Inter-Asia Cultural Studies
ISSN: 1464-9373 (Print) 1469-8447 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/riac20
Editorial introduction: American pop culture
Beng Huat Chua & Younghan Cho
To cite this article: Beng Huat Chua & Younghan Cho (2012) Editorial introduction: American
pop culture, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 13:4, 485-494, DOI: 10.1080/14649373.2012.717596
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2012.717596
Published online: 10 Sep 2012.
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Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, Volume 13, Number 4, 2012
Editorial introduction: American pop culture
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CHUA Beng Huat and Younghan CHO
Soon after the ex-colonies of European and Japanese imperial powers in Asia began to achieve
independence after the end of the Second World War in 1945, Asia was plunged into the Cold
War. Many of the new nations were transformed into frontline states as proxies of Western
liberal democracy—the so-called ‘free world’ led by the US—against the encroachment of
an expanding communism, which received covert support from Communist China and the
Soviet Union. The Cold War was in fact a ‘very hot war’ in Asia. Every newly independent
postcolonial nation in Southeast Asia, with the exception of Singapore, fought a civil/insurgency war with its respective home grown communist party. In each of these instances, the
US played either a covert or open role in supporting anti-communist fractions.
In China, the Chinese Communist Party (PRC) ousted the republican Kuomingtang
(KMT), which decamped to the island of Taiwan in 1949. In the Korean peninsula, the
early 1950s’ Korean War between American-led allied forces and communist forces from
Russia and the PRC ended with an armistice that divided the nation into a communist
north and a capitalist south; no peace treaty has been signed to formally end this conflict.
Even today, the north–south Korea division and relations between the PRC and Taiwan
across the Taiwan Strait remain tense, reminding all that the Cold War is not yet truly
over in Asia. In Vietnam, a protracted civil war between a communist north and a capitalist
south followed immediately from the defeat of the French colonial regime. The north prevailed, enabling the unification of the country under the Vietnamese Communist Party in
1973. In all these violent conflicts, America, the superpower, became directly and indirectly
engaged, providing financial, intelligence and military support to the capitalist side of the
conflict. The struggles of the non-communist Southeast Asian nations—Thailand, Indonesia,
Malaysia and Singapore—to establish political and economic sovereignty, economic development and national identity for their respective peoples opened these nations up to the financial aid and political and security influences of the US. America, the postwar leader of the
non-communist world, progressively became a pervasive and influential force, replacing
the defeated colonial European powers in the region.1
The American presence in East Asian pop cultures is a collateral of its immanent economic and military presence. Since the 1950s, the US has crafted its regional strategic influence
partly through the promotion of cultural understanding of America, including wide dissemination of American academic and pop culture throughout the region. Under the supervision
of the American military administration and financial support, governments in Japan, Korea
and Taiwan installed broadcasting and entertainment systems that embraced American
formats, programs and operating rationales. These broadcasts played crucial role in both
anti-communist propaganda and constructing new national ideologies in these countries.
In addition, as the US was perceived as the ‘modern’ world, American pop culture, seen as
encoded with symbols and desires of modern life or modern style, became popular with
East Asian consumers (Yoshimi 2003, 2006).
As pop cultures became pervasive in the everyday life of people throughout industrializing Asia, governments became wary of the influence of American pop culture, which was
brought in with American economic assistance. They objected to the perceived liberal and
ISSN 1464-9373 Print/ISSN 1469-8447 Online/12/040485–10 © 2012 Taylor & Francis
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14649373.2012.717596
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individualistic ideologies and permissiveness and tolerance in issues of sexuality and violence within the pop culture. They pointed to American-influenced Asian pop culture as
proof of the decay of society’s moral and ethical standards, which in turn threatened social
stability and governance. However, the patronizing attitudes of the governments, which
belittles the intellectual capabilities of their own citizens, collided with the latter’s enthusiastic
embrace of American pop culture. Consequently, in spite of the hostility of the governments
toward American pop cultural influences, the mass appeal of American pop culture was
unmistakable; from Hollywood’s influence on Asian moviemaking to American rock
music’s influence on Asian pop music and Asian fandom to American sports. Indeed, penetration of the East Asian region was part of the growing global dominance of American
pop culture as mass entertainment, crossing all national and cultural boundaries worldwide.
