The Asia-Pacific Journal | Japan Focus Volume 15 | Issue 14 | Number 4 | Article ID 5056 | Jul 15, 2017

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Notes Toward an Archaeology of Hallyu

Mark Morris

Abstract

The first consciousness that a new Koreancultural wave –hallyu-- was in motion began totake shape in different forms and at differenttimes in the rest of East Asia. It was the crazefor Korean TV drama that represented asudden apparition of something new fromSouth Korea. Before long, however, this wavegrew bigger and far more complex than anyonemight have predicted, including Korean popmusic and films, animation, online games,smartphones, fashion, cosmetics, etc. Therehave been resistances to this inundationnotably in Japan, a country where severalearlier mini-hallyu now seem long forgotten.

Keywords

Hallyu, tv drama, Korean pop, manga, film

I want our nation to be the most beautiful inthe world. By this I do not mean the mostpowerful nation. . . . The only thing that I desirein infinite quantity is the power of a nobleculture. This is because the power of cultureboth makes us happy and gives happiness toothers.

Kim Ku, Baekbeom ilji (1947)

Introduction

Kim Ku, 1876–1949

Kim Ku (1876-1949), in this rightly famous callto culture published not too long before hisviolent death, went on to articulate a vision of aKorea in which Koreans would not only be freefor the first time in a long while to be Korean,but would as well project their culture out intothe world. As he put it: ‘I wish our country tobe not one that imitates others, but rather thesource, goal, and model of this new andadvanced culture. And in that manner, I wishour country to both initiate and embody trueworld peace. . . . In addition, the historicaltiming of all this at a time when we are

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engaged in rebuilding our nation is more thanappropriate for fulfilling this mission. Indeed,the days when our people will appear on theworld stage as the main actors are just aheadof us’ (Wikilivres).

There is a sense in which Kim Ku called it right,even though he could not have predicted howlong or what form this would take. Nor wouldwe feel comfortable associating a modern orpost-modern concept such as ‘soft power’ withthis veteran patriotic schemer and scrapper. Itis, however, certain that Korea – at least SouthKorea – has over the past decade and moreoffered up a model for a new and advancedculture; that culture has brought a great deal ofhappiness to people in many parts of the world;Korean film-makers, TV drama writers andproducers, and popular music producers havebecome main actors in the Korean wavephenomenon in its sweep through East Asia,Southeast Asia then on about the planet. Andthis is to say nothing about the actual actors,singers and dancers whose skill and physicalbeauty have captured the imaginations andhearts of millions of mainly but not exclusivelyyoung people who have never been to, who maynever manage to get to, the nation whichgenerated this propulsive cultural energy.

Obviously, a Korean of Kim Ku’s generationwould not have had cinema, TV drama andcertainly not K-Pop in mind when dreamingabout a future ‘noble’ culture radiating fromthe peninsula. Still propelling Hallyu seems tobe an uneasy mix of the old developmentaldrive for exports most associated with the ParkChung-hee era of the 1960-70s with aconsumerist culture emergent only in the pastfew decades. Both represent eras of profoundpolitical/economic change as well as massivechanges in culture as experienced, producedand consumed by most South Koreans. Wereyou to invent a time machine that couldmagically transport, let’s say, Girls Generationback before these epochal shifts, back even to1947 Korea when Kim Ku was writing1, it isn’t

difficult to guess that the reaction of a yangbanaudience to this long-legged example of singingand grooving might vary from incomprehensionto outright fury (whatever their sons ordaughters might be feeling). Perhaps thereaction would be more controlled, in themanner of the stunned si lence of thePyongyang elite when they were favored by avisit from the South Korean boy-group Shinhwain December of 20122.

