East Asia Media and Advertising 4

East Asia Media and Advertising 4
? East Asian Media Cultures and Advertising
? Based on the two articles about ‘East Asian Media Cultures and Advertising, write a literature review that gives a detailed discussion and assessment of how experts have approached this issue. Compare and contrast the works you are discussing. The review should show their strengths and weaknesses, how they agree/disagree, and what contribution they make to your understanding of the topic.
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Globalization, East Asian media cultures and their publics
Koichi Iwabuchi
School of International Liberal Studies, Waseda University, 1-6-1 Nishi-Waseda, Shinjuku,
Tokyo 169-8050, Japan
(Received 8 December 2009; final version received 19 January 2010)
In the last two decades, media and cultural globalization has reached another level
of development and penetration.While various (national) media markets have been
penetrated and integrated by the powerful missionaries of global media culture
such as News Corporation, Disney and Time Warner, the development of East
Asian media cultural production and inter-Asian media co-production, circulation
and consumption has become no less conspicuous. On the one hand, these
developments have highlighted the de-Westernized patterns of cultural production,
circulation and connection in, from and within the region. However, on the other, it
is still questionable if these developments have eventually challenged uneven
transnational media cultural flows and have truthfully promoted dialogic connections
among people of various places, as they reproduce hierarchy, unevenness and
marginalization. This article will critically review how the rise of Asian media
culture production and inter-Asian connections fails to serve wider public interests
locally, nationally and transnationally, especially in terms of the promotion of
uneven globalization process in which the logic of market has deeply governed the
production, circulation and consumption of media culture. Given that the states
are supporting the activities of transnational media culture industries, it is
imperative for researchers to examine more rigorously the unevenness, inequality
and marginalization in the inter-Asian mass culture network, and to collaborate
transnationally with various social actors so as to advance inter-Asian media
culture connections in more democratic and dialogic ways.
Keywords: media globalization; inter-Asian connection; decentered power
structures; dialogue and unevenness; ‘inter-nationalism’; publicness of media
culture
Introduction
WatchingKorean TV dramas, listening to Chinese popmusic, reading Japanese comic
books and enjoying internationally co-produced Asian films are now part of the
mundane landscape of East Asian cities. Younger generations might take it for
granted, but it was something unconceivable just 20 years ago. While inter-Asian
media culture connections have a longer history, the changes and developments that
we have witnessed since early 1990s are really drastic. The last two decades after the
end of the Cold War has been marked by significant development of globalization
processes. Cross-border mobility of capital, people and commodity has been further
intensified by the penetration of neo-liberalism marketization, and the amplification
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DOI: 10.1080/01292981003693385
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Vol. 20, No. 2, June 2010, 197
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of international ethno-flows of labor, immigrants and tourists.No less important is the
progression of media and cultural globalization. While the development of digital
communication technologies has de-centered and individualized the media uses, it also
has lent itself to the penetration and integration of theworldwide media markets by the
powerful missionaries of global media culture such as News Corporation, Disney and
Time Warner. Cultural globalization does not just mean the spread of the same
products ofWestern (mostly American) origin all over the world through these media
conglomerates. Furthermore, the rise of media culture production capacity outside the
US has become conspicuous, of which East Asia displays a most dynamic example.
Advanced capacity in producing media cultures such as TV, films and popularmusic in
East Asia has also activated regional co-production, intraregional circulation and
consumption of media cultures. Media cultures from other parts of East Asia are
finding unprecedented acceptance in the region, leading to the formation of new
connections among people as well as media culture industries.
These developments highlight de-Westernized patterns of cultural production,
circulation and consumption and thus have attracted many researchers including
myself into examining what is going on. Indeed, many studies have been done in terms
of de-Westernization (Curran & Park, 2000; Erni & Chua, 2005), the rise of Chinese
media cultures and markets (Curtin, 2007; Fung, 2008; Zhao, 2008), Korean Wave
phenomena (Cho, 2005; Chua & Iwabuchi, 2008; Shim, 2006), the popularity of
Japanese media cultures (Allison, 2006; Tobin, 2004; Iwabuchi, 2002, 2004), cultural
adaptation and formatting (Moran & Keane, 2004) and regional cultural flows and
connectivities (Berry, Mackintosh, & Liscutin, 2009; Chua, 2004; Iwabuchi, Muecke,
& Thomas, 2004; Kim, 2008). These works contribute to enriching hitherto Westcentered
media and cultural studies in the English-language world by seriously
attending to East Asian and inter-Asian media cultural dynamic under globalization
processes.