After 60 years of steady interaction, the presence of American pop culture in Asian pop
culture production and consumption can on longer be untangled or extricated. Obviously, the
degree and ways of how local culture interacts with American pop culture vary across the
national geographies and historical periods. The perception and reception of it in Asia also
change over time, from new and curious to degenerate, contaminating and corrosive, to eventually ordinary, unremarkable. Today it is often difficult to discern the boundaries of American elements in some Asian pop culture (Yoshimi 2000; Ang 2004).
Studies on American cultural presence in East Asia
To date, with few exceptions, the field of Asian cultural studies has not examined the variegated history of America’s presence and influence across the region. Discussions tend to be
confined within national space in national language, rather than sharing and accumulating
individual studies on the regional level.2 There is thus a need for regional and comparative
analysis. In preparation for such an interrogation, it is necessary to review several pioneering
works on American cultural presence in East Asia. Broadly, research on American influence
can be categorized into two conceptually and substantively interactive foci: One situates the
influence within the modernization processes, including the construction of modern identities; the other traces direct and indirect impacts of American influence on everyday lives
and consumer culture.
In the modernization perspective, America functions as the superior Other, the ultimate
reference point in the construction of modern Asian subjectivities. Chen (2001: 84) asserts,
‘“America” as cultural imaginary has since the mid-nineteenth century never been outside
“Asia”’. This referencing became explicit and pervasive after the Second World War.
During the Cold War period, beginning in the early 1950s, the material power of the US
made it the central object of identification. In everyday life throughout Asia, ‘American
systems of representation and modes of living infiltrated the space of the national-popular
imaginary, and redirected its flows of psychic desire and cultural energy’ (Chen 2001: 85–
86). Thus, Chen (2001: 86) contends that America had not only been a force outside us but
lives within our subjectivity, as America has become ‘the dominant frame of reference’ of
Asian self-legitimation. For instance, the US—not Philippines, Korea or Japan—is constantly
cited as the exemplar to validate claims for democracy in Taiwan.
Japan’s position as the most modernized nation in Asia has compelled many Japanese
scholars to examine the nation’s relation with America. Focusing on the positions of Japanese
intellectuals toward America, Furuya (2006: 192) shows that since 1854, the United States has
been the ‘indispensable measuring rod for reaffirming Japan’s international status and its
place in world history.’ He argues, as a polity the United States influenced how the ‘founding
fathers’ of the Meiji period (1868–1912) understood the goals of the modern Japanese state.
After the Second World War, new features of American pop culture, such as jazz music
and ballroom dancing also began to reshape Japanese urban customs and sensibilities.
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Introduction: American pop culture
487
American pop culture, coupled with the mass production system, spurred Japan’s rapid
development of industry and mass consumption. Furuya (2006: 192–193) suggests that
Japan’s path to modernity since 1853 be defined as a process by which Japan’s ‘politics, economics, and society and culture have been “Americanized.”’
During the 1950s, America became a model of lifestyle consumption in Japan and was
presented as the ideals to be emulated and performed by Japanese families. On the other
hand, for the young, America ‘was a symbol of “emancipation” and “resistance”’. From
areas around the American military bases, such as Roppongi and Harajuku, ‘youth subculture of jazz, rock-‘n’-roll, and comics’ spread into other urban entertainment districts
(Yoshimi 2000: 208). In contrast to this celebration of ‘America’ was the concurrent presence
of an explicit ideological anti-Americanism, which was already present in pre Second World
War days. However, whereas anti-Americanism was a right-wing ideology pre Second World
War, in the post-war years it was the sentiment of left-wing politicians and intellectuals. Two
Americas thus appeared in Japan: one is America as a symbolic object of positive identification and consumption; the other is America as an embodiment of violence and an object
of protest (Yoshimi 2000: 209). The two became divided in the 1970s when American military
bases were moved to Okinawa.
