Asia’s Transformations. London and New York: Routledge, 2022. 214 pp. (B&W photos, illustrations.) US$48.95, paper. ISBN 9780429399558.
Beginning from the idea that “consumption of popular culture impinges upon mass sentiment and can shape relations between countries” (2), this volume explores contentious cultural interactions between Japan and Korea in a wide variety of arenas, from film and literature to historical tourism. The volume is organized thematically into four sections of three chapters each; each chapter examines an episode or artifact of cultural exchange or contestation between Japan and Korea. The chapters are short and engagingly written, focusing on the empirical phenomena, and largely eschewing the heavy jargon that plagues much cultural anthropology writing.
Here “Korea” is mainly represented by the modern cultural consumers of the southern half of the peninsula, with a few memorable exceptions. The first empirical chapter, by Roald Maliangkay, takes readers back to the colonial era for a thoughtful meditation on how punctuality and the technologies of timekeeping shaped perceptions of modernization and leisure between Japan and Korea. North Korea gets attention in two chapters: the first, by Markus Bell, offers intriguing details of correspondence between Japan-born migrants to North Korea and their relatives back in Japan, from a trove of letters archived by the International Red Cross that at one time spurred Japanese activism on North Korean human rights. The second, by Sunhee Koo, explores the musical and ideological evolutions of the song “Imjin River” from its original composition in North Korea, through its popularization as a folk anthem of the Japanese student pacifist movement in the late 1960s, to its later reincarnation as a t’ŭrotŭ/enka standard of South Korea and Japan. It is bittersweet to read these chapters and reflect on a time when North Korea existed in Japan’s imagination as more than just a forbidden land of abductees and missile launches.
Both Japanese and Korean cinema have become vibrant arenas for popular consumption and contestation of historical narratives, as illuminated in section 2. Hee-seung Irene Lee’s chapter covers the evolution of Korean cinematic depictions of the colonial era over several decades, with deeper dives into two recent films that portray both independence fighters and collaborators as complex individuals “split between loyalty to the lost nation and desires to follow new, modern ideas and trends” (65). The following chapter, by Rumi Sakamoto, moves to Japan for a critique of two feature films from 2001 and 2007 that each include characters modelled on a Korean kamikaze pilot currently enshrined at Yasukuni. The analysis considers how Japan’s political dynamics of war memory evolved between films and how these tensions played out in the contrasting depictions of the same historical figure. Rounding out the film section, Kukhee Choo’s chapter reconsiders the critically acclaimed 2009 film Air Doll, based on a Japanese manga about an inflatable sex doll that develops a soul. Choo argues that the Japanese director’s choice to cast a recognizable Korean actress in the title role “inevitably carries the historical and ideological associations of how Korean women were treated and viewed by many Japanese during and after the colonial period” (94). These chapters primarily focus on comparative content analysis of the various films; it would have been interesting to hear more about how these films were received by the Korean and Japanese publics and what their relative levels of viewership were.
Several chapters examine phenomena at the confluence of literature, television, and tourism. Philip Seaton writes about how Showa-era novelist Shiba Ryotaro’s works, particularly the novel Clouds above the Hill, came to shape Japan’s eventual accepted narrative about its imperial incursions in Asia, even as government promotion of sites from that novel fuelled a profitable tourism boom for one of Japan’s more neglected regions. Chris Perkins’ chapter details how postwar South Korea was re-encountered by the Japanese public through the successive reprintings and film adaptations of the 1964 South Korean serial The Diary of Yunbogi, contemplating why its depictions of innocence amid urban poverty struck such a chord with Cold War-era Japanese. Yoojin Choi’s chapter illuminates differing depictions of the former Mitsubishi mining complex Gunkanjima in two TV “wideshow” episodes broadcast in South Korea and Japan, respectively, following its designation as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2015. The contrast is striking, but again the reader is left wanting more information on the degree of public attention to this issue, beyond the two wideshow episodes described.
Otaku culture gets attention in a single chapter by Rebecca Suter examining the early-2000s phenomenon Axis Powers Hetalia, a manga-turned-animation that depicted various nation-states interacting as handsome young men. Suter examines the diverging priorities of its international fan base as expressed in online fora, including some fan creations which paired the Japan and Korea characters in homoerotic trysts. Though such products offer fertile ground for sociocultural analysis, readers who are not deeply steeped in East Asian pop culture may be left wondering how truly “popular” this culture is.
The final chapter, by Ria Shibata, offers the volume’s sole statistical data, through a survey evaluating the extent and sources of historical knowledge among college-aged Japanese youth. Although the survey group is small, the results suggest that former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s education policies have dramatically limited this youngest generation’s knowledge of Japan’s imperial-era crimes, and that popular culture narratives have filled in the gap primarily with a sense of Japanese victimhood and apology fatigue. One wishes that there was similar data on the Korean side assessing Koreans’ knowledge of past Japanese apologies, as well as data showing the public awareness of each of the films, books, and other pop culture phenomena explored in this book.
Indeed, most chapters give little sense of the scope of impact of the cultural phenomena under examination. An exception is the penultimate chapter, by Stephen Epstein, which covers the recent phenomenon of K-Pop icons responding to online backlash by apologizing for social media posts allegedly showing excessive/insufficient nationalism, raising provocative questions about whether increasingly online and transnational consumption of popular culture ultimately aids or hinders bilateral relations. The chapter includes a thoughtful rumination on how social media and clickbait news aggregators amplify the voices of fringe agitators. This calls to mind recent analyses of Koreans’ online reactions to former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s assassination, when a few horrifically insensitive tweets were commented and reported on intensively, giving Japanese viewers the appalling impression of widespread schadenfreude on the peninsula. Such incidents lead this reviewer to reluctantly agree with Epstein’s pessimistic conclusion, that “controversies will continue to appear and inflame tensions, as voices of outrage acquire greater currency in the attention economy” (178).
University of Tokyo, Tokyo