Rather than just appraising what has been achieved by the studies of East Asian
and inter-Asian media cultures, this article also critically reviews what has been not
achieved with an aim to gauge whether and how the rise of East Asian media culture
production and inter-Asian connection serves wider public interests: locally, nationally
and transnationally. While the recent development has given rise to de-
Americanized patterns of media culture productions and consumption and has
considerably facilitated mutual understanding among people in the region, it is still
debatable whether and how these developments fundamentally challenge uneven
media cultural globalization, what sort of cross-border dialogues are promoted, and
whether and how they encourage socio-culturally marginalized voices expressed,
heard and shared in a mediated public space. This article is interested in the
examination of the promotion of uneven globalization process in which the marketization
governs the production, circulation and consumption of media culture and
growing inter-nationalism in which dominant media cultures of each nation are
circulating, marketed and mutually consumed, in tandem with states’ increasing
interest in the uses of media culture for national interests. It is necessary, I would
suggest, to research more than before on the issues of unevenness, inequality and
marginalization to engage with a normative question of how to further advance the
development of inter-Asian media culture production and connections in more
democratic and dialogic ways.
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Rise of East Asian media cultures and inter-Asian connections
One of the contentious issues that the rise of East Asian media cultures highlights is
whether and how it de-Westernizes or de-Americanizes media culture production and
circulation and challenges and/or reconfigures global cultural power relations.
Globalization processes have enhanced media culture production capacities of various
non-Western actors. This testifies to the relative decline of the supremacy of American
media cultures and questions the credence of the Western cultural imperialism thesis.
Although American media cultures are still well-received in many parts of the world,
and their scale of transnational reach is by far the most prevailing, the popularity of
American media cultures has been decreasing in East Asia with the development of
local media culture production, which tends to be more receptive. The shift of media
policy discourses of East Asian governments from the protection of the populace from
Western cultural invasion to the promotion of domestic media culture production to
counter it, which was witnessed in the late 1990s (Wang, 1996), also reflected the
ascendancy of local media cultures.
East Asianmedia cultures are not just well-received domestically. They have crossed
the national boundaries aswell, especially to other parts of East Asia. This is suggestive
of another trend of media globalization that regional connections are enhanced in such a
way as to bypass the command of Euro-American media culture production and
distribution. Furthermore, inter-Asian promotion and co-production of media cultures
has become commonplace with the growing collaboration and close partnerships
among media culture industries in the region with the aim of pursuing international
marketing and joint ventures spanning transnational markets, as a term such as
‘Asiawood’ indicates (Newsweek Asia, ‘The birth of Asiawood’, 21May 2001). Indeed so
many films have been co-produced within East Asia, such as three-language films like
Seven Swords (Hong Kong/China/Korea) which was produced in Cantonese, Mandarin
andKorean; aUS$35 million budget film, Promise (China/Korea/Japan); Daisy (Korea/
Hong Kong with a Japanese music director); a trilogy horror film Three (Korea/Hong
Kong/Thailand) and its sequel Three . . . Extremes (Hong Kong/Japan/Korea), to
mention just a few (see Jin & Lee, 2007). East Asian markets have become increasingly
synchronized and producers, directors, actors as well as capital from around the region
have been engaged in various creative activities that transcend national borders.
East Asian media cultures have long hybridized in local elements while absorbing
American cultural influences, but cultural fusion among East Asian media culture has
come to be generated too. Remaking of successful TV dramas and films from other
parts of East Asia has been frequently done, especially between Japanese, Korean,
Hong Kong and Taiwanese media texts, and Japanese comic series are often adapted
for TV dramas and films outside Japan. In this process, the resulting texts dexterously
blend in a variety of local elements, far from being mere imitations of original works.
One of the most prominent examples is Taiwan’s TV drama series, Liuxing Huayuan
(Meteor Garden), which shows the creative localization of Japanese media culture in
Taiwan and its intriguing transnational voyage that follows. It is based on a Japanese
comic series about high-school students’ lives, Hana yori dango. At the time there was
no Japanese TV drama series based on the comic series, but Taiwan producers
skillfully adopted it to drama form on their own initiative in 2001. While the drama
takes up the Japanese character names as they are, including the name of the idol group
of four main male characters, F4, the story is reconstructed in Taiwanese university
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settings, featuring Taiwanese idols and original theme songs. The program has been
phenomenally popular not just in Taiwan but also in various parts of East Asia. The
drama was also well-received by audiences in Japan and a Japanese TV station
belatedly produced a Japanese version of the drama series in 2005 and 2007, which
were also well-received outside Japan. Finally, a Korean version of the drama series
was produced in 2008.
In the studies of cultural globalization, the West and the Rest tend to be equated
with the global and the local, respectively, and, even in the discussion of cultural
hybridization, the Rest is supposed only to imitate, appropriate and/or hybridize the
West, no matter howactively producing local media cultures in the process.While East
Asian media culture cannot be free from American influences, this intriguing dynamic
process of inter-Asian cultural fusion and intertextual reworking urges us to go beyond
the view of Westernization or Americanization of the world.
Another related significant issue of inter-Asian media culture circulation is
concerned with how people in many parts of the region are connected through media
culture consumption. One argues that it might engender an East Asian identity (Chua,
2004), while others discuss how the region works effectively to mediate between the
national/local and the global in terms of the operation of capital (Ching, 2000; Sinclair,
2007). Another crucial question is how inter-Asian circulation of media cultures
promotes people’s mutual understanding and self-reflexive dialogues in a transnational
scope.