Immediately after the end of the Second World War, Okinawa came under American
occupation and it was decided then that it would be a permanent site for American military
bases. It served as a very important American military base during the Vietnam War. In 1969,
a joint-declaration between the US and Japan supposedly worked out a path for its return to
the administrative control of Japan. However, little concrete steps were taken. In 1995, protest
erupted in response to an incident in which a girl was raped by two American Marines. The
Japanese government responded with plans for the promotion of economic activity on the
island. In the following year it was announced that the American base at Futenma would
be relocated to Nago, also within Okinawa Prefecture. Although the plan was rejected by
the residents, both the then mayor and governor of Nago accepted the relocation plan.
According to Japanese critic Tomiyama (2003: 416), this relocation was ‘no more than a
continuation of what happened 40 years ago’, despite the 1969 declaration and the Japanese
government’s promise for economic development of the island.
Back on the Japanese main islands, with the military facilities moved, ‘America’ became
relatively invisible in the urban areas; ‘America’ was sanitized as an image consumed
through the media; ‘America’ appeared as a ‘seducing presence in the everyday consciousness’ (Yoshimi 2003: 438).3 By the 1970s, however, more than two decades of rapid economic
growth and equally rapid accumulation of household goods and other objects of consumption left the Japanese feeling that ‘they were no longer poorer than their American counterparts’ (Yoshimi 2000: 210); the latter was until then ‘the superior mirror’ against which
Japan ‘reconstruct[s] its own identity’ (Yoshimi 2003: 449). From the 1970s, according to
Yoshimi, ‘America’ as a symbol underwent a transformation, exemplified by the phenomenal
success of Tokyo Disneyland (TDL) in the late 1980s: ‘The fact that TDL can draw such large
numbers of people is largely based on the power of a system which offers up for consumption
various self-images within a commercial landscape, not on simply making direct references to
“America”’ (Yoshimi 2000: 210), the ‘self-images’ are the Japanese’s very own, as Disneyland
in Tokyo is more a simulacra of the commercial areas such as Shibuya in Tokyo. That is, contemporary Japan was already ‘Disneyfied’ before the actual arrival of TDL.
In South Korea, the issue of American presence has been discussed in terms of modernization from the post-Japanese-colonial period to the present. In her study of the construction
of subjectivities during this period, Yoo (2001: 423) suggests that America continuously provided in fragmentary manner, ‘the way to visualize the modern—gestures, expressions, body
movements, and poises and accents—as well as how to express it with new terms, human
relations and values.’ She highlights three dimensions of American influence in this
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Chua Beng Huat and Younghan Cho
process: first, America in the imaginary/fantastic dimension was conceived as the richest
nation in the world as well as a gentleman-like brotherly nation that had no intention to
occupy, but rather to help weak countries to achieve independence. Second, America
showed the way to modernization of the daily lives of Korean people. Here, missionary
work by American churches promoted the image of America as a benefactor and contributor
of Korea’s modernization, while a new woman was usually depicted as one who could speak
English, read the bible and chanted hymns. Finally, America as Hollywood movies and jazz
sounds, which captured the fantasy of urban youth as well as intellectuals, stood as visual
symbolic images of modernity.
Beyond Japan and South Korea, where actual American military presence within their
national territories continues, American influence can be located in routine consumer
culture. Looking specifically at McDonalds, the fast food hamburger restaurant, in Singapore,
Chua pays attention to two separate processes of ‘McDonaldization’. From a production
point, it ‘stands for the continuing rationalization … of the process of mass production’
and, from a cultural standpoint, it ‘often stands as a US “imperial export”’ (Chua 2000:
185). He suggests that the ubiquity of McDonalds everywhere in Asia ‘normalizes’ its presence, reduces it to the quotidian4 and, in terms of cultural consumption, the fantasy of American-ness might be very low, even if not completely absent. The extent to which the ubiquity
of items of mass consumption still symbolizes ‘America’ would depend largely on whether
location of consumption has already attained a relatively American standard of living or
whether this standard remains a point of local aspiration.