Girls’ Generation, founded 2007

Situating the Korean Wave

Of course the phenomenon of the Korean Waveexisted before Chinese journalists coined aword for it around 1998 by joining thecharacter for South Korea han 韓 with anotherwhich commonly indicates a trend, style, waveof popularity, 流. This generates a new word韓流 (Hallyu), one easily, visually understood allaround East Asia, even on a hanja-resistantpeninsula. The first consciousness that such awave was in motion began to take shape indifferent forms and at different times in Japan,China, Taiwan and Hong Kong. For Chineseand Japanese commenters it was the craze forKorean TV drama that represented a suddenapparition of something new from South Korea.Before long, however this wave grew bigger

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and far more complex than anyone might havepredicted twenty years ago: ‘it now includes arange of cultural products including Koreanpop music (K-Pop), films, animation, onlinegames, smartphones, fashion, cosmetics, foodand lifestyles’ (Kim 2013). We could even addthe very advertisements which are oftensignificant propellants of the wave to its rosterof cultural contributions.

In South Korea as well as in other capitalistcountries, commercial advertising, whilecreated as a sales tool, in its everydaycirculation is distinguishable from othercultural products primarily by its form.Advertising draws on the same pool of culturalreferences, relies on the same mass media,casts the same celebrities, and engages thesame audiences as other media. Advertisingslogans find their way into public discourse,unusual advertising is discussed withacquaintances and blogged about, andadvertising images animate fantasies andambitions (Fedorenko 2014: 341-20).

It is striking that online and published CV’s ofSouth Korea’s successful actors list, right afterfilms appearances and TV drama roles, thebest-known ads in which they have featured.That direct commercial connection issomething generally played down, or passed offwith irony, in the case of most American andEuropean actors. (Of course, in the UK oneshort-hand term for people in advertising is‘ c rea t i ve s ’ – no t a c l a im tha t goesunchallenged.)

Popular stars flogging stuff

It seems as though a popularity first formedaround visual culture – TV and film – is nowborn along in a tidal wave of consumerproducts to such an extent that it may seemdifficult, if not reactionary or at least oldfashioned, to attempt to extract some residueof the cultural from the flow of consumablecommodities. Formulating an intellectualresponse to something so unexpected (andpotentially ephemeral) as the Korean Wave canseem a daunting task. Here is how oneeloquent interpreter, Youna Kim, sets out theresearch problematic:

Even the processes of contraflows [competingwith dominant US popular culture] today, suchas the Korean Wave, are multiply structured,mutually reinforcing and sometimes conflicting,while reconfiguring the asymetrical relations ofpower within a hybridization process. Theemerging consequences at multiple levels –both macro structures and micro processes thatinfluence media production, distribution,representation and consumption – deserve tobe analysed and explored ful ly in anincreasingly global, cosmopolitan mediaenvironment (Kim 2013: 3).

Kim herself is a British-trained , prolific writeron a wide range of Korean media. Her languageis perhaps too finely tuned to internal debates

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within media/cultural studies and itsprofessional idiolect to appeal to a generalaudience – or to ordinary surfers of the KoreanWave. But the energy and hard work she andother cultural interpreters are bringing toHallyu give the patient reader some chance ofgrasping the significance of the acceleratingconjunction of culture and commerce.

Professor John Lie

Beyond cultural and media studies, Hallyu hasattracted the formidable social scientific skillsof John Lie. Lie’s previous works, such as HanUnbound, Multiethnic Japan and Zainichi, haveestablished him as both a key political andcultural interpreter of modern South Korea aswell as one of the most insightful guides to theexperience of Japan’s Korean-origin minority,the zainichi – usually referred to in South Koreaby the not altogether positive-sounding name ofkyopo 교포. Lie has recently taken on whatmight seem to be the almost impossible task –perhaps especially for a fifty-something seniorscholar (or so it must seem to this even olderwriter) – of understanding and contextualisingthe most intensely commercialised form ofKorean Wave phenomenon, K-Pop. In so doing,he has dug back into the recent past of popularsong in Japan, especially types of song such asKorean trot or Japanese enka, to remind us thatKorean-origin and South Korean entertainershad gained an audience in Japan well before K-

Pop stars such as BoA or the members ofDongbang Shingi were born.

