, since the spread of computer- mediated communication in the late 1990s, many young Koreans have shared their information and experience about Japanese popular culture, and have actively formed numerous fan communities. With widespread information communication technologies (ICTs), the consumption of Japanese popular culture has transformed from a small number of private acts to a larger number of leisure activities. For instance, in 2004, at Daum, the largest Internet portal site in Korea, there were 549 Internet 8 Popular Cultural Capital and Cultural Identity: Young Korean Women’s Cultural Appropriation of Japanese TV Dramas Dong-Hoo Lee 158 Dong-Hoo Lee communities related to Japanese TV dramas. The largest community, called “Ilbon TV,” had 820,000 members (Hankyoreh, 29 June 2004). Japanese TV fans can share information about and instantaneously consume recent Japanese dramas, and dramas aired on cable TV channels. They have constructed a consumption space where they can interpret and appropriate foreign cultural products regardless of the marketing purposes or intentions of their producers and distributors. Meanwhile, they have witnessed that with the wave of enthusiasm for Korean pop culture that started in 2003 in Japan, popular cultural flow between the two countries is no longer one-way, and that Korean pop cultural products are transnationally circulating in Asia. In order to understand the ongoing multi-layered, complicated sites of production, circulation and consumption of popular culture in Asia, it is necessary to examine a local site of transnational cultural consumption. This research attempts to ethnographically study the transnational TV consumption articulated in young Korean women’s everyday lives. Specifically, it intends to understand how they have viewed and related Japanese TV dramas to their daily lives and what kinds of popular cultural capital have been created by these enthusiasts’ appropriation of the cultural codes found in Japanese TV dramas. While Bourdieu’s (1977) notion of cultural capital suggests that the financial and cultural economies have a similarly top-down operation, Fiske (1992) argues that the cultural economy and the financial economy do not work in the same way, saying, “popular cultural capital can maintain its relative autonomy because the financial economy can exercise control over only a fraction of it.” Further, Fiske suggests that the audience can reinterpret cultural products in terms of the needs and desires in their own lives. With easy access to Japanese TV dramas via the Internet, one can accumulate popular cultural capital beyond the control of formal production or distribution agencies and utilize them for his/her own pleasure. Thus, this research tries to look at how young Korean female fans have accumulated popular cultural capital via viewing practices and what it has meant to them. Rather than generally mapping out Korea’s consumption of Japanese TV dramas or investigating the reception of a specific type of Japanese TV drama, this research makes an attempt to examine in both an experiential and microscopic dimension how young Korean female fans between their late teens to early thirties, whose social conditions have been changed but still constrained by conventional gender systems, have received and appropriated Japanese TV dramas in their daily experiences. By examining their consumption of Japanese TV drama, this study will discuss not only the ways in which young Korean female fans have created or experienced transnational consumption space, in which they have negotiated their cultural or gender Popular Cultural Capital and Cultural Identity 159 identities in an age of globalization, but also the...