Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris BerryBuilding on the “regional turn” practiced by a fluid and dispersed academic network, this
book offers a critical review of East Asian popular culture studies. We have commissioned chapters
by researchers who offer contexts for and windows on studies of East Asian popular culture.
Collectively, we are interested in developing cultural–historical, inter-referential, and theoretical
approaches. First, we understand the manifestation of national and regional popular cultural
forms in larger sociohistorical contexts like cultural globalization, structural interactions out-
side of East Asia, and colonial and postcolonial inscription. Second, we underline transregional
interactions in inquiries into the production, circulation, and consumption of popular culture.
We believe a comparative and inter-referential approach can reveal the relational constitution of
popular culture experiences. Last but not least, we regard our research about East Asian popular
culture as a theoretical “sounding board” that relativizes media and cultural concepts derived
from Western experiences.
As a whole, this volume exercises an inter-Asian mode of scholarship in popular culture
studies. Inter-Asian referencing, in the most basic sense, critically references the cultural
and social knowledge of other Asian localities, acquired and rendered through scholarly
analysis, policy writing, social discourse, cultural criticism, and documentation. When Chen
Kuan-Hsing and his cohorts initiated the inter-Asian cultural studies movement around the
late 1990s (Chen 1998), they advocated that scholars studying East Asian society and cul-
ture read each other’s work for theoretical intimations rather than empirical confirmation
of Western grand theories. In the areas of political thought, gender, literature, and film, the
continuous interactions between Taiwanese, Chinese, Japanese, Indian, and South Korean
intellectual circles have made a decolonizing and comparative mode of knowledge produc-
tion an established method of inquiry (Chen 2010; Chen and Chua 2000; Ding and Martin
2000; Chen and Chua 2010; Baik 2010; Rajadhyaksha and Kim 2013; Chen 2014). The
impact inter-Asian referencing has had over the last two decades can be felt in the journal
Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and also in numerous conferences, workshops, books, and special
journal issues on East Asian popular culture.
For those working on popular culture analysis, inter-Asian referencing is more than an aca-
demic endeavor. It is built into cultural–industrial practices like coproduction and multinational
casting. Ordinary citizens also construct their identities using inter-Asian references, since nego-
tiating with popular culture from another country often has consequences for one’s own con-
ditions. Given these reasons, we feel it is time to make a critical review of studies on East Asian
popular culture in order to tease out the epistemological and methodological issues particular
to the area: What is East Asian popular culture? How do we access this cultural materiality and
knowledge construct? Why is it crucial to understand it from a regional position?
Before explicating the thematic details and arguments of the sections and chapters, let us
define the scope of the book. The notion of “East Asia” is based on a cultural–historical con-
struction and negotiation rather than a fixed geography. The book principally covers South
Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and China. While internal diversities and mobilities are
addressed whenever needed, the nation-state receives more attention than these other aspects.
Yet given the porous boundaries of nation-states, we find it important to name the diverse East
Asian political and cultural realities. As for the “popular culture” covered in the book, chapters
discuss selected media culture (television, cinema, pop music, fashion magazines, stars, and idols),
industrial and economic activities (film festivals, online streaming economies, live venues), as
well as creative and informal cultural forms and practices such as social media, mass-produced
painting, fandom, girl culture, and queer media.
This book is organized according to the following themes: (1) historicizing and spatial-
izing East Asian popular culture, (2) media culture in national specificities and inter-Asian