Even if we exclude Zainichi singers, there weresome South Korean trot stars – Yi Sŏng-ae, ChoYong-p’il, and Kye Ŭn-suk among others – whowere household names in Japan from the late1970s to the early 1980s, the time of the boomin South Korean songs . . . Moreover, thanks tothe karaoke boom of the early 1980s . . .personal renditions of South Korean trot songsb e c a m e f a s h i o n a b l e f o r J a p a n e s ebusinesspeople (Lie 2015: 113).

Of course, the 1970s or 1980s represent erasthat to young people today must seem likecultural and technological dark ages, and oldert r o t s o n g s l i k e s o m e t h i n g f r o m a nembarrassing past best relegated to thememories of grandparents and their dustycollections of LP records. Globally, it is onlyfrom around 1996 that music began to becomeavailable in digitized formats, and YouTube andcompetitors have only been around since 2005.It is not surprising that ‘South Korea [is] thefirst country where sales of digitized musicexceeded sales of music in nondigital formats’(Lie 2015: 119). For South Korean or English orScottish teenagers, there’s always been aYouTube and downloadable music and videoclips. The imaginations of South Koreanyoungsters – who perhaps rightly maythemselves as having more in common withtheir European counterparts than their Koreanelders – would be severely stretched toembrace a not so distant past when a largelyrural population could hardly even listen to aradio – no electricity + no money = no radio –and where owning a record player wassomething most city kids could only dreamabout.

The earlier slow trickle of Korean popularmusic and musicians across to Japan wasprof i tab le for the enter ta iners andentrepreneurs involved. But the scale of K-Popis altogether different. It has been estimated

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that in the s ingle year o f ‘2013, thegovernment’s budget for promoting thepopular-music business was roughly $300million, roughly the same amount as totalturnover in the industry a decade earlier’ (Lie2015: 119). John Lie makes the case that it isnot simply scale but the whole dynamic that isdifferent. Unlike the Korean music ofyesterday, ‘K-Pop has not been a demand-driven, quasi-organic development; rather, ithas been the object of a concentrated strategyfor its exportation’ (Lie 2015: 114). Within themusic business, we can note the strategy bywhich Lee Soo-man and his now huge anddiversified SM Entertainment invented singerBoA as cultural export for the Japan market.‘SM Entertainment promoted BoA as a J-Popstar, one who just happened to be SouthKorean. The company hired leading Japanesevoice and dancing instructors, investing £3million in her debut’ (Lie 2015: 101). If youcan’t beat them join them.

TV drama and resistance to the wave

Manga Kenkanryu

However, in the case of the Korean Wave, theresult hasn't been to so much to join with othermarkets of national pop cultural, as to seem toalmost overwhelm them. This is of course onereason for the kind of negative reaction inJapan expressed with crude vigour in the best-selling series Manga Ken-Kanryū (Hating-Hallyu comic), one which cartoonist YamanoSharin has stretched into four volumes between2005 and 2015. One aspect of the reaction tothe Korean Wave in Japan and China has beenfocused on the enormous popularity of KoreanTV dramas. This reaction grew gradually fromthe early 2000s. Too many dramas on air fortoo many hours, has been the complaint ofsome social commentators. Some in Chinahave, as is well known, reacted with less thanenthusiasm to certain features of South Koreanhistorical dramas. Take the case of one MBC

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favourite, Jumong, which ran for 81 episodesbetween 2006 and 2007. It has been sold to:Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Iran,Indonesia, Thailand, Malaysia, Cambodia,Kazakhstan, Pakistan, The United States, andquite a few more countries. But China has notappreciated the way Han Dynasty figures aredepicted as cruel and power-hungry, nor astory line that incorporates a large chunk ofChina’s Northeast – once referred to asManchuria – into the Goguryeo kingdom; thiswas after all the same era in which theAcademy of Chinese Social Sciences had beenengaged in a massive research project, theNortheast Project (2002-07), destined to provehow integral the region was to China’s past andpresent. Efforts to broadcast the series in HongKong created controversy. The far-distant HanDynasty is not the only source of Chinesevillains dreamt up by Korean scriptwriters. Theonce much-revered Ming Dynasty provided abackground, and some arrogant lecherousvisiting Chinese officials, for the 2010 MBCseries Dong-Yi4.