Media culture plays a significant role in constructing the national public. Many
studies have shown how the mass media such as film, radio and TV have constructed
imagined communities and the public sphere on a national level. However, as media
cultures of various places regularly cross the national boundaries, people have now
much wider repertoire for reflecting on their own lives and socio-political issues,
though the national mass media are still the most powerful in this respect. The practice
of transnational media consumption is most elucidated by migrants and diasporas’
consumption of media culture coming from ‘home’ but those national audiences who
have never moved to other countries are also actively watching and listening to bordercrossing
media cultures. In East Asia too, the consumption of media cultures such as
TV dramas and films from other parts of the region has become more commonplace in
the last 20 years. For most parts, this was something which the producers were not
conscious of and did not expect in the production process, since media cultures are
produced chiefly for the national audiences. However, media cultures have transcended
the national boundaries to reach unforeseen audiences via free-to-air channels,
cable and satellite channels, pirated VCD and DVD and Internet sites. Furthermore,
increasing numbers of media cultures are produced and internationally co-produced to
target those international audiences. Inter-Asian media culture circulation has come
to gain a significant weight as it has given a wide range of resources for people’s public
engagement in everyday life.
People’s participation in the public realm via the media is not just limited to a
Habermasian public sphere in which people equally partake in rational deliberation
about significant socio-political issues. Emotion and affection are also vital to people’s
participation in and belonging to society and the consumption of media cultures plays
a significant part in constituting the cultural public sphere, which McGuigan (2005,
p. 435) defines as ‘the articulation of politics, public and personal, as a contested
terrain through affective (aesthetic and emotional) modes of communication’. It
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‘provides vehicles for thought and feeling, for imagination and disputatious argument,
which are not necessarily of inherent merit but may be of some consequence’
(McGuigan, 2005, p. 435). Indeed, the personal is always political and everyday
mundane meaning construction through media consumption is an indispensable part
of the public participation (Livingstone, 2005).
Many studies have shown that inter-Asian media culture consumption has brought
about new kinds of cross-border relationships, mutual understanding and selfreflexivity
about people’s own society and culture on a large scale that has never
been observed before (e.g. Chua & Iwabuchi, 2008; Iwabuchi, 2002, 2004; Kim, 2008).
The mutual consumption of media culture has created an opportunity in which the
understanding of other society and culture dramatically deepens and improves, and
the socio-cultural issues and concerns are sympathetically appreciated and shared by
many people in the regions. The sympathetic watching of Japanese or Korean TV
dramas has encouraged the audiences in Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Japan and
Korea to have a fresh viewon their own societies, gender relations and social lives of the
young through the perception and appreciation of spatio-temporal distance/proximity
of other East Asian modernities (e.g. Iwabuchi, 2002; Kim, 2008; Lee, 2008; Leung,
2004; Nakano &Wu, 2002). Although the sense of nostalgia, which is often evoked by
the consumption of media culture from other Asian countries, might reproduce
Orientalist views of other Asians as not-quite-modern-as-us by equating ‘their’ present
with ‘our’ past, nostalgia alsoworks to evoke a self-reflexive thinking (Iwabuchi, 2002,
2008a). In my study, the somewhat nostalgic consumption of Hong Kong or Korean
media cultures in Japan has even destabilized a historically-constituted belief in
Japan’s superiority over the rest of Asia; thinking which, while accepting that the
country belongs geographically and culturally to Asia, makes a distinction between
Japan and Asia (Iwabuchi, 2002, 2008). Furthermore, the consumption of media
cultures has also triggered extra post-text activities. No small number of people
eventually visit other Asian cities, meet people there, start learning local languages and
join transnational Internet fan communities (Hu, 2005). In the case of the Korean
Wave in Japan, many (mostly female) audiences even started re-learning Japan’s
colonial history.
Inter-Asian media culture connections thus work as a great opportunity for many
people to critically review the state of their own culture, society and historical
relationship with other parts of Asia. The mediated encounter with other Asian
modernities may make people in East Asia realize that they now inhabit the same
developmental time zone as other parts of East Asia. They mutually appreciate how
common experiences of modernization, urbanization, Westernization and globalization
are similarly and differently represented in other East Asian contexts. This displays
a great possibility of cross-national dialogues engendered by media culture flows.
Media cultures have connected East Asia in new, dialogic manners: dialogic, not in the
sense of actually meeting in person to talk to each other, but in the sense of rethinking
one’s own life, society and culture aswell as socio-historically constructed relations and
perceptions with others, critically and self-reflexively, via mediated cultures.
Glocal marketization of media cultures
While the rise of East Asian media cultures demonstrates that it is no longer persuasive
to understand the structure of global cultural power as bipartite domination, with
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one-way transfers and influences of media culture from the center (West) to the
periphery (Rest), this does not however mean the disappearance of power structures in
the global media culture production and circulation. The rise of East Asian media
culture needs to be considered in the context in which cultural power has become
decentralized, dispersed and interpenetrated by the transnational alliance of media
culture industries. Cross-border partnership and cooperation among media culture
industries involving non-Western players are being driven forward, with America as
a pivotal presence, but in such a way as to go beyond the West
Rest paradigm or
a straightforward notion of Western cultural hegemony over the non-West. Here, a
crucial question is whether global power relations are fundamentally challenged and
transformed, and whose voices and which issues are not included in the transnational
cultural conversation as the marketization of media cultures is moving forward.
