Historicizing East Asian pop cultureconcerned about cultural influences from neighboring countries. To spare East Asian audiences
from such elitist views, my historical articulation of East Asian pop culture does not passively
avoid concepts such as Americanization and acculturation. Rather, it underscores the multiple
origins of and mutual borrowing among regional pop cultures, and it treats American pop cul-
ture as any other pop flow, which is to say, as one of the cornerstones of East Asian pop culture.
The same understanding can be applied to the process of consuming culture. Due to the multiple
origins and mutual borrowings inherent in East Asian popular culture, it is not necessarily true
that East Asian people who enjoy Japanese pop culture would become acculturated to Japanese
thinking, morals, and consciousness, that is, become Japanese. While East Asian audiences enjoy
Korean pop songs, Hong Kong films, or Japanese dramas, they may also perceive the recurring,
the shared, and the familiar but also the unique, the different, and the strange. The attributes of
historical accumulation and coexistence among regional pop flows, unwittingly or not, serve to
attract regional attention and popularity in various parts of East Asia. This historical approach
perceives East Asian pop culture as unfettered by a dichotomist approach, which draws simplistic
comparisons between the local and global—or even the local and regional—cultural spheres.
Double inscription as the cultural logic of East asian pop culture
Regional pop flows promote mutual knowledge across distances, extend reciprocal understand-
ing across national borders, and provide people with the opportunity to experience a common
consumerism and a common fandom. Through sharing regional cultural products, people in
East Asia can recognize both the differences and similarities among diverse regional pop flows.
According to C.J. Wee Wan-ling, “the circulation of culture and cultural products is tied up
with the concerns of East Asian commonalities and differences, past and present” (2012, 203).
Although regional cultural flows are still asymmetric in East Asia, they contribute to increas-
ing the overall cultural diversity of the region by expanding the number of contact zones and
strengthening the multiplicity and reciprocity of East Asian pop cultures. Increasing inter-Asian
cultural flows and actual encounters “have become sources for articulating new notions of Asian
cultural commonality, difference, and asymmetry” (Cho 2011, 394). In particular, the iterative
nature of regional pop flows inevitably forms the regional distinctiveness of East Asian pop cul-
ture. In this section, I suggest the term “double inscription” to describe the distinctive cultural
logic of East Asian pop culture.
Here, I refer to double inscription as a condition in which the global is always and already
in the national and the regional. For instance, the success of Korean pop culture in East Asia
demonstrates that global culture, which is one of the elements within the Korean Wave, is
already embedded in regional tastes, for example, middle-aged urban women who enjoy Korean
dramas. Difference and sameness among various regional pop flows become resources for imag-
ining un/familiar intimacy and dis/coevality among regional audiences in different countries.
As I have argued in a previous work, East Asian audiences recognize the Confucian themes
and elements in Korean dramas, but, simultaneously, find them very odd, a frame of mind I
call defamiliarized intimacy (Cho 2011, 396). The coexistence of different dimensions (such as
Confucian elements in very modern and urban settings) in East Asian pop culture elicits “feeling
of unexpected pleasure and empathy from regional audiences” (ibid., 396). In this vein, we can
suppose that East Asian pop culture “does connect people in the distance crisscrossing the world,
evenly and unevenly, intimately and indifferently, friendly and discordantly” (Iwabuchi 2004, 20).
However, double inscription does not suggest that the national, regional, and global are equal,
nor does it imply that their relationships or hierarchies are predetermined. In their collected
studies on East Asian pop culture, Chua and Iwabuchi point out that “East Asian pop culture