Jumong, 2006–7

Historical dramas (sageuk) are primarilytargeted at an older audience. It was thesuccess of melodrama and above all romanticmelodrama and comedies that made Koreantelevision series hugely popular in Japan andChina, then all over the world. By now the 2002KBS series Gyeol yeonga -- ‘Winter Love Song’

b u t b e t t e r k n o w n v i a i t s J a p a n e s etransformation as Winter Sonata – is the stuffof TV legend. It made its young stars, BaeYong-joon and Choi Ji-woo, East Asian icons;this was especially the case with Bae, whoprobably cringes every time people evoke hisJapanese nickname ‘Yon-sama’. JournalistClaire Lee, on the eve of the tenth anniversaryof the ser ies , recal led the Yon-samaphenomenon which followed the massivepopularity of Winter Sonata in Japan during2003-4:

Bae, who the New York Times called “the $2.3billion man” for his value in 2004, made hisfamous visit to Japan that year. Some 3,000middle-aged women gathered at NaritaInternational Airport to greet their heartthrob.According to a scholarly article published onKeio Communication Review in 2007, some 350riot police were there to guard the scene. Inspite of the presence of the officers, however,10 women were sent to hospital as they wereinjured from “pushing and shoving” in anattempt to see their “Yon-sama” (Lee 2011).

At a time when many Japanese young womenwere being criticised for devoting themselvesto careers or enjoying foreign travel andshopping, or just generally daring to beindependent rather than getting married earlyand producing babies to prop up Japan’sdeclining population, it was bad enough thatyoung women swooned over Korean TV stars:they rubbed the insult to Japanese manhood inwhen observing that the Korean men were notonly handsome, but also more manly – must bethat military service which toughens them up,more than our hard-working but rather dullfellows. But then the mothers got in on the act,and had enough disposable income to catch theplane to Seoul, to following in their thousandsthe TV drama trail to Nami Island – key locationfor Winter Sonata – and then come home andstart studying Korean! The bitterness ofslighted masculinity has provided fuel for somefairly silly publications such as the Ken-Kanryū

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comics. It may even have been one elementmotivating the notorious Zaitokukai, the quasi-fascist hate-group targeting zainichi and otherforeigner residents in Japan. When life seems abit complicated and full of people different thanyou, blame it on Yon-sama.

Japanese female fans greet Bae Yong-joon

The changing fortunes of TV production as anexport were themselves a kind of drama.Twenty years ago, in 1996, Statistics from theMinistry of Culture and Tourism indicate thatSouth Korea imported US£42.2 million worth ofTV programmes and exported barely US$ 5.5million. In the wake of the take-off in TV seriesin Japan and elsewhere that occurred a decadelater, the 2005 figures present a very differentpicture: imports up to US$ 31.0, but exportsincreased by almost twenty-fold to US$ 100million (Shim 2008: 27). Compared, forexample, to the export figures for Samsung thesame year, those are small potatoes. But theincrease in the export of South Korean culturewas just about to add music and music videosto the mix, eventually the most profitable of allcultural exports. The year Winter Sonata airedin South Korea, 2002, the domestic market forpopular music was estimated to be worthsomething like US$ 296 million. That, too,sounds like a lot, until you compare the

relevant estimates for Japan that year, US$ 5.4billion (Lie 2015: 116). No wonder that SMEntertainment or Park Chin-yong’s JYPEntertainment saw the neighbouring market ascrucial for export breakthrough, on their way toconquering as much of the world as they couldget to. By one accounting, K-Pop exportsreached US$235 million in 2012: the Japanesemarket accounted for US$ 204 million of thetotal (Wikipedia [Eng]: K-Pop).

