This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations.
Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional conflict and reconciliations between Japan and Korea. Its contributors link several key areas of interest in East Asian Studies, including conflicts over historical memories and cultural production, grassroots challenges to state ideology, and the consequences of digital technology in Japan and South Korea.
Taking recent discourse on Japan and South Korea as popular cultural superpowers further, this book expands its focus from mainstream entertainment media to the lived experience of daily life, in which sentiments and perceptions of the "popular" are formed. It will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese and Korean studies, as well as film studies, media studies and cultural studies more widely.
Chapter 3 of this book is freely available as a downloadable Open Access PDF at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.
Stephen Epstein is the Director of the Asian Languages and Cultures Programme at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and served as the 2013-14 President of the New Zealand Asian Studies Society. He has published widely on contemporary Korean society, literature and popular culture and translated numerous pieces of Korean and Indonesian fiction, including the novels Who Ate Up All the Shinga? by Park Wan-suh (Columbia University Press, 2009), The Long Road by Kim In-suk (MerwinAsia, 2010) and Telegram by Putu Wijaya (Lontar Foundation, 2011). He has co-produced two documentaries on the Korean indie music scene, Us & Them: Korean Inidie Rock in a K-pop world (2014) and Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community (2002). He co-edited Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia (Monash University Publications, 2010) and The Korean Wave: A Sourcebook with Yun Mi Hwang (Academy of Korean Studies Press, 2016).
Rumi Sakamoto is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, the University of Auckland, and is convenor of Asian Studies, Chinese, Japanese and Korean programmes. She has published widely on Japanese popular culture, nationalism and war memory. She is a co-editor of Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan (Routledge 2006) and Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge 2014). Her current research looks at cultural representations of kamikaze pilots and Self-Defense Forces in postwar Japan.
