This book is an introduction to an emerging field of study, namely, East Asian Pop Culture. An inherent precondition of such a text is that a substantial amount of research and published material must already be available in the field before the writing can be undertaken. An introductory text is, therefore, fundamentally a parasitic text that draws on the existing material in order to attempt a relatively coherent mapping of the contours of the object of analysis. The indebtedness of such an endeavor to available material is even more pronounced in instances, such as this one, in which the analytic...

Conventionally, mass entertainment—television, film, and pop music—is referred to as “popular culture.” However, following Stuart Hall’s (1994) proposition, the term “popular culture” should be reserved for the larger cultural sphere that encompasses the everyday life of the masses in contradiction to and contestation with elite culture, while “pop culture” should be used to refer to commercially-produced, profit-driven, media-based mass entertainment; so conceived, pop culture is but one segment of popular culture. American pop music, movies, and television programs loom large globally, penetrating all places where the local income level is high enough to enable the purchase of such...

The loosely-integrated East Asian pop culture economy is one of unequal flows and exchanges across national and cultural boundaries, with Japanese and Korean products exported to areas which have a predominantly ethnic Chinese population—China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. Although geographically in Southeast Asia, Singapore has always been an integral part of the Chinese-language pop culture industry due to its seventy-five percent majority ethnic Chinese population, who speak a multiplicity of Chinese languages or dialects. This transnational ethnic Chinese population constitutes the largest consumer market for Japanese and Korean pop culture exports; without it they would likely have remained...

This chapter is in the strict sense a digression from or a parenthesis to the discussion of East Asian Pop Culture in that it examines an issue in Pop Culture China that was raised in Chapter 2, in order to round out that discussion of Pop Culture China. As mentioned, the intrinsically plural cultural traffic among Huaren communities in terms of the different languages and the different cultural contexts in the locations of production and reception/consumption creates slippages in meanings and symbolic values encoded at production and decoded at reception, with negotiated outcomes. Indeed, producers in Pop Culture China are...

To return to East Asian Pop Culture, as pointed out in previous chapters, Singapore is essentially a location of reception/consumption of pop culture not only from East Asia but also from other regions of the world. This is largely as a consequence of its small and ethnically heterogeneous population, which is unlike that of other East Asian Pop Culture locations where the populations are highly homogenous and thus support a “national”-language pop culture.¹ The small audience population is fragmented firstly in terms of language. In a country with four official languages—English, Mandarin, Malay, and Tamil—each language group potentially...

The routine flows of television drama series across national, cultural and linguistic boundaries in East Asia have been characterized “as a self-aware but non-consensual force field articulated by the region’s mixed postcolonial experiences, negotiation with globalization, and interacting media cultures” (Tsai 2005: 102). Within this non-consensual force field are the highly uneven flows of Japanese and Korean products entering Pop Culture China and a trickle at best of the reverse flow of Chinese languages products into Korea and Japan, particularly the latter.¹ In part as a consequence of lower production qualities, Chinese languages productions in every location have been losing...

With new technologies, the reception/consumption of pop culture has become a highly individualized activity. Listening to music has been highly individualized since the development of the now defunct Sony Walkman, which was replaced by a great variety of small portable gadgets including mobile phones. Television watching is less and less a shared activity among family members as individuals, especially youth, move to watching television on personal computer screens and again, mobile phones. Nevertheless, beyond the individualized watching and listening, aficionados of pop culture continue to seek out similarly inclined individuals with whom to exchange information and share the pleasures of...

The emergence of a loosely integrated East Asian Pop Culture economy since the beginning of the 1990s has, as might be expected, led governments in the region to think about using their pop culture exports as resources to positively influence the opinions and attitudes of the transnational audiences in the export destinations. In an age when the use of military power among responsible states as members of the international community is progressively receding, this desire to seek influence through “culture” is conceptualized as an exercise in “cultural diplomacy” or “soft power.” As the flows of pop culture products have hitherto...

The emergence of an East Asian Pop Culture stands significantly in the way of complete hegemony of US media culture, which undoubtedly continues to dominate the entertainment media globally. Indeed, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, discussions on media in East Asia have displaced concern with the “cultural imperialism” of the West, namely of the US, to focus instead on the celebration of the “arrival” of East Asian pop cultures in the global entertainment market; however, traces of this debate, albeit reconfigured in terms of the hegemony of multinational media corporations rather than nation-states, continue (Shi 2008). Several achievements...