McGuigan (2009) argues how ‘cool capitalism’, which gives priority to individual
consumer sovereignty in a profound marketization logic, is capable of subtly taking in
its critique to promote further commercialization. Flexibility of capital is, to put it
more extensively, discerned in such a way as to absorb subversive and opposing
challenges for its own benefit. This is shown by the marketing strategy of media culture
industries that subtly combines globalization and localization, homogenization and
heterogenization, and decentering and recentering. These seemingly opposing forces
are actually working simultaneously in a mutually constitutive manner and such
processes are subtly exploited by media culture industries as the business buzzword
‘glocalization’ shows (Robertson, 1995). The new configuration of cultural power
exploits the locally-specific meaning construction process in a globally-tailored
manner.
Globally-disseminated cultural products and images are, as suggested earlier,
reworked through a process of hybridization in each locality. While this process gives
rise to the diversification of media cultural repertoires in many parts of the world, this
increase in cultural diversity is being governed by the logic of capital and organized
within the context of globalization (Hannerz, 1996). Globalization does not destroy
cultural differences but rather brings about a ‘peculiar form of homogenization’ while
fostering them (Hall, 1991).With the advancement of globalization, a series of cultural
formats such as genre, narrative style, visual representation, digitalized special effects,
marketing technique, and the idea of coolness through which various differences can
be adjusted have been disseminated, shared and deployed by media culture industries.
Many of them are attributed to the global spread of American media culture (Morley
& Robins, 1995) and thus one could say that ‘America’ has become a base format that
regulates the process of media culture production around the world. It can be argued
then that what is happening is less de-Americanization than late Americanization.
However, while it is incongruous to deny the enormity of American cultural influences,
it is too simplistic to straightforwardly equate globalization with Americanization or
American cultural imperialism. As demonstrated by the prevalence of the television
format business and film remaking, many examples of which are not of American
origin, various media culture industries of Europe and Asia are now actively joining
the glocalizing enterprise and jointly exploiting late Americanization. Transnational
media corporations are seeking to raise their profits by tailoring globally adoptable
formats to every corner of the world while promoting cultural diversity in every
market. The world is becoming more diverse through standardization and more
standardized through diversification under the marketization of media cultures.
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Inter-Asian media culture circulations are not free from this transnational alliance
of media culture industries. As exemplified by STAR TV, owned by News Corporation,
and MTV Asia, global media giants are penetrating regional media flows by
deploying localization strategies in tandem with local partners. Made-in-Asia global
cultures are not immune to the dominance of the transnational alliance centered on
America, either. Hollywood’s distribution networks are indispensable to make the
Poke´mon animation series and films (distributed by Warner Bros.) and the anime
films of Hayao Miyazaki (distributed by Disney) a global culture. Moreover, the
Poke´mon anime series and movies that audiences around the world enjoy have been
‘Americanized’, a process that involves removing some of their ‘Japaneseness’ to make
them more acceptable to global audiences from the perspective of American producers
(see Allison, 2006; Tobin, 2004).
More recently, Hollywood has been accommodating itself with the rise of Asian
media culture production and markets so as to make its products more internationallyoriented.
Hollywood has been actively incorporating the strength of East Asian media
cultures through the employment of directors and actors such as JohnWoo, Ang Lee,
Jackie Chan, Zhang Ziyi and Lee Byung-hun, and the remaking of Japanese, Korean
and Hong Kong films such as The Grudge, Shall We Dance, Infernal Affairs and My
Sassy Girl. Hollywood also actively (co)produces and distributes Asia-related films
such as Hero, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Kung Fu Hustle, The Last Samurai and
Memoirs of a Geisha. In addition, the Hollywood studios are now actively producing
‘Asian’ media cultures by setting up local branches in prosperous Asian cities. It could
be argued that Hollywood’s embracing of Asia shows uneven power relations between
the US and Asia, since ‘Asian’ contents need to be modified to the taste and style of
Hollywood for which Western markets are still the most significant even though its
target audiences are becoming more global than before, and because Orientalist
stereotypical images of Asia are represented even in those films. However, let me
reiterate here, while America still occupies a central position, the power relations in the
global cultural economy has become more entangled than a Manichean picture of
West
Asia or America
China.1 Hollywood production capacity, system and format
are becoming ubiquitous and constitutive in the producing of ‘original’ national media
cultures in East Asia and inter-Asian media culture circulation. But this also means the
shifting nature of ‘America’ too, in which ‘Asia’ has come to occupy a significant part
and Asian actors in turn are actively and complicitly exploiting the opportunity to
reach global markets. In this context, it is highly dubious that the rise of Asian media
cultures fundamentally challenges the existing global cultural power configuration,
which is governed by transnational media culture industries of developed countries.
