East Asian Journal of Popular Culture - Online First

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.

K-pop groups and artists have been localized to appeal to the lucrative Japanese market since the early 2000s. However, the two successful girl groups, TWICE and Iz One, exhibit a new direction in K-pop, by being members of both Korean and Japanese origin within the same groups. By drawing upon the literature on localization strategies and contentious Japan–Korea relations, ethnographic fieldwork and media sources, this article examines two locations in Tokyo in which K-pop consumption takes place. Contrary to the polarization tendencies that signify current Japan–Korea relations in the political realm, the gendered K-pop spaces and Japan–Korea collaborations such as Iz One signify benign hybridity and localization.

In SMAP’s post-break-up social media output, there was a shift in the kind of masculinity embodied by the performers: from the beautiful, sexually desirable mode of masculinity associated with their Heisei heyday to a more vulnerable mode of masculinity that emphasized intimacy and authenticity. I call this more recent mode of masculinity ‘entrepreneurial masculinity’, drawing on Akiko Takeyama’s study of male hosts, who use romance, emotion and intimacy to connect with customers. From an object of desire, particularly sexual desire, the male body changes to an entity associated with vulnerability. This article explores different kinds of vulnerability in SMAP’s post-break-up output, particularly in social media posts by member Katori Shingo: vulnerability to loneliness, vulnerability to social and economic precarity and vulnerability to violence. This shift with regard to the body and masculinity in idol culture reflects trends of increased social and economic precarity in neo-liberal Japan.

What does humour do to us and our relationship with the society? This article examines political humour in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and asks how hegemony is mediated through political humour in China. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) of two Spring Festival Gala sketches, 春晚小品 (‘chunwan xiaopin’), is applied not only for its ontological fit with the literature of hegemony but also because of its potential to unravel the hidden power relations. I argue for the social and psychological significance of xiaopin to the general public because they reveal the fragility of the intellectual hierarchy that places the rural population at the bottom, play with the heavy historical episode of the Great Leap Forward, and create the illusion of empowerment. Furthermore, it reveals that humour can be subversive on the textual level and simultaneously hegemonic on the discursive level.

The 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics birthed a cultural phenomenon in China: Eileen Gu, an 18-year-old half-white, half-Chinese ‘skiing genius’ who left the United States to join team China. In this article, I explore the ways in which Gu’s online presence informs understandings about class, women, race, ‘Chineseness’ and the complex entanglement of the neo-liberal self and collective nation. First, I provide an introduction to sports nationalism and neo-liberal feminism to situate Gu in the post-socialist neo-liberal Chinese context. Then, I turn to Gu’s social media posts, self-made videos and online commercials during the Winter Olympics. I argue that Gu is presented within (1) a neo-liberal feminist moment characterized by individual empowerment and (2) a nationalist and cosmopolitan moment framed by the national pride towards her and her self-framing of a flexible citizenship and ‘apolitical Chineseness’. I conclude that the ‘Eileen Phenomenon’ is an illustrative instance of the shifting demarcations in a global political economic field, in which a desirable Chinese identity and a marketable femininity are both crucial for the Chinese state under globalization. Gu’s case shows that the interplay and contradiction of the neo-liberal self and the nationalist collective continue to play out in contemporary Chinese culture and society.