East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave

7. Touring ‘Dramatic Korea’: Japanese Women as Viewers of Hanryu Dramas and Tourists on Hanryu Tours

Touring ‘Dramatic Korea’ 143 Korean pop culture has been spreading since the end of the 1990s, and the big boom of the Korean drama, Winter Sonata, brought a cultural and social phenomenon called the Korean Wave, or Hanryu, to Japan in 2004.2 As of 2005, Korean pop culture seems to have definitely taken root in Japan, and it is diversifying and changing. Examination of the Korean Wave indicates that media goods as well as people are moving across borders. The number of Japanese who traveled to Korea in 2004 recorded a growth of 35.5 percent compared to the previous year; people who are traveling to Korea, or “moving people,” are in the spotlight along with media products. The number of Japanese tourists who travel to the shooting locations of Winter Sonata have rapidly increased, particularly since the end of 2003, and most are women. Transnational drama consumption is causing women to move transnationally to visit these locations. Such transnational cultural traffic indicates changes in gender dynamics and inter-Asian cultural flows, relative to the imbalanced flows of mainly male travelers from Japan to the rest of Asia just a few years ago. It is emblematic of cultural traffic in Asia that is becoming more complex and diverse. This chapter examines the effects of the Korean Wave, particularly in the field of tourism. First, it discusses gender politics and the postcolonial situation of Korea as a historical tourist destination for the Japanese. Second, it deals with the question of why women in particular are now traveling to Korea, facilitating and intensifying the Korean Wave. Thirdly, the change in Japanese tourists’ view of Korea following the change in gender dynamics 7 Touring ‘Dramatic Korea’: Japanese Women as Viewers of Hanryu Dramas and Tourists on Hanryu Tours Yukie Hirata1 144 Yukie Hirata and the boom in Korean popular culture since the 1990s will be discussed. The research is based on fieldwork and interviews3 with Japanese women who visited or planed to visit Chunchon, Seoul, Nami Island and Yonpyon, which were shooting locations for Winter Sonata. Moreover, this chapter focuses on the transnational consumption of dramas by Japanese women and what occurs in the process of a viewer turning into a tourist. Finally, this work discusses conditions concerning Hanryu tourism and its place in the history of Korean tourism from the perspective of gender. Nostalgia, Gender and Tourist Gaze Saying tourism is the satisfaction of curiosity without considering sociohistorical context risks guest-centered or tourist-centered thinking. When sociologists like Rojek (1985) and Wang (2000) argue generically for “the satisfaction of curiosity” in tourism or leisure theory, they do not take into account the tourist’s socio-economic status, such as ethnicity, class, or gender. In postcolonial situations, such as between Japan and Korea, subjects who are moving are often romanticized as steeped in “imperialist nostalgia” (Rosald 1989). In addition, such moving subjects were mostly men or masculinized, intentionally or otherwise. Women travelers were long ignored or their travels equated with consumption. However, many works by feminist scholars argue that women’s travels and their gaze, including their contact with others, differ from those of men because of women’s position in a male-dominated patriarchal society (Kim 2003; Ghose 1998). The ‘tourist gaze’ is thus closely related to the subject’s identity and position in time and space, including gender. However, the tourist’s gaze includes complex contradictions that cannot be simplistically grasped as a dichotomy, i.e. by whether the gaze is male or female. For instance, Laura Mulvey (1975) discussed the relationship between gaze and media using psychoanalysis as a political weapon in her classic study titled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, exposing the gaze in Hollywood movies as the male gaze. Her argument was criticized because it denied the subjectivity of women viewers and ignored their complex positions. Subsequently, Mulvey modified her argument, taking into consideration the possibility of an active female gaze. Bobo (1988) studied black female groups as viewers of The Color Purple and revealed how they were empowered through the text and in turn restructured the text. Mulvey’s modification and Bobo’s argument show that the subjectivity of media viewers is not just structured psychoanalytically but that there are moments in which Touring ‘Dramatic Korea’ 145 it is actively constructed through various readings. Such feminist arguments have been raised in the field of media studies. What about in the field of tourism...