The Normalization Treaty and the mini-Hallyuof the past

The Same Starlight on This Land, 1965

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Yoshinaga/Mochizuki Kazu with Koreanorphans

South Korean scholar Yang Inshil hasunearthed an interesting mini-Hallyu, more aripple than a wave, that we might regard astesting the waters for what was to come in laterdecades as regards both film and TV drama(Yang 2007). It occurred in Japan in the contextof the major rapprochement achieved by SouthKorea and Japan through the Treaty on BasicRelations between Japan and the Republic ofKorea signed in June of 1965. (For a recentoverview, see Lee 2011). In that year directorKim Kiduk – the older Kim Kiduk – alreadyknown for his skills in genre film and for hiscommercial instincts, made a film about anextraordinary Japanese woman, YoshinagaKazu (also known as Michizuki Kazu). It hadthe long title The Same Starlight on This Land(<이땅에도 저별빛을>)3. She had ended up inSeoul at the outbreak of the Korean War andtook it upon herself to rescue and care fororphans swept up in the chaos. She was madean honorary citizen of Seoul in 1964, and thenext year her personal story became abestselling book. Kim seized the doubleoccasion of the treaty signing and the story ofone remarkable Japanese individual to producea bio-pic released in October the same year. Itstarred the most famous omoni (grandmother)in Korean cinematic history, the great HwangJeong-sun, who died last year at the venerableage of eighty-eight. It may be difficult to recall

t h a t t h i s w a s a n e r a i n w h i c h f i l mrepresentations of Japanese characters werealmost always two-dimensional, cardboardvillains. To cast Hwang as a Japanese womanwas a bold, clever move. The film was releasedin Japan the next year under the title LoveCrossing Borders, and made a considerableimpact, once again due in part to the context ofthe treaty. In Japan it had stirred someopposition, but never aroused the furiousreaction of South Korea’s protestors of thetroubled era. This is a case of one SouthKorean film, made by a South Korean directorwith staff and cast all Korean, being a modestsuccess – by telling the story of a Japanesewoman!

Yang Inshil has noted that in order to find asimilar Korean wavelet in the realm of TVdrama means waiting until the early 1980s. A1981 KBS special drama was shown the sameyear in a late-night slot on Japanese television.The title was Yumi’s Diary. Unlike thesentimental route through the motheringcentral character of Kim Kiduk’s film, thisdrama treated the shocking story of a zainichischool boy, Im Hyeon-il. Hyeon-il took his ownlife in 1979, frustrated by bullying anddiscrimination. In an unusual step, the SouthKorean government staged his funeral as astate occasion. I don’t know what the particularforces were, political or other, which led theChun Do-hwan regime to host the funeral; wemight assume that it was an attempt to assertthe regime’s legitimacy, after the massacre atGwangju. I assume that it was old-fashionedJapanese liberal regard for zainichi and otherminorities which got the drama on television,even if relegated to an 11.00 p.m. slot. You canonly wonder if it could happen now given thecurrent chilly climate between the twocountries. Yang points out that the drama, bynarrating Hyeon-il’s story through the figure ofhis older sister, manages to at least partiallyfeminize and sentimentalize the harsheraspects of the story and the real, continuingcontradictions and injustices of zainichi life in

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Japan.