Copyright and labor as the site of power operation
Globalization theories, which discuss how active hybridization and localization
processes are bringing about unexpected outcomes in the local, are often attacked
for their optimistic construction of the myth of global interconnectivity by neglecting
the unevenness in the political economy of the media culture production process in
favor of agency of audiences and social actors at the receiving end (e.g. Hafez, 2007;
Sparks, 2007). While these critiques tend to over-exaggerate the argument they try to
refute, the point is well taken that more attention needs to be paid to the political
economy of media culture production, which highlights the structural unevenness and
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domination. Hesmondhalgh (2008) disapproves of the kind of argument that
globalization is unidirectional but nevertheless connecting the world in a complex
manner, for it ‘somehow downplays inequality, exploitation and injustice’ (p. 96).
While criticizing the argument of cultural imperialism in its simplified account of
meaning construction process, Hesmondhalgh proposes to analyze the copyright
monopoly by media culture industries as the neo-liberalism operation of imperialism.
Copyright and intellectual property is the most important source of profit for media
culture industries, as is the case with the brand manufacturing sector (Klein, 2000).
Hesmondhalgh (2008) argues that the neo-liberalism marketization of media culture is
strengthening the view of culture as property, which raises a serious question about the
ideas of cultural creativity and cultural commons. Creativity is shifting from a ‘social
and collective’ one to individualization, which is eventually monopolized by media
culture industries with the support of the state regulation.
Though it is open to question if such a conception of culture as property is
‘Western’ as Hesmondhalgh states, Euro-American-based transnational corporations
certainly work hard to institutionalize it in the world. However Asian media culture
industries too actively collaborate with them. Since late 1990s, the policing over
copyright infringement has become much tighter in East Asian cities, and this has a
serious implication in the inter-Asian media culture circulation. The comprehensive
picture of the circulation and consumption of TV dramas, films and popular music in
East Asian markets cannot be captured solely by the examination of the formal
business and distributional route. Pirated VCDandDVDand the Internet are actually
the main media for promoting their circulation. Through surprisingly swift subtitling
in Chinese, Korean and other languages, audiences worldwide enjoy many East Asian
TV dramas just a few days after they are first broadcast. Unofficial circulation of
media cultures has been developed precisely because media culture industries in East
Asia were not much interested in overseas audiences, as suggested earlier. The
indifference of media culture industries has led to them being left out in the
transnationalization of TV dramas, which is promoted not just by the underground
political economy but also by neglected fans’ guerrilla activities (Hu, 2005).
Fans’ creative activities on the translation of, commenting on and conversation
about media texts engender an unofficial globalization from below (Hu, 2004, 2005;
Pang 2006, 2009). Through the (illegitimate) repackaging, East Asian TV dramas
facilitate new transnational cultural connections and gain public significance outside
the original country of production. The ownership of cheapVCDandDVDcopies and
the watching of dramas on Internet sites have brought about new patterns of media
consumption, new forms of cultural creativity and new kinds of transnational affective
communities. It highlights grassroots practices of copying, distributing and sharing of
media culture,which seriously question the dominant system of ‘the global governance
of symbol production and consumption’ (Hesmondhalgh, 2008) based on the
privatization of culture as property (Hu, 2005; Pang, 2009). While the right of the
producers needs to be protected, whether the corporate-driven dominant discourse of
copyrights, with the increasing weight of its neo-liberalism mode of creativity and
ownership of culture, takes seriously the issues of publicness of media culture in terms
of cultural commons, sharing and creativity is dubious.
It is also deeply questionable if the policing of copyright infringement would really
benefit all producers and workers. Another important issue raised by the copyright
monopoly is the international exploitation of cultural labor. The high concentration of
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media ownership in the hands of a few global companies and their monopoly of
intellectual property has accompanied the new international division of cultural labor
(Miller, Govil, McMurria, Maxwell, &Wang, 2005).While the headquarters of media
culture industries are located in global cities of wealthier countries, the production
process is highly decentered as the corporations are desperately seeking cheap labor in
outsourcing basic work. This is not just occurring to Hollywood but also to cultural
production within East Asia. Working conditions of animation subcontractors in
Japan are infamously poor, but the exploitation of cultural labor has become not just a
domestic issue but a transnational one. Japanese animation companies have long
subcontracted the basic work of animation production to other parts of Asia. It used
to be to Korea and Taiwan but, as the labor cost has increased there, it is gradually
shifting to other cheaper locations such as China. Those workers work hard with long
labor hours for low wages, and the situation is even getting worse with the
advancement of media globalization (see Yoon, 2009).
While it is expected that promotion of creative industrieswould benefit all creators
by improving their working conditions, giving more job opportunities and encouraging
cultural creativity to flourish, however, as Otsuka and Osawa (2005) point out
regarding the animation industries, without fundamentally changing the existing
structure of profit-taking through the monopoly of distribution and copyright by
global media culture industries, the issue of uneven profit distribution would not be
substantially improved. As global media conglomerates’ oligopolistic control over
intellectual property and copyrights has become a significant part of global cultural
domination, whether and how the profits and benefits of the development of media
culture industries actually return to media-factory workers, both domestically and
internationally, is an imperative matter for public discussion.
