Trans–East Asia as methodculturally diverse citizens as equal members of Japanese society. This is demonstrated by the 2009
expansion of the Japanese international broadcasting service, NHK World, at the expense of the
linguistically and culturally diverse TV programs within Japan that foreign national citizens had
demanded (see Iwabuchi 2012).
The rapid rise of soft power and related pragmatic cultural policies, such as cultural diplo-
macy and the development of creative industries, stand in sharp contrast to the lack of policy
discussions on increasing cultural diversity in East Asian countries. Although the two might not
have a direct causal relationship, it is worth investigating whether and how the strengthening
of national border controls and the inadequate attention paid to cultural diversity within the
nation align with soft power and nation branding policies to more clearly demarcate exclusive
national cultural borders. Promoting the border crossing of popular culture while restricting the
border crossing of people (and by extension limiting cultural diversity within the nation) seems
to be incongruous or even disjunctive (Appadurai 1996). However, it can be argued that the dis-
junctive engagement with these two kinds of mobility—people and popular culture— actually
constitutes an internally consistent vision for the administration of national cultural borders.
The containment of cultural diversity within national borders and the international promotion
of national popular culture are two sides of the same coin (Iwabuchi 2015). Cross-border media
and cultural connections are more often administered to strengthen the national image and
feeling and to reinforce exclusive national cultural borders while at the same time overtly and
covertly discouraging the engagement with multicultural questions within the national borders.
tr a n s–East asia as method
This chapter has suggested the necessity of rigorously examining the unevenness of East Asian
popular culture connection and deterrences to the promotion of cross-border dialogue. If we
take seriously the dialogic potential of trans–East Asian popular culture connectivity to facilitate
cross-border exchange over transnationally shared issues and mutually foster cultural diversity
within national borders, the inter-national administration of cultural connection, which has
been strengthened and widely instituted through the interaction of marketization and state cul-
tural policies, must be more consciously and critically engaged with. In concluding this chapter
and section, I would like to propose a collaborative project—trans–East Asia as method—to
effectively engage the radical potentials of popular culture connection in East Asia. This is to take
the multiple perspectives and approaches that “trans” implies seriously: critical engagement with
the transnational circulation of capital, people, and popular culture and the uneven connections
it engenders (“trans” as “across/through”); going beyond an exclusive, mutually demarcated
understanding of region and nation (“trans” as “beyond”); and striving to materialize a more
open and dialogic social relation (“trans” as “into another state of things”). That is to say, the
project of “trans–East Asia as method” is to envision and materialize East Asia as a dialogic com-
municative space in which people across borders strive to connect diverse voices, concerns, and
problems in various, unevenly intersecting public sites in which the national is still a major force
but does not have exclusive claim over the administration of the public interest. The method in
“trans–East Asia as method” is not purely an academic methodology, echoing Chen Kuan- Hsing’s
point that “‘Asia as method’ ceases to look at Asia as object of analysis” (2005, 141). It is a means
by which to engender alternative modes of knowledge production with the aim of enabling
people to tackle and transform the existing unequal composition of society and the world.
In order to enhance a sense of togetherness and nurture dialogic relationships among various
social subjects and across various borders, what is required of researchers is to advance two kinds
of engagement with trans–East Asian connection: producing critical knowledge that is accessible