Diaspora

Korea’s greatest export has been, since at leastthe mid-nineteenth century, Korean people.First the small groups and families tricklingover the border with Qing China, attempting toleave behind the harsh taxation and arbitraryrule of late-Joseon Korea; then the late-1860sfamines pushed more people, especially fromnorthern provinces such as Hamhung over intothe Russian far east. As Japanese forces intrudeinto the country from the t ime of thesuppression of the Donghak Rebellion of themid-1890s to the Russo-Japanese War of1904-05, the exodus of poor farmers is joinedby disaffected Koreans of all classes. Some willend up in China or Russia, some try to get tothe United States. Japan’s control of theborders makes the slender life-line to US citiesfor intellectuals, or to the cane fields of Hawaiifor the poor, harder to make use of. In the earlydecades of the mid-twentieth century the landof the free would erect insurmountable racialbarriers before immigrants from the East.Japan would attract, then eventually force,several million Korean workers to Japan toaugment a workforce depleted by conscriptionof Japanese workers to fight the never-endingwar in China and then the deadly war throughthe Pacific Islands.

Some 600,000 descendants of this singlelargest diasporic group remain in Japan. Aroughly equal number make up the Chinese-Korean joseonjok population, many of whomnow form a source of mainly low-paid labour inSouth Korea and Japan. What had been avigorous Korean community of over 170,000people in the Soviet Union’s Primorskikrai/Maritime Province was loaded ontoboxcars during the autumn of 1937, drivenstraight through the freezing weather intoCentral Asian, dumped off in Kazakhstan andTajikistan and left pretty much to fend forthemselves. Thus did Stalin – basking since the

previous year 1936 in a orotund new title, ‘theFather of Nations’ – dispose of his people.

The biggest, fairly recent change in thediaspora concerns the Korean-Americans. Itwas only with the final removal of racialquotations in the mid-1960s that this group ofhighly motivated communities really began totake shape. By the 1980s Korean-Americansfamously, or infamously, were regularlyincluded in that condescending term of praisefor Asian Americans, ‘model minority’. KoreansAmericans have played a part in the KoreanWave: as singers and actors, as musicians,artistic advisers and promoters, and businesscontacts for Korean entrepreneurs andperformers trying to crack the US market. Oneof SM Entertainment’s ‘first stars, Hyǒn Chin-yǒng, was a Korean American. Especially in the1990’s, a steady stream of Korean Americans . .. began returning to South Korea’ (Lie 2015:60; see also Russell 2008: 133-65). Others, ofcourse, might come to South Korea in order toexplore family roots, to study Korean, or to landa job in an economy that seemed to bebooming. As significant as this Americanconnection has been, below I want briefly toconsider the role of one key member of thezainichi diaspora in the diffusion of SouthKorea’s new cinema.

Yi Bong-u and the cinematic wave

After leaving behind his home in Kyoto andstudying in Paris for two years in themid-1980s, Yi Bong-u had become a devotedcinephile. It would take some doing but by1989 he had set up his own distributioncompany. He traveled to the great Europeanfilm festivals and brought back films to theJapanese arthouse audience by the great Polishdirector Krzysztof Kieslowski, by radical Britishfilm-maker Ken Loach, and even our belovedBritish animation, Wallace and Gromit. By 1993he had moved into film production. He workedwith fellow zainichi director Choi Yang-il (SaiYōichi) to create the first really popular film

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about the experience of zainichi and otherminority people, All Under the Moon (Tsuki wadochi ni dete iru?).

Seopyeonje, 1993

Around this time he heard about a film that wasbreaking box office records in South Korea.

Im Kwon-taek’s small, intimate film about anodd family of wandering pansori singers –Seopyeonje – had stirred something profound,it seemed, in the newly democratizing country.At a time when the film industry was deep inthe doldrums, overwhelmed by Americanimports and its own mediocrity, a veterandirector had wagered that a literary adaptationexploring a disappearing form of Koreanmusical culture might just sell some tickets.Although only screened in a few cinemas,

Seopyeonje became the first Korean film toattract more than one million viewers. Thanksto the generosity of the Korean Film Archive,y o u c a n g o t o Y o u T u b e(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z-MOMTUcVEc) and judge for yourself.

