East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Current Issue

Fullmetal Alchemist is a Japanese shōnen manga that is written as well as illustrated by Hiromu Arakawa. The story follows the journey of Edward Elric and Alphonse Elric as they try to regain their original physical bodies, which were altered due to a fatal alchemical procedure to revive their deceased mother. Existing critical studies on Fullmetal Alchemist primarily focus on structural elements, gender, trauma and war. However, no study has been done on the monomyth aspect of the story, and the present study aims to bridge that research gap. Joseph Campbell originally conceived the hero’s journey or ‘Monomyth’ template. However, the present article utilizes Christopher Vogler’s twelve-stage revised version of the Campbellian monomyth as the primary theoretical framework to analyse Edward Elric’s journey in the story. Moreover, critical comments from critics like Angela Drummond-Mathews, Vladimir Propp, Stuart Voytilla and others have been incorporated. Shōnen manga typically follow the hero’s journey structure, but there are exceptions as well. The present study attempts to decode whether Fullmetal Alchemist follows the hero monomyth or negates it.

This article examines the first arc (named the ‘Public Safety’ arc) of the anime and manga Chainsaw Man, focusing on the print version written and illustrated by Tatsuki Fujimoto. Although the series apparently lies on the more juvenile extreme of shonen works, this article applies Bakhtin’s carnivalesque approach, including manifestations of the grotesque, to show that the gore-splattered hero is engaged in a postmodern critique of society. Whether mocking the promoters of traditional values by kicking them in the groin or depicting grotesque amalgamations, the manga attacks the structures and norms of the modern world while elevating ‘simple’ desires and values.

This article examines repeated patterns of resolution refusal in the 2022 series Black Sun from the Japanese superhero franchise Kamen Rider. Director Kazuya Shiraishi leverages nostalgia and the self-referential nature of this 50-year franchise anniversary to offer a biting critique of contemporary Japan. Black Sun plays with, reflects on and ultimately denies the narrative and aesthetic expectations of cathartic release and melodramatic justice set up by the franchise. In doing so, it makes explicit the underlying pattern of the series, which is endless cycles and repetitions of history. Based on the combination of narrative, visual symbols and music, this article argues that Black Sun reimagines melodrama’s potential as a medium in a denial of individual feeling or even a social appeal to feeling as the basis of moral justice. Black Sun looks back to the past but points clearly to the present, being the first Kamen Rider series created for an international streaming audience. These decisions mark the release of the series as a key moment in Japanese popular culture against which popular culture’s engagement with politics and social justice issues – past and present – may be measured.

Visual kei, a Japanese rock subgenre, and K-pop have been the two most visible East Asian music fandoms in Chile since the 2000s and a critical element of the expansion of East Asian popular culture in the country. This article examines how fans of both genres have come to perform their fandom through bodily strategies within the setting of visual kei and K-pop dance parties held in Santiago, Chile. We understand identity as a performance and the dance floor as a prime site to display fandom adherence and build identities via in-person interactions. Through literature review and direct observation conducted over twelve months, this article establishes that Chilean visual kei fans perform fandom through sartorial choices. However, K-pop fans perform their fandom through imitation and repetition of dance moves. We argue that the differences in fandom strategies arise from the availability of identification models within Chilean society and the expectations set by visual kei and K-pop as genres.

From 13 to 15 January 2023, the Korean pop (K-pop) idol group Blackpink held a three-day concert in Hong Kong, the first large scale event for the city still emerging into a post-COVID normality. Based on an ethnographic participatory observation of the activities around the premise, this article seeks to draw out a more dynamic initiatives of committed individual fans or ‘fan volunteers’ in active negotiations with frontline venue managers to permit them corners for their activities. Described here as negotiated fan zones, these premises become the quasi and transient public space for more organic fan activities from distributing and selling fan merchandise as well as exhibitions and dance cover performances. Such spontaneous community gatherings have not been witnessed since the simultaneously implemented draconian National Security laws and COVID restrictions. Discussions on negotiatory practices in Fandom Studies are positioned predominately within textual readings of interpretative communities. In this respect, this article extends its scholarly trajectory towards the spatial dimensions. Framed along Henri Lefevbre’s spatial practices and Doreen Massey’s power-geometries, these negotiated K-pop fan zones arise from the affective and independent fan labour of critical place-making. If Blackpink’s official slogan ‘in your area’ represents the global commercial K-pop industry, the K-pop fan zones within the concert venues stand autonomously ‘outside your area’.

Korean television dramas (K-dramas) have become a media promotion of Korean culture to worldwide popularity, in line with the popularity of the Korean culture known as Hallyu. This article aims to explain the continuance intention to watch K-dramas using the extended theory of planned behaviour (TPB), production value and cultivation theory. Data from 406 Indonesian K-drama fans were analysed using structural equation model-partial least square (PLS-SEM) to examine construct relationships and test hypotheses. The results prove that the continuance intention to watch K-dramas is influenced by the TPB constructs, especially the attitudes towards K-dramas and Korean culture. These two constructs are influenced by the production value and frequency of watching K-dramas. The findings will assist the film industry, especially K-drama, in developing and understanding better K-drama audience behaviour to increase K-drama popularity among international audiences and encourage the marketing of Korean culture. This article is empirically the first research to develop a TPB model, production value and cultivation theory to predict the continuance intention to watch K-dramas.

Review of: Hollywood in China: Behind the Scenes of the World’s Largest Movie Market, Ying Zhu (2022)

New York: The New Press, 370 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-62097-218-2, h/bk, USD 32.99

Review of: Japan on American TV: Screaming Samurai Form Anime Clubs in the Land of the Lost, Alisa Freedman (2021)

New York: Columbia University Press, 200 pp.,

ISBN 978-1-95263-622-6, e-book, GBP 20.00