Howard, Keith

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Keith Howard

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Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds): East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. (TransAsia: Screen Cultures.) xi, 307 pp. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. ISBN 978 962 209 893 0.

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Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/BSOAdditional services for Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereChua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi (eds): East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave. (TransAsia: Screen Cultures.) xi, 307 pp. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008. ISBN 978 962 209 893 0.Keith HowardBulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies / Volume 73 / Issue 01 / February 2010, pp 144 ­ 146DOI: 10.1017/S0041977X09990589, Published online: 28 January 2010Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0041977X09990589How to cite this article:Keith Howard (2010). Review of Chua Beng Huat, and Koichi Iwabuchi 'East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave' Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, 73, pp 144­146 doi:10.1017/S0041977X09990589Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/BSO, IP address: 212.219.238.14 on 29 Oct 2012CHUA BENG HUAT and KOICHI IWABUCHI (eds):East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave.(TransAsia: Screen Cultures.) xi, 307 pp. Hong Kong: Hong KongUniversity Press, 2008. ISBN 978 962 209 893 0.doi:10.1017/S0041977X09990589For a few years now it has been commonplace to talk about the Korean Wave – theincreasing importance of Korean cultural production in East and South-East Asia –largely from outside. Admittedly, this reflects how Korean production has impactedon the music, TV and film markets outside the Korean peninsula, whether writersdiscuss the TV drama “Winter Sonata” or the pop artiste Bo’A. However, an imbal-ance has been apparent, where Korean writers typically celebrate the importance ofcultural exports without analysing the local markets into which those exports arepromoted, while non-Korean writers tend to overlook domestic production and tohave limited knowledge of both the motives of the Korean companies and govern-ment agencies who seek to promote exports. This volume goes some way to over-coming that imbalance, by combining the efforts of a number of distinguishedscholars and commentators from Taiwan (Eva Tsai and Fang-chih Irene Yang),Korea (Yukie Hirata, Dong-Hoo Lee, Keehyeung Lee and Doobo Shim), Japan(Yoshitaka Mori), Hong Kong (Lisa Y. M. Leung, Angel Limn, Avin Hei ManTong) and Australia (Tania Lim). This gives a notably broad coverage, bringingtogether a number of national perspectives and disciplinary interests from journalismthrough globalization to feminist theory.“Korean Wave” (hanliu) is a term that was coined in China in 1997, when thefirst broadcasts of Korean television dramas were aired. Taiwan also began tobuy and broadcast soap operas, and within the next year introduced Koreandance and rap music performed by bands such as CLON, NRG and H.O.T.H.O.T., a band whose name comes from “High Five of Teenagers” went on toperform to large crowds of Chinese fans and sell over 40,000 albums on themainland in 2000 alone (and, over their seven-year existence, they sold sevenmillion albums in Korea). Korean agencies and companies set about teachingtheir top stars Mandarin or Japanese, and sought to place them in films andTV dramas produced in Hong Kong, Taiwan and China. The Korean governmentbegan to implement policies that aimed to capitalize on success, and to promotetrade and tourism.The introduction to this volume points out that the mainstream cultural importsacross the region in the 1980s and early 1990s tended to be Japanese, althoughTaiwanese costume dramas had also enjoyed some success. Japanese productionswere “visual metaphors for capitalist–consumerist modernity”; they were “urbantrendy dramas of romances among young professionals dressed from head to toein international designer togs, living in well appointed apartments and dining inupscale, especially Western, restaurants in the most trendy locations in the city ofTokyo” (p. 2). However, the size of the Japanese market meant that producersand companies typically measured success by sales and viewing figures at home.They did not need exports to make profits, hence many of the initial broadcastsof Japanese dramas were illegal. In fact, some of the attempts to market Japaneseproductions abroad then failed, an example being the drama Romance 2000,which was broadcast simultaneously in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong andSingapore. Also, the costs of buying dramas produced for the developed andexpensive Japanese market were high.144 R E V I E W SCost played to Korea’s advantage as Japanese dramas waned in popularity. Therelatively small size of the Korean domestic market encouraged Korean producersand companies to look for export markets. They did so as a reassessment ofJapanese colonial activities before and during the Pacific War spread throughoutthe region, and this too played a part in making a move away from Japanese culturalproduction attractive. Korean cultural exports began to circulate. Within a few years,the popularity of Korean pop music, at least when sung by Korean stars, waned, butTV dramas and films remained: “one drama series was followed hot on the heels byanother”, as Korean dramas “became part of the daily programming of manyfree-to-air and satellite television stations in East Asia and, thus, part of the routineviewing habits of their respective audiences” (p. 2).This volume descends from a workshop at the Cultural Studies in Asia ResearchCluster at the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. The twoeditors are Chua Beng Huat, Professor of Sociology at the National University ofSingapore and editor of, among other volumes, Election as Popular Culture inAsia (London: Routledge, 2007), and Koichi Iwabuchi, from Waseda Universityin Tokyo, who is a well-known commentator on East Asian cultural flows, withbooks