Hearing that the film might be screened at theCannes Film Festival, Yi Bong-u flew to Franceonly to discover that Im had changed his mindabout the screening. Luckily, someone wasthere from the Korean Film Council with aversion on VHS. Yi was stunned by the beautyof what he saw and heard. Back in Japan hefaxed the production company, eager toacquire the Japanese r ights . He wasdesperately eager to fly to Seoul and make thedeal with Taehung Pictures before some otherdistributor got there. Which is when thingsstarted to get really complicated. Because thegenerally apolitical Yi Bong-u comes from animportant family in the North Korea-affiliatedorganization usually referred to by the shortname Sōren/Chongryeon. He had neither aJapanese nor a South Korean passport, buttravel papers good enough for Europeancountries. At the Korean Embassy in Tokyo ittook him several days to persuade staff to issuea temporary visa – he was granted all of threedays. So a Saturday came when off he went, tofind himself met at the airport by officials of thesecurity service. They ushered him through adiplomatic channel and drove him straight intothe city. By this point Yi was having doubtsabout the wisdom of following his passionateattachment to Seopyonje.

He was taken to the Shilla Hotel and given athorough questioning, both as to his purpose incoming and concerning his family’s historywhich, disturbingly, they knew in great detail.Once they had left him alone, Yi dashed off tomeet Im’s producer Yi Tae-won. The story had amore than happy ending. After an all-nightdrinking session with the formidable Mr Yi, heflew back to Japan Sunday morning with hiscontract, scrawled on a scrap of paper (Lee &

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Omota 2005: 269-76). Yi Bong-u went on thebring films such as Swiri (1999), Park Chan-wook’s JSA (2000), Yi Chang-dong’s Oasis(2002) and Bong Joon-ho’s real breakthroughfilm Memories of Murder (2003), to Japanesescreens. The impact on serious film-goers,Japanese critics and fi lm-makers wasextraordinary.

I would argue that fi lms such as theserepresent a Korean Wave that is thankfully stilllapping at our shores. Films by the threedirectors mentioned above are recognized aslandmark achievements in the creation of aSouth Korean cinematic culture, one whichblends high artistic standards, technicalvirtuosity and popular appeal. Yi Bong-u, fromhis often uneasy position within the Koreandiaspora, set something in motion which, Ibelieve or at least hope, will prove of morelasting significance for global culture than allthe clips on YouTube ever could.

Retro-elegy

John Lie, who I have quoted from throughoutthis essay, notes with wry humour a commentof Gustav Mahler: when it comes to debatesabout musical taste, ‘the younger generation isalways right’ (Lie 2015: 17). Yes, they probablyare. I would like to end with one last passagefrom Lie’s very fine book K-Pop. In it I think heeloquently captures the bemusement of oldergenerations confronted with their tech-savvychildren and grandchildren. He is speakingabout music but what he says holds true foryouth culture in general. (It also creativelyrecasts the famous closing line of The GreatGatsby.)

The urge to seize the moment valorizes thepresent and the new, contributing in turn to thedevaluation of the past and the traditional,which in any case is suspicious preciselybecause of its association with parents andelders. The perpetual modernity of the popular-music canon goes hand in hand with a constantforgetting of the past. Youth’s discretionary

spending power and the constant transition ofthe generations ensure that popular musicbeats on, borne ceaselessly into the future(Ibid.)

