East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2020

This article investigates transnational adaptations of male Korean idol performances to Japan, focusing especially on music video performances. When marketed to Japanese audiences, these music videos are transformed and tailored to Japanese consumers. I argue that when K-pop videos become sites of transnational adaptation processes to Japanese contexts, Korean version narratives of the quotidian are elided and replaced with narratives of the fantastical. Here, quotidian designates a focus on multimodal elements that are rooted in the everyday experiences of the intended audience, while fantastical is used to describe the presentation of what is outside of everyday experience. In these videos, power is exerted not through explicit hierarchies but through the location of K-pop idols as a desirable, but nonetheless consumable and never-proximate ‘other’.

Much of the academic research on the Korean Wave has focused on transcultural hybridity, with little analysis of how the Korean Wave has challenged and reshaped the site of heterosexual masculinities among millennials. Through ethnographic and focus-group interviews, this article explicates how Taiwanese masculinities have been negotiated and constructed in response to the Korean Wave, based on both Taiwan and Korea sharing a Confucian culture that emphasizes diligence and responsibility, and the popularity of refined and sophisticated men as male role models. These localized influences have compromised the ‘hegemonic masculinity’ in the West. Various contradictory attributes of Taiwanese masculinity interact with one another, but this article elicits three themes: soft/‘wen’ masculinity, a sculptured by not excessively muscular body and male-bonding. The results illustrate how the boundaries between hegemonic and marginalized forms of masculinities in Taiwan, similar to in the West, are often more interactive than oppositional. While there are contradictory attributes respond to one another, this article illuminates how a dominant form of Taiwanese masculinities prevails among the Taiwanese male millennials. Ultimately, consumerism has significantly influenced the construction of masculinity and led to diversity in masculine discourse.

This article examines the development of the media franchise Mahō shōjo Madoka magika/Puella Magi Madoka Magica from the perspective of the growth of character media ecologies. Originating as a 2011 anime series, Madoka Magica presented a critically acclaimed narrative featuring a dark, traumatic take on the magical girl genre of media. Outside this narrative context, however, Madoka Magica has developed into a vibrant array of media products, including manga, video games, character merchandising and cross-promotional brand marketing, with little to no reference in these products to the dark context of the chronologically prior characters. Characters who were brutally killed in one context become smiling ambassadors for convenience stores in another; the monsters fought against become cohabiting associates, if not allies, between texts. By focusing on the marketing, proliferation and malleability of the Madoka Magica characters, and the brand’s evident emphasis on the characters’ affective potential outside the narrative context of the original series, this article highlights the multiplicity of characters within the brand’s officially produced media mix. Examining the production of the brand as a totality of products becomes a staging point for future analysis into character marketing more broadly, and the divergent approaches to such marketing across a global context.

In this article, the author explores the idol-phenomenon in Japanese society and, more specifically, how the relation between the idol-image and the otaku should be understood. By analysing the way in which the otaku interacts with his desired idol-image, the author is able to explain how an otaku comes to desire an idol-image and how his supportive consumption of her commodities constitutes an investment in her grand-narrative of lack. He also shows how this consumption, as driven by the otaku’s desire to desire, concerns a consumption of fantasies of the supposedly writable sexual relationship as well as a consumption of images that satisfies the scopic drive. Eventually, the author concludes that the interaction of the otaku with his desired idol-image, an interaction devoid of female subjects, remains beyond any true love whatsoever.

The study of Korean media, and K-dramas specifically, has been dominated largely by discourses surrounding the ‘Korean Wave’ and the increased popularity of South Korean popular culture abroad. More specifically, many English-language analyses have tended to focus their attention on the Korean Wave as an analytical framework, thus failing to acknowledge the ways in which these texts address domestic audiences and societal issues specific to South Korea. Thus, little attention has been paid to more implicit representations of the nation and its past in these K-dramas, a particularly noteworthy oversight when we consider that melodrama, a distinctly reflexive genre, is the governing mode of many contemporary K-dramas. Thus, this article aims to demonstrate the multiplicity of meanings that can exist within these media texts, paying particular attention to the reflexive capacities of the melodramatic mode. Through the examination of two case studies, Ireland and Descendants of the Sun, this article will discuss the ways in which shifting inter-Korean relations have been articulated in both dramas through sociopolitical contextualization and narrative analysis. This article will examine the use of foreign places and foreign crises in these dramas, and demonstrate their capacity to function as arenas for the expression and exploration of national trauma relating to the Korean war and the division of the Korean peninsula. This article aims to demonstrate that despite the increasing hybridization of Asian media, it remains important to analyse the relationship between K-dramas and domestic audiences in order to better understand the ways in which they address and work through significant social and political concerns for South Korean audiences.

Review of: The White Book, Han Kang (2017) (trans. Deborah Smith)

Cornwall: Portobello Books, 128 pp.,

ISBN 978-0-525-573, p/bk, $11.56