As the US has been globally dominant in the mass entertainment industries, pop culture
traffic between Asia and America is inevitable. This is best illustrated by the Hong Kong film
industry and the increasingly common adaptations of American TV formats in Asian programming (Keane et al. 2007). Marchetti and Tan (2007) observe that as a result of Hollywood’s influence, the Hong Kong film industry has been more globally (inter-) connected
since the 1980s. Hong Kong’s vertically integrated studio systems have been transformed
into highly individualized brand-name productions, post-1980. This change requires Hong
Kong cinema to move between dictates of Hollywood’s aggressive forays into the Asian
market and fashions of the international festival circuits, between Hollywood-styled commercial genres and art-house cinema. Nevertheless, although Hollywood is a hegemonic
force, the rise of other Asian cinemas, such as Korean and Thai, continue to demand their
due in the global film market and, in the television industry, there has emerged a loosely integrated East Asian regional cultural economy, namely Japan, Korea, Hong Kong, PRC and Singapore, for which America is not a necessary point of reference (Chua 2004).
American influence in East Asian pop culture
In the above review of some existing analysis of the East Asian context, it is apparent that
American cultural influence can be found in everyday consumer practices in goods and
media entertainment. In his attempt to theorize the concept of Americanization in this
volume, Allen Chun first reviews the modes through which Americanization has been conceptualized in existing literature; specifically, the relevance of culture to Americanization; the
nature of Americanization as a sociologizing process; the hegemony of Americanization as a
cultural industry; and the nature of global-local flows. He then suggests two possibilities of
how to think ‘Americanization’ in the propagation, circulation and consumption of mass
culture. One is to assume Americanization as a conscious political-ideological desire of the
US to influence local culture and then examine how the latter is changed by it. Alternatively,
one examines historically how an American cultural practice is introduced, gets insinuated
and absorbed by the local and makes it one of their own, albeit the practice continues to
be identifiably American.
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We can expand the two-way approach to four-fold possibilities of influence: (1) the US
government consciously sought to inject American culture into an Asian location, such as
during the period of military administration of Japan immediately after the war; (2) the
expansion of US mass consumer and entertainment industry into Asian locations is economically driven, without explicit government interventions; i.e., US global domination of mass
consumer and entertainment industries is the result of its capitalists having invested in
mass consumer culture since the turn of the century, ahead of capitalists everywhere else
in the world, and continuing to do so (Cross 1993); (3) American ‘way of life’, mediated
and represented to Asians through different mass media, is appropriated by different
groups in Asian locations as the idea of the ‘modern’, particularly as a means to disrupt
the constraints of local traditions; and (4) the ideologically conscious resistance, with or
without local government effort, to things ‘American’ in particular Asian locations, conventionally expressed through the ‘demonization’ of American cultural influence as corrupting
and corrosive to wholesome Asian traditions. Of course, the divisions between these four possibilities are not hard and fast and each instance of examining one main focus is likely to blur
into others at the edges.
Analytically, one should not only distance oneself from the easy demonization of American cultural presence and influence but also from the uncritical, enthusiastic embrace and
consumption of American culture within a reductionist dichotomy of Asia-America, or generically East-West. What should be mobilized is the by now commonplace concept of an
‘active’ consumer who is not a cultural dope that is led blindly by the cultural commodities
producers but one who actively reworked the objects of consumption into his/her own horizons of relevance. Substantively, one needs to examine the active processes of mimicry,
appropriation and incorporation, and contestation and resistance against American influence, all of which are transformative of Asian pop culture, through empirical studies of cultural practices in national and regional spaces and different historical times. Such a
conceptual and substantive move enables us to deconstruct the ‘Asia/Asian’ pop culture
sphere and show it as a hybrid space that it is; one that is open to other influences so as to
reinvent, rejuvenate and remake itself.
It is well-nigh impossible for the comparative study of all active consumption processes
across different objects and times of analysis to be undertaken by a single scholar who is able
to traverse not only national-spatial boundaries but also cultural-linguistic barriers across the
whole of East Asia. Collaborations among researchers working in different locations and in
different fields of pop and consumer cultures are essential. This collection of work brings
together analyses that examine, historically, American pop and consumer cultural penetration, interaction, appropriation and articulation with the production and consumption
practices of culture industries in different locations across the cultural geography of East
Asia. Each contribution develops from empirical research in the field to critically examine
the complex connections and interactions between a particular area of American and local
cultural practices; together they unveil the contextually variable and multi-layered features
of contact between American and Asian pop cultural practices. As our motivation is to initiate
comparative studies of the phenomenon across the region, the following introduction to the
individual contributions is aimed at bringing some of the points of comparison to relief,
rather than in the sequential order of their appearance.