Readings

Fedorenko, Olga (2014) ‘South KoreanAdvertising as Popular Culture’, in The KoreanPopular Culture Reader, eds. Kyung Hyun Kimand Youngmin Choe (Durham & London: DukeUniversity), pp. 341-62

Kim, Youna (2013) ‘Introduction’, in TheKorean Wave: Korean Media Go Global, ed.Youna Kim (London: Routledge), pp. 1-27

Lee, Claire (2011) ‘Remembering ‘WinterS o n a t a ’ , t h e s t a r t o f h a l l y u(http://nwww.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20111230000497)’

Lee Bong-u & Omota Inuhiko (2005) ｢パﾂチギ！対談篇｣ (Tokyo: Asahi Books)

Lee Jung-Hoon (2011) ‘Normalization ofRelat ions with Japan: Toward a NewPartnership’, in The Park Chung Hee Era: TheTransformation of South Korea, eds. Byung-Kook Kim & Ezra Vogel (Cambridge: HarvardUniv Press), pp. 430-456

Lie, John (2015) K-Pop: Popular Music, CulturalAmnesia, and Economic Innovation in SouthKorea (Oakland: Univ of California)

Russel, Mark James (2008) Pop Goes Korea:Behind the Revolution in Movies, Music, andthe Internet Culture (Berkley CA: Stone BridgePress)

Shim, Doobo (2008) ‘The Growth of KoreanCultural Industries and the Korean Wave’, inEast Asian Popular Culture: Analysing theKorean Wave (Hong Kong: Univ of Hong KongPress), pp. 17-31

W i k i l i v r e s(http://wikil ivres.ca/wiki/Baekbeomilj i)

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W i k i p e d i a [ E n g ] : K - P o p(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/K-pop)

Yang Inshil (2007) ‘韓流の前夜’, in 2007 Trans:Asia Screen Culture Conference (Seoul: KoreanNational University of Art), pp. 127-29

Mark Morris is a fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and formerly a member of theDepartment of East Asian Studies at the University of Cambridge. There his teaching andresearch focused on Japanese literature and East Asian cinema, especially South Korean film.He is an advisor to the Korean Cultural Centre in London and has organised and participatedin a wide variety of film events in the UK, Europe and South Korea. He curates the ‘classiccinema’ strand of the annual London Korean Film Festival.

Notes1 This is not to suggest that Kim Ku was excessively straight laced. Bruce Cumings notes thatwhen he finally returned to Korea from China, ‘Kim . . . traveled around with a “bevy ofconcubines” and a “flotilla of gunmen”’ (Cumings 1997: 197). The trajectory of Kim’s life wasdeeply inflected by Japan’s conquest of Korea. It took him from youthful student of theConfucian classics to Donghak rebel; after several spells in prison and the experience oftorture, he became a member and eventual leader of the Korean Provisional Government inexile, based in Shanghai. Before and after his leadership of the KPG, his resort to politicalviolence earned him the nickname ‘the Assassin’ (Ibid: 197-8). That makes it somewhatdisappointing to see that the actor portraying him in the recent historical political thriller TheAssassination (2015) only has a very minor role. A life that fairly begs for big-screentreatment has seemed to produce only dull hagiographies such as the stodgy 1960 film Aa,Baekbeom Kim Ku Seonsaeng.2 A delightful occasion, captured on video: see here(https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-eBJ_uxThhk).3 This film, like a surprising number of films from the not so distant past, no longer existsexcept in the form of a scenario. During the 1960s heyday of South Korean cinema, thegovernment restricted the number of prints that could be circulated, generally to six. Theostensible reason was to limit the outflow of capital, in this instance, money needed to buyraw film stock from overseas. As films moved from first-run theatres in cities to second- andthird-run venues, to towns and smaller towns, the prints grew more and more fragile, oftenwith badly made repairs and splices. Films were seen as commodities the value of whichdropped rapidly once screened in any given theatre, whose owners would be anxious to getthe newest release on the screen. Few people in the business really seem to have consideredfilm as having lasting cultural value and worth careful preservation. Now, South Korea has inthe Korean Film Archive one of the world’s most significant institutions for the preservationand restoration of visual culture.4 One nasty-looking fellow even assumes he will bed our fair young heroine Dong-Yi, played

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wittily and with seductive virginal charm by Han Hyo-ju. Like other men of a certain age whowatched and worried over Dong-Yi through all 60 episodes, I can testify that there was no wayhe was going to get away with that.