East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 1, Issue 1, 2015

In the late 1850s, western powers ‘imposed’ treaty ports on Japan, ending 200 years of Japanese near seclusion from international exchange. Western modernity and traditional Japanese society suddenly and sharply intermixed in the treaty ports. In 1860, a criminal court case was held in the Yokohama Treaty Port involving British and Japanese. The case provides a window on a Japanese early encounter with westerners and western culture. This article takes up the court case’s preliminary examination, addressing how Japanese prosecutors and witnesses engaged the culturally uncharted and potentially vexed circumstances they found themselves in.

Hatta Yoichi (1886–1942) was a Japanese engineer who designed and oversaw the construction of a massive reservoir in southern Taiwan, completed in 1930. He is a widely celebrated figure in present-day Taiwan, an island once ruled by Japan (1895–1945). Hatta is featured in books, music, manga, an animation film, a TV drama, a dance drama and a play. He has been deified; every year on 8 May, admirers flock in the hundreds to the Wushantou Reservoir to pay tribute to the famed engineer. In recent years, Wushantou has become a popular tourist attraction for both Japanese and Taiwanese. What is often overlooked, however, is the fact that Hatta, as a widely known figure, is a new discovery and modern invention; until the late 1980s, the famed engineer was virtually absent from public discourse and memory.

This article examines how Hatta is represented in present-day popular culture, as well as how his legacy has been culturally produced and consumed by different civic and political groups in both Taiwan and Japan. This study demonstrates that new meanings have been added through the ongoing process of productions and consumptions, making the Japanese engineer look very different from who he was historically.

In this article attention will be drawn to ways in which so-called ‘qianwei’ (literally, ‘avant-garde’) Chinese art of the 1980s and early 1990s can be understood to diverge from and/or reverse positions, trajectories and intentions conventionally associated with the work of the European and North American politicized avant-gardes. It shall also be argued that those divergences and reversals are informed in part by the persistence of subjective realist approaches to artistic representation within the People’s Republic of China that not only differ in intent from the western avant-garde’s signature anti-aesthetic and anti-realist use of collage-montage, but also related postmodernist framings of contemporary art as a focus for the critical deconstruction of supposedly authoritative meanings.

A generation of female queer stars has emerged in post-millennial transnational Chinese popular culture. They have amassed many female followers. Among these stars are Mainland China’s Chris Lee, Hong Kong’s Denise Ho and Taiwan’s Jing Chang. These celebrities are often characterized as ‘zhongxing’, which literally means ‘neutral sex and/or gender’, because of their non-normative gender and ambiguous sexual representation. This article aims to develop a lens to approach this emergence of queer stars and its sociocultural implications. Considering the genealogy of zhongxing and its historical relevance and taking on the reflections of Anglo-American queer theory, this article justifies the use of zhongxing over the usual English term ‘androgyny’. Recent media scholarship on Chinese queer stardom has provided an insightful entry point to this phenomenon. In this article, zhongxing is conceptualized as a sensibility for its liminal status as a non-identity category and non-sexual practice. It is ambiguous but also gradually being stabilized and shaped as specific forms of embodiment, a quest for individuality and reflexive authenticity, and an emerging queer feeling. The potentiality of zhongxing sensibility, as suggested by preliminary interview data, invites further research in the affective texture of everyday life and the transforming contours of gender and sexuality in transnational Chinese societies.

Eric Valette’s 2008 remake of Miike Takashi’s 2004 J-horror film Chakushin ari / One Missed Call calls into question a simple East/West economic and contextual binary often assumed in cases of transnational remakes, regarding the purity of an original ‘exotic’ Other and the debased, impure ‘corporate’ American remake. One Missed Call cannot be so easily placed into national cinema categories when we explore the production and financial origins of the film however, given the transnational nature of the remake’s content and production. This article explores how transnational remakes engage with transnational flows of production and influence, thinking about how transnational modernity works with what Koichi Iwabuchi terms ‘cultural odor’. The article challenges the presence of an ‘original’ in the transnational franchising of the One Missed Call films, contending that Ring (Nakata Hideo, 1998) and The Ring (Gore Verbinski, 2002) have functioned as metatexts in both Miike’s and Valette’s versions of One Missed Call. In so doing, the article examines the characteristics of transnational media production on an economic and political basis.