The essays
American pop culture influence through the diffusion of mass entertainment products—pop
music and movies—in Asia was already noticeable long before the Second World War and
the subsequent escalation of the American presence as a super power in the region.
Indeed, American pop music was already present in Japan even at an early period. From
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Chua Beng Huat and Younghan Cho
the late 1920s, Japanese pop music was adopting American pop musical scores but replacing
the English lyrics completely with Japanese language and idioms. Examining Japanese
popular music between the late 1920s and the Second World War, Pope suggests that one
of the elements that determine which American songs got selected for such re-scripting
was reference to places or cultures that mainstream America considered exotic, such as
Hawaii, China, Arabia and Cuba. This ‘imported exoticism’ via American music was then
creatively reworked by Japanese musicians in accordance with Japanese aesthetics and
culture. This process of replacing American-English (and other foreign language lyrics)
with local language and idioms has become the conventional practice in Asia because,
unlike film and TV programs, translating and dubbing the lyrics while still maintaining
the musical rhythm is impossible. In such instances, the appropriation and incorporation
of American pop culture emerged from local initiatives rather than any explicit American
ideological motive or intervention.
In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War and the subsequent unfolding of the
Cold War, with its troops stationed in South Korea, Japan, Taiwan and the Philippines, American presence was unavoidably highly visible. So too were its cultural influence in these
locations. In Japan, the US military administration, under General Douglas MacArthur, the
Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP), undertook initiatives to democratize the
Japanese polity. Matsuda shows that this push for democratization generated significant political benefit for Japanese women, enabling them to claim greater gender equality within a very
patriarchal society. Without prompting from the military administration, American women
and their everyday life were regularly featured in a plethora of women’s magazines published
during that period, transforming them into representations of ‘modern’ women, implicitly or
explicitly recommending them as role models to be emulated by Japanese women as a way
towards the ‘modern’ womanhood. In similar circumstances of American military presence,
Chun examines the arrival, institutionalization and consumption of American pop music in
Taiwan through an analysis of the complex institutional history of the only English language
radio station, which was initially established by the American military to serve its own community. Taiwanese youth who were the primary audience of the stations were motivated by a
range of different reasons, from politically motivated reception of foreign news as resistance
against the Taiwanese military regime, to the learning of the English language for personal economic benefits. Ironically, the American military presence had indirect, politically progressive
effects against local patriarchal and military regimes, respectively.
Another arena of expansion of US cultural presence in the everyday life of Asians is in
sports, baseball in Korea via Japan and basketball in the Philippines. According to Cho, baseball was introduced as early as 1905 in Korea by American missionaries but became popular
only during the Japanese colonization (1910–1945). This popularity was extended during the
Cold War period, which saw an intensified American presence in Korea. For Cho, the popularity of baseball among Koreans can thus be read as the ongoing relations with their past
colonizers. The efforts by US’s Major League Baseball (MLB) to globalize the sport, including
incorporating Asian talents in the league, have turned baseball into the most popular spectator sport in Korea. Focusing on MLB online fandom in South Korea, Cho found that the
Korean fans were promulgating their own national narratives around MLB and its Korean
players. For example, given the historical status of America as the ‘modern’ Other, the
success of a Korean player at the MLB would inspire euphoria (or nostalgia) on the part of
the Korean fans as having successfully overcome crisis, for both self and the nation. Cho
suggests that such specific habits and interaction of Korean MLB fans continued to forge
the game of baseball with, and into, their nationalism, and in so doing, these fans were creating a new national pastime.
Away from a direct military presence, as in the case of Korea and Taiwan, the US continued its ideological battle against communism in covert ways throughout the entire Cold War
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Introduction: American pop culture
491
period. It provided financing and technical support for the establishing of local national
media institutions, such as the setting up of the television industry in South Korea and
Taiwan, obviously with the aim of using the industry to disseminate anti-communist propaganda throughout Asia. Hong Kong, a British colony at the edge of the emerging Communist
China, was naturally an important location in the ideological battle between communism and
the US-led ‘free world’, at the beginning of the Cold War in the 1950s. This was where direct
anti-communist propaganda was to be injected to keep communism at bay. Leary exposes
this ideological machination through his close analysis of the correspondence between the
Committee on Free Asia, a US Central Intelligence Agency funded organization that was subsequently renamed the Asia Foundation, and the short-lived Asia Pictures, a Hong Kong film
production company run by a Chinese exile with anti-Communist sentiments. Besides financial assistance, the Asia Foundation arranged for Hollywood experts to critique and advise
Asian Pictures on filmmaking and to monitor the content and scope of film productions.
