earticle

영어

Popular culture in Asia, including music, is intensely transnational, involving not only exchanges with the West, but also the traffic of regional popular musics between Asian countries. The dynamics of intra-Asian popular cultural flows, however, are much more complicated and locality-specific than it may first appear to be. In this essay I address the contrast in pop musical “flows” between Japan and Korea.
Recently the popular press has made much of the Korean Wave (the demand throughout Asia for Korean popular cultural products, including music). This has, indeed, been an important new development, an area that scholars have begun to document and interpret. However, the coverage is distorting, suggesting that Korea is replacing Japan as the main trend-setter in Asia. Japan’s continuing and substantial influences throughout Asia, and on contemporary Korean popular culture in particular, have been rather intentionally underestimated, I argue, and Korea’s recent influences in Japan have been exaggerated and overvalued.
More specifically, the nature of Korean popular musical presence in Japan is categorically different from the Japanese presence in Korea. Korean pop music undergoes a process of “repackaging” by the Japanese music industry, rendering it, while not completely “de-Koreanized,” substantially “Japanized.” In contrast, Japanese pop is imported and consumed in Korea mostly “as is,” suggesting that Korean audiences relish new Japanese sounds and images in ways that are not reciprocated as Japanese encounter pop from Korea. I illustrate these contrasts with examples of recent pop from both countries and interpret them in light of the troubled history of Korea-Japan relations.