Jung-Sun Park: Riding the Pan-Cultural Wave

Jung-Sun Park, associate professor and coordinator of Asian-Pacific studies, had her essay “What is Hallyu, the Korean Wave” published in the summer issue of News and Reviews, a publication of the Asian Educational Media Service, which is based at the Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Another article by Park, “Korean Pop Culture Spreads Beyond Asia” was published Aug. 1 and 2 in the Korea Herald, a leading English-language newspaper in South Korea.

The articles refer to the growing popularity of South Korean pop culture in East and Southeast Asia and beyond. According to Park, the phenomenon was surprising to many people, including Koreans themselves.

“Western pop culture has long been prevalent in the Asian region. In some Asian countries, Japanese pop culture has also been popular,” she says.” But in the late 1990s, Korean TV dramas and pop songs became big hits both in China and Taiwan. Soon, Korean pop culture gained popularity in other Asian countries, as well. The emergence of such a trend has to do with globalization and regionalization. Obviously, globalization makes the circulation of information easy. At the same time, global media industries created new market strategies by dividing the world into different regions, facilitating the circulation of not only the Western cultural products, but also locally produced products.”

Park also cites technological development as a catalyst for the hallyu phenomenon, saying that the proliferation of satellite and cable television stations all over Asia necessitated the import of foreign programs. Hallyu means “the Korean wave” and refers to the recent surge of popularity of South Korean popular culture in other countries, especially in Asian countries.

“For example, in the 1990s, Taiwan, which is a very small country, had more than 100 cable stations,” she notes. “They could only produce a certain amount of local shows, and had to import programs from other parts of the world. Of course, the Western products were popular as well as the Japanese products, but those were not enough to satisfy the needs [of the audience]. Also, the internal domestic competition in South Korea became too severe, so in order to survive, small production companies had to look for a different market, and they thought that going overseas would be the answer.

“Consumers get tired of seeing the same products from the same country over and over,” Park continues, “so the media looked for something unique, fresh and diverse. Korean programs had enough sophistication to satisfy many foreign audiences in terms of storytelling, camera work and characters.”

Besides the Korean Wave, Park is also interested in Japanese comics and animation and East Asian cinema. Over the past several years, she has taught courses on those topics and published an article on anime (“The Question of Identity in ‘Ghost in the Shell’: Breached Boundaries, Anxiety and Hope in the Cyberage” in Yuriika (Eureka: Poetry and Criticism) Tokyo, Japan 2004). She is offering a course titled “Japanese Comics and Animation” this fall and looks forward to exploring what she calls “cultural hybridization” and the complexity of contemporary trans-Pacific cultural flows with her students.

Park remembers seeing a screening of the 1988 animated film, Akira in Chicago when she was a graduate student at Northwestern University. The Japanese import heralded a new wave of popularity in the United States for animation and comics (manga) from that country.

“Probably the reason that Japanese comics and anime has been so successful in the United States is that for the video generation, everything is interconnected. A book is made into a TV drama, or a movie that can be made into a graphic novel or a video game. The people in those industries are fully aware of the benefits of making all those forms of media work together.”

The diversity of genres in and audiences for Japanese manga and anime may also be their recipe for success in Western societies, says Park.

“When I ask my students why they like Japanese animation, they often say it’s because it shows things that are not available in the Disney-type animation,” she says. “They can watch it as adults. Japanese animation has a wide range of genres that target specific consumer groups, with animation geared toward little kids, teenaged girls, teenaged boys and working adults, both male and female.”

Park is a cultural anthropologist whose internationally published writings focus on transnationalism, migration and immigration, race and ethnicity, citizenship, and Korean and East Asian popular culture. With several Dominguez Hills colleagues, she co-edited The Borders in All of Us: New Approaches to Three Global Diasporic Communities (William Little, Selase Williams, Irene Vasquez, Munashe Furusa and Jung-Sun Park, eds. Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006). For this volume, she contributed the article “Korean American Youth and Transnational Flows of Popular Culture Across the Pacific,” which originally appeared in the Amerasia Journal. Her upcoming book, Chicago Korean Americans: Identity and Politics in a Transnational Community, will be published by Routledge.

- Joanie Harmon