The CIA’s selection of Hong Kong as the location for using film as a propaganda medium
was, of course, in part determined by the fact that Hong Kong was the centre for Chinese film
production from the 1950s till 1980s, although it has been in a slow decline since the 1990s. In its
heyday, it was one of the major film production centers in the world and its films, particularly in
the martial arts genre, had circulated globally. Unsurprisingly, this film industry had also provided professional opportunities for American and other actors from the West—the gweilo and
gweimui (literally, ‘white-ghosts’ men and women)—who lived and worked in Hong Kong.
Morris examines the career of Cynthia Rothrock, an American woman who enjoyed a successful career in the male-dominated action films genre in Hong Kong cinema during the mid1980s, as an illustrative instance of the contribution of foreign actors to the transnational
dimensions of the Hong Kong film industry, while simultaneously adding another dimension
to complicate the idea of ‘American’ influence in Asian pop cultures.
Since late 1978, when China began to marketize its economy, and the collapse of the
Berlin Wall a decade later, the belligerent rhetoric of the Cold War has largely subsided
across the world. China’s entry into global capitalism has transformed it into a location for
US capitalist investments, trade partners and a supplier of cheap consumer goods. The
rapid rise of its capitalist economy has also transformed it into potentially a future global
power that can confront the US. With this potential equalization of international relations,
the idea of ‘Americanization’ of China (and the rest of Asia) might have run its course.
Thus, instead of the ‘Americanization’ of China, the latter has become of object of curiosity
to ordinary Americans who want to ‘know’ China. A mode of this learning is via the Internet.
The Internet television show, ‘Sexy Beijing,’ written/created by an ‘inquisitive’ American
woman who resides in contemporary China, includes interviews with Chinese, bits of the
producer’s memoir, journalist reporting and micro analysis of China’s rapidly globalizing
economy. According to Ford, this show, by foregrounding Chinese interviewees’ comments
and opinions not only on things Chinese but also on American issues, is a site for Americans
—the audience of the show—to know China. Ford suggests that this show exemplifies the
two-way process of cultural flows across the Pacific where the ‘inquisitive American
woman’ performs a role as cultural insider/outsider seeking to enhance Americans’ understanding of the complexity of contemporary Chinese society, even as she becomes, arguably,
less ‘American’ in the process.
Conclusion
As Morris (2004: 253) points out, the opposition of West/non-West is ‘now becoming an
obstacle to analysis as distinct from network-building in intra-Asian cultural studies.’ In
this collection of analysis of pop cultural practices in different medium and different locations
in Asia, we eschewed the ideologically interested West–and-the-Rest paradigm to investigate
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Chua Beng Huat and Younghan Cho
how East Asian pop cultural practices reworked the American influence into its own,5
demonstrating that Asian pop culture is neither antithetical to nor mere reproductions of
American pop culture. These case studies, drawn from different mediums and locations in
Asia, embrace the complex dynamics among regional cultural industries and the local consumers, illustrating the multiplicity and mutability of Asian sensibilities, which are always
unfinished, always being made and remade via their interaction with pop cultures from elsewhere. This compels us to examine the ways and modes by which East Asian pop culture has
historically and continuously opened itself up to influences from outside the region, and
outside the continent. This openness is all the more necessary to move East Asian pop
culture towards becoming regional and global.