Inter-Asia mass culture network and banal inter-nationalism
The development of inter-Asian cultural public spheres also raises a question of the
politics of inclusion and exclusion. While we cannot neatly generalize the division
between people in terms of place of residence, class, gender and ethnicity, inter-Asian
media circulation has brought about not just cross-boundary connections but also
cross-boundary disparity, divisions, antagonism and marginalization in various
overlapping ways. Most fundamentally, the disparity in the material accessibility to
media culture has not gone away in Asian regions. Internet usage in Key indicators for
Asia and the Pacific 2009, which was issued by the Asian Development Bank, shows
the fact that just 16 countries out of 47 have an Internet usage rate of more than 20%
and the number becomes 10 if we exclude the Oceanic countries and Pacific islands.
Although the development of the Internet and cheap DVDs has encouraged a wider
public consumption of various media culture from many parts of the world,
tremendous numbers of places and people do not yet enjoy even limited access to
the media culture circulation due to economic restraints.
A related crucial question is what kind of media culture is encouraged to
circulate and be mutually consumed. Media culture globalization is promoted by
transnational alliance of media culture industries, most of which are based in a small
number of industrialized countries and their profits are enjoyed largely within those
national borders (Hirst & Thompson, 1996). Similarly, the activation of inter-Asian
media culture circulation has engendered a new international hierarchy with the rise
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of subcenters such as Tokyo, Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei, Singapore, Bangkok and
Shanghai among which transnational partnerships and joint projects are facilitated.
While these are driven above all by the force of marketization, in which capital acts
freely beyond the confines of the national boundaries, this development has brought
about the establishment of an inter-Asian mass culture network, in which nationally
dominant media cultures are mutually promoted and consumed.
The kind of media texts that media culture industries promote to circulate in East
Asia are mostly commercially and ideologically hegemonic ones in each country and
thus tend not to attend well to unprofitable and socio-culturally marginalized
differences within the nation (except those of tokenized multicultural commodities).
Although the digital communication technologies have diversified grassroots cultural
expressions and mediated cross-border connections including those among marginalized
people and activistsworking for them, we still need to ask what kinds of mutual
understanding are predominantly promoted through which media texts and whose
voices and which issues are not included and/or shared in the emerging inter-Asian
cultural public sphere. This question is related to the lacuna in the studies of inter-
Asian media culture connections, which tend not to critically attend to the politics of
representation. For example, when I conducted audience research on the Korean TV
drama series Winter Sonata in Japan, or the Japanese TV drama series Tokyo Love
Story in Taiwan, the attention was paid more to how audiences positively interpret the
gender relations and love romances that are represented in the TV dramas from other
Asian societies to self-critically reflect on their own lives and societies (see Iwabuchi,
2002, 2008a). This is still a relevant research question in the studies of inter-Asian
media culture consumption, but what is missing in this investigation is the critical
analysis of the drama representations and the cross-examination of what kinds of
representation of gender relations, for example, are traversing the boundaries in East
Asia, and what are not. The issues of representation are covered up by researchers’
attention to audiences’ self-reflexive consumption. While the critical studies of queer
cultures, ethnic minorities and migrants in the media representation have been much
conducted in the national context, these are not yet well explored in the studies of
inter-Asian media culture connections. More rigorous analyses will need to be done to
examine whether and how transnationally consumed texts in East Asia do justice to
the cultural differences, inequality and marginalization of each nation in terms of
gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, region, class and migration/diasporas.
This point is related to the resilience of the national framework, which has been
engendered by the development of inter-national governance of culture. Here I put the
hyphen between the ‘inter’ and ‘national’ to highlight the reworking and strengthening
of the national in tandem with the intensification of cross-border media culture flows
(Hannerz, 1996). The development of inter-nationalismis facilitated by the trend that
‘the national’ functions as one of the most marketable and significant local units, as a
unit of commercialized and standardized cultural diversity in the glocalization
process. National cultural specificity is increasingly expressed and constituted more
and more through global mass culture formats, as suggested earlier, and this has been
accompanied by the institutionalization of what Urry (2003) calls ‘global screen’,
through which national cultures from many parts of the world are exhibited,
introduced, contrasted and made to compete with each other while being mutually
consumed, appreciated and compared in the inter-national arena. In the last twenty
years or so, there has been a substantial increase in such opportunities as sports
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spectacles, film festivals and various cultural exhibitions, and inter-Asian media
culture flows do not elude the inter-national governance of culture. Sreberny-
Mohammadi’s (1991) argument, made twenty years ago, that the framework of the
nation-state, both as a spatially-controlled entity and as a discursively-articulated
geography, is highly relevant to the analysis of media globalization is even more
pressing now.
