Chua Beng HuatHe inaugurated an annual International Manga Award for non-Japanese manga artists, but his
plan for heavy investment in Japan’s soft power industries, with the aim of producing 500,000
jobs within a twelve-year period did not survive his departure as the prime minister.
Koichi Iwabuchi has argued that Japanese nationalists translate the regional popularity of
Japanese popular culture into an idea he identified as “Asia-yearning-for-Japan” (2002, 66).
He further points out that this nationalist attitude is a reformulation and extension of the histo-
rically deeper “ambivalence of the Japanese conception of ‘Asia,’ a cultural geography that offers
Japan at once a shared identity with other parts of Asia and also the source of Japanese feeling of
superiority” (Iwabuchi 2002, 66). This perspective, which underlay Japan’s attempt during World
War II to colonize Asia and form a “co-prosperity sphere” under Japanese imperial leadership,
survived the war and became symptomatic of Japanese nationalists’ desire to “return” to embrace
Asia, which has been suppressed since Japan’s 1945 defeat. This thinly veiled sense of superiority
quickly ran up against antagonistic regional political sentiments; the International Manga Awards
initiated by Aso were criticized as Japanese nationalist hubris by Chinese media, who questioned
the right of the Japanese to judge, singularly, who the world’s best manga artists are.
The Korean government has taken an active role in the development of the media industry
since the end of the 1980s. The demise of the military-authoritarian regime in 1987 led to the
television industry being liberalized (Shim 2010). In 1991, to capture a piece of the expanding
market, the newly established Seoul Broadcasting System (SBS) launched a “television drama
offensive” (Shim 2010, 123). Two other stations, Korean Broadcast System (KBS) and Munhwa
Broadcast Corporation (MBC) also stepped into the competition. The result was a “drama war”
which saw as many as thirty dramas being aired per week. In the same year, the government
imposed a compulsory outsourcing scheme on the television stations, requiring each to pur-
chase a fixed quantum of dramas from independent producers. This led to the proliferation of
independent production houses of varying sizes that competed to sell their products to the three
networks based on their superior quantity, quality, and responsiveness to audience demands.
These dramas constitute the stock that has been selectively exported to the rest of East Asia,
forming the most important component of the Korean Wave.
The Korean government was anxious to ride on the popularity of the Korean Wave to
develop its soft power regionally. This was seen as necessary, given Korea’s weaker economic and
political position relative to Japan and China. As Lee Geun suggests, even “though Korea is the
13th largest economy in the world and possesses a world-class military, it cannot comfortably
compete with other advanced industrialized countries in the area of hard power”; however, with
the “recent blossoming of its cultural potential, Korea can and needs to develop its soft power
and soft power resources as Korea’s political and economic instruments of high significance”
(Lee Geun 2009, 85). In addition, the Korean Wave’s “internationalization” of Korean culture
was seen euphorically by Korean nationalists as Korea’s breaking out of regional cultural mar-
ginality. As Cho Hae-Jeong sarcastically remarks:
To the people of “a marginal country,” who had for so long lived under the oppres-
sive culture of other countries, the news that their own culture was influencing other
countries’ cultures could have been nothing other than amazing and wonderful.
(2005, 173–174)Soft power is to be built on this foundation of acceptance. Again, as in Japan, the Korean
Minister of Culture and Tourism, Kim Hang-gil, pronounced that the government “will actively
support the penetration of our culture into foreign markets” (quoted in Cho 2005, 160).
However, as Cho points out, there is an awareness among Korean government and cultural