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When the Korean Wave Meets Resident Koreans in Japan 243 Introduction In the last decade, East Asian media flows and connections have intensified. Media markets have rapidly expanded and transnational partnerships have been closely formed among media corporations which pursue marketing strategies and joint production ventures spanning several different markets. The circulation of popular culture is no longer limited to the national borders but finds a broader transnational acceptance in the region, leading to the formation of new links among people in East Asia, especially the youth. This trend has shown no sign of letting up. Asian markets have become even more synchronized, East Asian co-projects in film and music have become more common, and singers and actors from around the region are engaged in activities that transcend national borders. In this development, Japanese media culture took the initiative in the 1990s. However, many other East Asian regions too are creating their own cultural forms of international appeal within the social and cultural contexts specific to their countries and media flows are becoming more and more multilateral. Most notably, in the early twenty-first century, Korean popular culture is sweeping over Asian markets. Korean TV series and pop music are now receiving an even warmer welcome in places like Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China than their Japanese equivalents. Japan, too, is embracing the Korean Wave. While local channels such as Fukuoka TVQ had begun to broadcast Korean TV drama series as early as 12 When the Korean Wave Meets Resident Koreans in Japan: Intersections of the Transnational, the Postcolonial and the Multicultural Koichi Iwabuchi 244 Koichi Iwabuchi in 1996, it is especially since the late 1990s that Korean films and TV dramas have been well received in Japan. As far as TV dramas are concerned, in 2002, a national-network channel TV Asahi, for the first time broadcast All about Eve at prime time. The series was not successful in terms of rating, but it opened the door for Korean TV dramas’ entry into the major media space in Japan. Finally, as the chapters of Mori and Hirata in this volume discuss in detail, Winter Sonata was phenomenally popular since 2003 and this clearly marked the landing of the Korean Wave in the Japanese market, which has been hitherto exclusive to other Asian TV dramas. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the complexity of the impact of the Korean Wave in Japanese society and consider the possibility of transnational dialogues through popular cultural connections. First I will look at how the reception of other East Asian media cultures proves to be an opportune moment for Japanese audiences to critically review the state of their own lives, society and history. I will do this by comparing the reception of the Korean Wave, and Winter Sonata in particular, with the fervent reception of Hong Kong popular culture in the late 1990s. While the sense of nostalgia is a key feature to the both cases, the nostalgia perceived by consuming Korean TV dramas has more to do with personal sentiments and memories and this leads to more self-reflective post-text activities such as learning the Korean language, visiting Korea and even studying the history of Japanese colonialism. However, there is another crucial difference between the reception of Hong Kong and Korean popular culture. It is the existence of postcolonial subjects within Japan. To understand the complexity of transnational media connections promoted by the Korean Wave, I will argue, it is also crucial to consider how the media flows from South Korea have influenced, both constructively and unconstructively, the social positioning and recognition of resident Koreans in Japan, most of whom are the descendants of expatriates under Japanese colonial rule. I will consider this by examining the representation of and audience responses to a popular Japanese TV drama series that for the first time deals with socio-historical issues about resident Koreans at prime time. It will be suggested that while the social recognition of resident Koreans has been much improved as the Korean Wave significantly betters the image of Korea, it tends to disregard the understanding of historically embedded experiences of resident Koreans. They are instead effortlessly associated with the culture and people of South Korea in a way in which postcolonial and multicultural issues are subsumed under international relations. This consideration highlights the importance for the study of trans-Asian media and cultural flows to go beyond the nation-centered [18.219.236.199] Project MUSE (2024-04...

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