In this context, the development of inter-Asian media culture connections not just
facilitates a self-reflexive review of self
other relations but reproduces the exclusive
conception of the nation. Inter-nationalism gets along with nationalism. On the one
hand, it takes the form of antagonistic nationalism. Recent Indonesian condemnation
of a Malaysian tourism campaign in terms of the ownership of Bali dance culture and
Chinese criticism of the distortion of historical representation in the Korean drama
series Jumong2 shows the increasing rolewhich media culture plays in the disputes over
the ownership of national culture and historical narrative. Especially pertinent is the
dispute over historical issues regarding Japanese colonialism in Asia, which still has a
strong downside for the inter-Asian dialogue. In China and Korea, many people still
think of Japan negatively due to unresolved historical issues. The Japanese government
argues for the necessity of using media culture to smooth out the anti-Japanese
sentiment in East Asia, believing that media culture is expected to improve the image
of Japan and that Korean youth who consume Japanese media culture tend to feel
more empathy with Japan. However, even though mediated cultural exchange may
improve the image of the nation, it does not eradicate the history and memory of
colonialism. Even those who love to consume Japanese media culture would consider
historical issues separately and critically (Iwabuchi, forthcoming). This attitude is a
sensible engagement with the present and the past, but an inter-Asian media culture
circulation is occasionally taken in by the nationalistic anti-Japanese movement in
China and Korea as well as by the reactive nationalistic discourse against China and
Korea in Japan. Aprominent example is the popularity of anti-Korea books in manga
form in Japan. One popular book is titled ‘anti-KoreanWave’ but its actual content is
actually not so much about the critique of Korean media cultures but more about a
strong renunciation of Korean nationalism against Japan and those Koreans resident
in Japan who allegedly support it. This shows how a growing mediated interconnectedness
under globalization has reactionarily evoked the sense of national pride and
belonging (see Liscutin, 2009).
Nationalism that is provoked by the rise of inter-nationalism also takes a banal
form. Billig (1995) argues that the permeation of national feeling is more often than
not facilitated and displayed by a mundane, banal practice. This kind of an ordinary
sense of national belonging is further promoted by the rise of inter-nationalism in
which the nation is conceived as the unit of the global cultural encounter. The increase
in the encounter with people, goods and media cultures from many parts of the world
promotes a propensity that when one discusses international mobility, encounter and
connection, one is apt to implicitly assume the cardinal existence of the delimited
national cultural boundaries to come across. Such conception of the nation as organic
cultural entity endorses and is endorsed by the contesting claims of essential cultural
ownership as mentioned above, and fails to bear in mind that national boundaries are
discursively drawn in such a way as to suppress various socio-cultural differences
within and disavow their existence as constitutive of the nation.
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This is shown when we examine how an inter-national media culture encounter
overwhelms and suppresses local multicultural politics; the ways in which banal
inter-nationalism further marginalizes nationally marginalized voices, while publicly
highlighting them in a particular manner. The above-mentioned case of an anti-
Korean Wave book in Japan suggests an awkward muddling of Korea and resident
Koreans in Japan, most of whom were born and raised there. But this confusion also
occurs in an approving consumption of the Korean Wave. Elsewhere I analyzed how
the Korean Wave had impinged on the social recognition of resident Koreans who
have long been suffering from discrimination as ethnic minorities in Japan
(Iwabuchi, 2008a). Eventually the improvement in the image of Korea due to the
popularity of Korean media cultures accompanies that of resident Koreans in Japan.
The Korean Wave thus empowers no small number of resident Koreans in terms of
cultivating a hopeful will to live as a citizen of Korean descent in Japan. Japanese
mass media, including TV drama series, also began dealing with their voices and
existence more often than before. However, the enhancement of the images of
resident Koreans in the public space is achieved within an inter-national framework,
at the expense of not recognizing them as citizens constitutive of Japanese society.
While the advance of the media culture connection between the two countries rehighlights
the demarcation of Japan
Korea national cultural borders to be traversed
in an affirmative manner, the stress on inter-national cultural exchange between the
two countries tends to make the complication of the in-betweenness and multiple
belongings that resident Koreans have experienced and negotiated in Japanese
society overlooked. Historically constituted discrimination and identity distress that
many resident Koreans have been experiencing in Japan have not been well
comprehended.3 Moreover, the positive reception of the Korean Wave tends to
make the existence and difference of resident Koreans effortlessly conflated with and
understood through the culture and people of the present Korea, making them
perceived and represented as ‘Korean nationals living in Japan’. Thus the rise of the
Korean Wave in Japan underscores anew the recognition of resident Koreans ‘in but
not of Japan’. These considerations highlight the way in which inter-national media
culture connections are implicated in the multicultural and postcolonial questions
and the national politics of inclusion and exclusion of the ethnic minorities.
Engaging the publicness of inter-Asian media culture connections
As the marketization and privatization of media cultures has been intensifying, the
notion of publicness gains a renewed significance in the study of media culture
globalization. It is imperative to put to the fore a normative research question of
critically appraising the publicness of media culture connections and their uses for
democratic purposes.
