Popular Culture and the Transformation of Japan–Korea Relations

From the publisher’s website:

This book presents essays exploring the ways in which popular culture reflects and engenders ongoing changes in Japan–Korea relations.

Through a broad temporal coverage from the colonial period to the contemporary, the book’s chapters analyse the often contradictory roles that popular culture has played in either promoting or impeding nationalisms, regional conflict and reconciliations between Japan and Korea. Its contributors link several key areas of interest in East Asian Studies, including conflicts over historical memories and cultural production, grassroots challenges to state ideology, and the consequences of digital technology in Japan and South Korea.

Taking recent discourse on Japan and South Korea as popular cultural superpowers further, this book expands its focus from mainstream entertainment media to the lived experience of daily life, in which sentiments and perceptions of the “popular” are formed. It will be useful to students and scholars of Japanese and Korean studies, as well as film studies, media studies and cultural studies more widely.

Contents

Introduction | Rumi Sakamoto, Stephen Epstein

Part I: Everyday Cultural Practices and Japan-Korea Relations

1. Colonial timekeeping: bringing Koreans up to speed | Roald Maliangkay
2. “Dye for my grey hair and curry powder for cooking”: informal politics of exchange between North Korea and Japan, 1959-1975 | Markus Bell 
3. The “Shiba view of history” and Japan-Korea relations: reading, watching and travelling Clouds Above the Hill | Philip Seaton

Part II: Reimagining Japan-Korea Relations in Film

4. Remembering to reset: representations of the colonial era in recent Korean films | Hee-seung Irene Lee
5. Korean Kamikaze Pilots in Japanese Films | Rumi Sakamoto
6. Memories of comfort: postcolonial production and consumption of Koreeda Hirokazu’s Air Doll (2009) | Kukhee Choo

Part III: Japan-Korea relations and popular culture manipulations

7. The Diary of Yunbogi and Japan-Korea relations | Chris Perkins
8. “Imjin River” and the transnational consumption of partitioned Korea | Sunhee Koo
9. Industrial miracle or Hell Island? Gunkanjima, television, and nationalism in South Korea and Japan | Yoojin Choi

PART IV Japan-Korea relations and popular culture engagement

10. Lovers’ quarrels: Japan-Korea relations in amateur Boys’ Love manga | Rebecca Suter
11. Fly the flag (at your own risk)- netizens, nationalism and celebrities between South Korea, Japan and beyond | Stephen Epstein
12. Japanese inherited responsibility, popular narratives and memory of the war | Ria Shibata