such as Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and JapaneseTransnationalism (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2002) and Rogue Flows:Trans-Asian Cultural Traffic (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2004) tohis credit. Chua keeps the volume grounded, commenting that the region’s culturalflows have much to do with the massive and disproportionate ethnic Chinese con-sumer market. Iwabuchi, who in earlier publications proved himself to be the masterof statistics about market penetration, costs, profits, and more, here confines himselfto how the Korean Wave impacted on Korean residents in Japan.The volume divides into three sections. Three initial chapters consider the tele-vision industry in East Asia. Korea is held up as a good example of how televisionis promoted as part of national policy, with investment from industrial conglomer-ates and capital accumulated by the media sector. The second chapter considers howstar culture and the celebration of individual icons permeates the whole of East Asia,and the third offers a case study that explores how regional media operators useimports of foreign dramas to compete with dominant national broadcasters. Thesecond section begins with a broad-brush consideration of transcultural flows ofmedia production by Chua Beng Huat. Angel Lin and Avin Tong then explorehow Korean dramas play to a modern pan-Asian femininity. Two further chaptersexplore how Japanese women consume Korean dramas, and a final chapter turnsthe tables, looking at how Korean women appropriate aspects of Japanese dramas.The third section is titled “Nationalistic reactions”. Keehyeung Lee looks at Koreancultural policies to promote the Korean Wave developed by government, producers,and intellectuals; somewhat disappointingly, he notes that there is a lack of self-reflexive critiques of the phenomenon in Korea, but never offers the critique himself(I note he also gives 2001 rather than 1997 as the date when the term hanliu wascoined; p. 176). Fang-chih Yang, returning to a feminist perspective, identifiesthe somewhat xenophobic Taiwanese reappraisal of Korean cultural imports,while Eva Tsai, citing the Korean Bo’A and the Taiwanese Aboriginal singerA-mei, looks at border crossing stars, illustrating how different nationalisms meetand compete. Finally, Iwabuchi turns our attention to Japan.The division of the volume into three broad sections is, at times, a little unset-tling. Only a short introduction sets the scene, and each of the three sections juxta-poses chapters that cross regional boundaries with chapters based on case studies.Again, the theoretical perspectives often depart some distance from what I assumewas meant to be the central theme – how the Korean Wave is or has been perceivedR E V I E W S 145in Korea and the East Asian region – as we move between feminist theory, mediastudies, and more. This, I guess, is the nature of many edited volumes, but I forone would have preferred a greater consistency between authors in their approachesand subjects.Keith HowardGENERALNINIAN SMART:World Philosophies. (2nd edition. Edited by OLIVER LEAMAN.)xi, 564 pp. London and New York: Routledge, 2008. £80. ISBN 978 0415 41188 2.doi:10.1017/S0041977X09990590This second edition of Ninian Smart’s 1999 original is a welcome revision of a valu-able work. In sixteen chapters Smart’s survey embraces South and East Asian,Greek and Roman thought, Islamic, Jewish and European philosophies and Northand Latin American contributions. The final four chapters focus on modern times,including African philosophies. In his 1999 Preface Smart wrote: “Mine is aguide to intellectual thought from all parts of the world. I have limited its scopeup to shortly after World War II, say the 1960s, and chiefly to the dead. This ispartly because of limitations of my own knowledge and because of the desire formy descriptions to be confined to complete philosophers, namely dead ones. Thishas generally led to the underplaying of some recent movements, including femin-ism, environmentalism and postmodernism. It has led to the neglect of otherwiseexcellent philosophers, such as my brother”. Oliver Leaman’s intention as editorof the second edition is unobtrusively “to tweak [Smart’s] material to bring itmore up to date and in line with current research in the many areas that he dis-cussed”. Accordingly, in this edition some additional sections have been addedand minor revisions made, sometimes without it being obvious that a hand otherthan Smart’s is at work. This is still a book that, for the most part, admirers ofSmart’s lucid style can relax into. The work takes an admirably broad view of “phil-osophy” and “philosophers”, with the minimum criterion being some kind of sys-tematic expression of a world-view (hence the Buddha with his lists makes thecut, while Jesus the mysterious storyteller and healer does not). In his opening chap-ter, quite ambitiously titled “The history of the world and our intellectual inheri-tance” Smart sketches eight “human types” of philosopher. These are: sage,spiritual analyst, super-scientist, metaphysician, sceptic, logician and adviser, aswell as the modern professional philosopher. This latter, Smart observes, “is indanger of becoming tamed by the very institutions that have begotten him [sic].The image of suit and briefcase flit through the mind, and hours completed at theknowledge-plant from nine to five”. The tasks undertaken by philosophers ofthese various sorts across the world and throughout history include analysis, sys-tematic instruction, worldview construction, questioning (from curiosity or scepti-cism), and offering political and ethical advice. Smart notes that globalizationencourages such systematic representations of world-views (and university courseson them), where previously local and idiosyncratic reflections prevailed.146 R E V I E W S

Review of Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi, eds, East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave

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Review of Chua Beng Huat and Koichi Iwabuchi, eds, East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave

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