This is especially pressing now that marketized inter-nationalism is also actively
moved forward by the states’ cultural policy to promote the production and export of
national media cultures. Culture has extended its role to other spheres and become a
useful resource for various social actors, including marginalized people and NGOs, to
pursue their own political and economic interests (Yuý`dice, 2003), but what is even
more salient is the alliance of the states and (transnational) media culture industries.
For the states, media culture has come to be regarded as important politically to
enhance ‘soft power’ and ‘cultural diplomacy’, and economically for attracting global
208 K. Iwabuchi
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capital and developing creative industries. In East Asia, the best known example is the
Korean government’s policy to sell Korean media culture, which contributed to the
development of the KoreanWave (Shim, 2006). Likewise, many national governments
in East Asia such as Japan, China, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand and India are also
eager to pursue this kind of policy. They appoint pop icons and idols as cultural
ambassadors and authenticate national cuisine overseas (Iwabuchi, forthcoming). The
problem of the national branding policy lies in its ideological closure over imperative
issues of globalization, since it limits the public discussion about the promotion of
media culture to a narrow scope of national interests in the international arena at the
expense of the engagement with wider public concerns. The states’ active backing of
market-oriented globalization hinders rather than promotes the public discussion
about the crucial issues of media cultural globalization (see Iwabuchi, forthcoming).
In this context, we need to examine even more rigorously the publicness of media
culture and inter-Asian connections. One crucial issue is concerned with equality and
openness of access. Economic disparity in Internet accessibility, the international
division of new cultural labor, corporate domination of copyright, and commons of
media culture are all relevant. The right to express one’s view and the right for
difference to be respected and understood need to be guaranteed. This also involves
the politics of listening across difference (Dreher, 2009), so that no one is put in a
‘private’ situation in which his/her place in the public space is deprived as their voices
are not attended or responded to (Arendt, 1958/1998). These issues are further related
to a more difficult question of sharedness. How various emergent issues of media
culture that have been generated by market-oriented globalization can be shared and
conversed about by various people across borders is rather a challenging task.
The consideration of the publicness of media culture needs to have a scope that
goes beyond the national boundaries, since neo-liberalism’s cannibalization of the
publicness is not just a national matter. It is often argued that while the nation is still
important as a local unit of administration and regulation for the public good, the
national framework is too big and too small to handle the complex matters of
transnational flows of capital, media and people in our age, as Seyla Benhabib argues:
The nation-state is, on the one hand, too small to deal with the economic, ecological,
immunological, and informational problems created by a more interdependent
environment; on the other hand, it is too large to contain the aspiration of identitydrive
social and regionalist movements. Under these conditions, territoriality is fast
becoming an anachronistic delimitation of material functions and cultural identities.
(Benhabib, 2002, p. 180)
What is required is not post-nationalism, which tends to unconvincingly refute the
significance of the national framework, but a ‘de-national’ perspective with the
recognition that the state and the national still matter but we need to move our focus
on ‘the transformation of the national’ to engage with transnational and intra-national
issues (Sassen, 2005).
Given that state cultural policy is not well engaged with and even moving further
away from social democratization, we researchers should consider seriously how to
further advance the dialogic and participative potential of media culture connections
across various divides with the aim to construct an inclusive society at various levels:
locally, nationally, regionally and globally. This requires us not just to critically study
media culture connections in East Asia but also to pursue the active role of
Asian Journal of Communication 209
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coordinating the dialogues of various social subjects such as the governments, the mass
media, activists, NGO/NPOs and all citizens for the pursuit of a more democratic use
of culture. It seems to be time for researchers to be more actively engaged with the
institutionalization of a critical perspective in society. Towards this goal, a rigorous
and critical research on the publicness of inter-Asian media culture connections is
essential.
Notes
1. For example, it can be argued that those who are most offended by the continuing
Orientalist representations in Japan-related Hollywood films such as Memoir of a Geisha
and Lost in Translation are less people in Japan than ethnic minorities of Japanese/Asian
descent in the Western countries such as Asian Americans. See Iwabuchi (2008b).
2. I thank an anonymous reviewer for reminding me of this.
3. It should be noted that the improvement of image has only been happening to that of South
Korea. The demonizing of North Korea due to the abduction issue has been occurring
simultaneously with the positive reception of the Korean Wave. There has been a
considerable bashing against North Korea and those resident Koreans who identify
themselves with North Korea.
Notes on contributors
Koichi Iwabuchi is Professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the School of International
Liberal Studies,Waseda University, Tokyo.He hasworked on contemporary media and cultural
issues such as globalization and transnationalism, inter-Asian media connections,multicultural
questions and cultural citizenship in the Japanese/East Asian contexts. His main English
publications include: Recentering globalization: Popular culture and Japanese transnationalism
(Duke University Press, 2002), Rogue flows: Trans-Asian cultural traffic (co-edited with Mandy
Thomas and Stephen Muecke; Hong Kong University Press, 2004), East Asian pop culture:
Analyzing the Korean Wave (co-edited with Chua Beng Huat; Hong Kong University Press,
2008), He is a co-editor (with Chris Berry) of a book series by Hong Kong University
Press, TransAsia: Screen Cultures.
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