In the domain of popular culture since the 1990s, Japanese media has increasingly crossed regional and international borders. There has been appropriation, adaptation and remaking of many of these media products into different formats, such as manga, anime, TV drama, films and games. Products, when traded and remade across geographical boundaries, have a multidimensional aspect and potentially contribute to an evolving cultural re-engagement between Japan and Asia. This article analyses, within a sociocultural context, the significant textual and cultural elements of the iconic Japanese manga, Hana yori dango / Boys Over Flowers. Firstly, it explores how the originating manga has been adapted into TV drama formats through the process of remaking, in Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Secondly, it examines the differentiation of textual and cultural content in the three countries; and, finally, it measures audience reception within a distinct fan group. Survey questionnaires and focus group interviews are used to collate the audience reception of the texts. The article argues that the media trade, through products like Hana yori dango, is contributing to the enhancement of regional intercultural understanding beyond regional historical antipathy. The article further argues that the influence of media trade and Japanese popular culture is contributing in a positive manner to the idea of regional ‘harmony’, rather than hybridism, with the retention in Japan, Korea and Taiwan of inherent cultural values.

The manner in which manga can reflect and influence readers’ gender perceptions has been a frequently researched issue. This article is an attempt to consider those questions through language, a traditionally less-examined element, in order to shed new light on how male and female characters are used in manga. To do so, I use a linguistic corpus of ten popular shōjo-manga and shōnen-manga to look at (1) how much of the text found in speech bubbles was spoken by male and female characters; and (2) how many characters were seen. With regards to approximately 80% of all text, the corpus shows that shōnen-manga are extremely skewed towards male characters, compared to shōjo-manga, which is more balanced between female and male characters. While many more characters appear in shōnen-manga, the majority are male. Furthermore, only two female characters in all of the shōnen-manga series account for more than 10% of text, whereas all the shōjo-manga have male characters accounting for over 12%.

In examining why this might be, I suggest that the focus on interpersonal relationships – including both friendship and romance – in shōjo-manga may lead to a smaller cast of characters and better balance between male and female characters. However, with authors usually writing for their own gender, I also maintain that it is related to differences in the roles of women and men in Japanese society. These distributions also have an impact on characterization itself, particularly in regards to the use of gendered speech patterns. With insight from Kinsui’s yakuwari-go, or role-playing language (2003), I specifically argue that the results predict that shnōen-manga will use more stereotypical speech, particularly in depicting female characters. In offering supporting evidence for this hypothesis, I suggest that this may affect how readers engage with the characters, thus creating different types of reading experiences within the genres. Through this discussion, it will become clear that linguistic data can shed light into how characters are manipulated in manga on a variety of levels, thus appealing to its potential as a legitimate and unique approach to manga research.

The yueqin is a traditional stringed instrument found in East Asian and South East Asian countries. Taiwan yueqins come in various shapes with different timbres and numbers of strings. The Taiwan yueqin minyao xiehui / Taiwan Yueqin Folk Music Association, a group run by Taiwan pop-folk music icon Chen Ming-chang, annually holds Taiwan yueqin minyao ji / Taiwan Yueqin Folk Music Festival, a music festival promoting yueqin songs sung in Taiyu, the language that while is not the official language of what is still known as the Republic of China, is the native language of the Hoklo ethnic majority. Since 2012, the festival has been held held indoors in the Beitou Hot Springs Museum, a building that was constructed during the Japanese colonial period (1895–1945). Also since 2012, the festival is not purely performed by Hoklo Taiwanese. Having been introduced to an aspiring student of shamisen master Kazuo Shibutani by his own student in 2009, Chen Ming-chang now invites Shibutani and his troupe to Taiwan to perform alongside him.

Popular Culture Co-Productions and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia, Nissim Otmazgin And Eyal Ben-Ari (eds) (2013) Singapore and Kyoto: NUS Press in association with Kyoto University Press, 276 pp., ISBN 9784876983568 (paperback), £26.95

Korean Horror Cinema, Alison Peirse And Daniel Martin (eds) (2013) Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 256 pp. ISBN 9780748643097 (paperback), £19.99