Enabled by advancements in telecommunications technologies, strong regional pop cultures in Asia have been emerging: Bollywood in south Asia, Thai pop music in mainland
Southeast Asia, Malay language-Islamic themed pop music in island Southeast Asia and
East Asian pop cultures in northeast Asia. Focusing on East Asia pop culture as an illustration, there has always been a constant flow of films and pop music in different Chinese
languages—particularly Mandarin, Cantonese and Hokkien—within the ethnic Chinese communities in the region, with Hong Kong as the center of film production. In the 1990s, Japanese television dramas featuring trendy young urbane professionals living highly
consumerist lifestyles in contemporary Tokyo became the rage throughout East Asia. Japanese pop music also attracted its aficionados throughout the region (Iwabuchi 2004). In the
early 2000s, Japanese drama was followed and displaced by Korean dramas. The speed
with which Korean dramas and related pop cultures were consumed was so rapid that
their arrival was dubbed by PRC commentators as the ‘Korean Wave’, a term/concept that
was immediately adopted by all.
The wide circulation of different regional pop cultural products is indicative of changing
trends in tastes and sensibilities, revealing emerging shared structures of feeling among the
regional audiences. It has generated a new ‘contact zone’ for the audiences ‘to find an interest
in my/our neighbors and to reflect upon both them and myself who have been “othered” for
so long in modern history’ (Cho 2005: 179). People who were once separated by geography
and/or history of colonization and violence, who were unknown and therefore indifferent to
each other or bear animosity towards each other on account of past contacts, now enjoy the
same pop cultures, enabling them to imagine each other’s communities, to share conversations and to know each other better, recognizing differences and sameness among themselves, reflected in the intermittent processes of identification and distancing from what is
on screen in the process of viewing.
Conceptually and substantively, the emergence of regional pop culture trends demonstrates that American pop culture is no longer a single or even necessarily the primary reference point in Asian pop culture but is just part of a mix of possible references for East Asian
pop culture producers. Within the current, perhaps understandable, celebratory mood in
announcing the arrival of regional Asian pop cultures, indeed even a global presence as in
the case of Korean pop music and Chinese films, juxtaposed and contesting for spaces
with the globally dominant American pop culture, it would serve well to remind ourselves
of historical and ongoing relations between the two pop cultures. The intensifying regional
flows make it imperative to examine the effects of its juxtaposition to American pop
culture as a new configuration in the Asian pop culture sphere and as part of the process
of the globalization of mass entertainment.
Notes
1. Chen (2001) suggests that a direct relation between an older kind of colonialism and new Cold War structures existed in Asia after 1945.
Introduction: American pop culture
493
2. For instance, in South Korea, a book entitled Americanization (2008) contains articles written in Korean for
Korean academic audiences; we suspect that there are similar texts in other countries.
3. Yoshimi (2003) furthers his thesis on Americanization into Asia by examining the decolonization processes
in various Asian countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and the Philippines, when many parts of Asia were
incorporated into the Cold War and became part of the structure of American hegemony.
4. As an example, Chua (2000) shows that the particular use of McDonald’s as a study space ‘familiarises’ it, in
the senses of being familiar and familial.
5. In a similar way, Iwabuchi et al. (2004: 9) argue that ‘we still tend to think of global-local interactions by how
the non-West responds to the West and to neglect the non-West countries “rework” modernities.’
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Authors’ biographies
Chua Beng Huat is Research Leader, Cultural Studies in Asia Research Cluster, Asia Research Institute; Convener Cultural Studies Programmes and Head, the Department of Sociology, National University of Singapore.
His publications include: as author, Life is Not Complete without Shopping and, as editor, Elections as Popular
Culture in Asia, (co-editor, Chen Kuan-Hsing) Inter-Asia Cultural Studies Reader, (co-editor, Koichi Iwabuchi)
East Asia Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave (2008).
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Chua Beng Huat and Younghan Cho
Contact address: Department of Sociology, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore, AS1 #03-06, 11 Arts Link, Singapore 117570
Younghan Cho is an assistant professor in Graduate School of International and Area Studies at Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, Korea. He received his PhD degree in Communication Studies from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and was a postdoctoral fellow in the Asia Research Institute at National
University of Singapore. His research interests include media and cultural studies, global sports and nationalism, and Internet ethnography in Asian contexts. His papers have appeared in numerous journals, including
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies (2008), Media, Culture & Society (2009), Sociology of Sport Journal (2009) and Cultural
Studies (2011).
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Contact address: Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Graduate School of International and Area Studies,
270 Imun-dong, Dongdaemun-gu, Seoul 130791, South Korea