Koichi Iwabuchi, Eva Tsai, and Chris BerryII Media culture in national specificities and inter-asian referencing
In East Asia, formal and informal modes of transnational exchange and collaboration—ranging
from coproduction to piracy—have coexisted to make and move various media products. This
has made so-called “national media” both a problematic category and a limiting methodology.
Media culture tethered to traditional areas of communication like film, television, and music
have reconfigured significantly across national borders due to consumer practices, state measures,
and trade agreements. Social media—the new media of our time—while being decentralized,
are known to create internalizing echo chambers that constrain consumption practices.
How do media rearticulate dynamic national imaginations in the context of transnational
awareness and connections? How have transnational and transborder cultural traffic reworked
the notion of media? This section considers these questions with regard to four areas of media
culture in East Asia—film, television, popular music, and social media. In each area, two or
three chapters make their inquiries from specific media and territorial sites. Furthermore, they
consider the meanings of media in the context of new modes of de-territorialized production
and circulation. The juxtaposition of the chapters as omnibus units is meant to highlight and
encourage knowledge production within a comparative and inter-Asian framework.
Writing on film from South Korea, the Chinese-speaking world, and Japan respectively
(Chapters 6a, 6b, and 6c), Soyoung Kim, Chris Berry, and Aaron Gerow present new film his-
toriographies based on national encounters with transnationalizing forces. According to Kim,
colonialism, the Cold War, the IMF financial crisis, migration under Northeast Asian neoliberal-
ism, and expansion into the Chinese market have had multiple and varied effects on how cinema
is understood in South Korea. “Phantom cinema” evokes a postcolonial desire for a canon based
on the lost silent films of the colonial period. Trans-cinema reconfigures Korean cinema in the
context of digital platforms and alternative spectatorship. The multi-nationalized space in recent
Korean blockbusters can be regarded as a kind of affective mobilization.
In a similar vein, Berry (Chapter 6b) outlines for Chinese-language film successive transna-
tionalized historiographies. Chollywood, in particular, is the manifestation of a current transbor-
der assemblage—marked by trade agreements, transborder employment, the decline of studios
in provincial capitals, and the creative clustering of production. In contrast to South Korea and
the Chinese-speaking world’s active industrial negotiation with the world, Gerow (Chapter 6c)
argues that Japanese cinema displays a recurring confined worldview despite its increasingly
multilingual and multinational output. This shift towards a singular, looped narrative that seem-
ingly exists outside transnationalized reality is ineluctably reinforced by Japan’s comparatively
insular media environment.
Compared to film, bordercrossing television in East Asia is a more recent phenomenon. Each
manifestation—adaptation, coproduction, subtitling, distribution, consumption, and so on—has
its own unique set of technological, policy, ideological, and historical conditions. Both of the two
chapters on television address the ideological underpinnings that facilitate the flow of television
drama in East Asia. In Chapter 7a, Anthony Fung addresses a range of bordercrossing television
cases in East Asia. These include Hong Kong TV broadcasters’ domestication of Japanese TV
drama, the transborder consumption of Hong Kong television in Guangdong, China–Hong Kong
coproductions, television remakes of Korean films in Hong Kong, and successive, hybrid drama
adaptations of a Japanese comic book into respectively, a Taiwanese, a Japanese, a Korean, and then
a Chinese drama. In each case, gender, capitalistic, and state ideologies are at play, often yielding
conservative representations such as women’s lack of freedom and state-sanctioned modernity.
Hsiu-Chuang Deppman’s chapter (7b) undertakes a close examination of the popularity of
the Korean TV drama My Love from the Star and the Japanese TV drama Hanzawa Naoki in East