Will the Korean Pop Culture Boom Have Legs?

By Jeff Yang

A month ago, on a riotously lovely morning in Orange County, California, I stumbled into perhaps the most convincing display I’ve yet encountered of the potency of hallyu – a Korean term that literally translates as “The Korean Wave.”

I’d been invited to be a panelist at KCON ‘12, which billed itself as “the first-ever large scale convention dedicated to the hottest entertainment coming out of Korea.” The event was conceived of and organized by the cable channel MNET America, the U.S. branch of the hugely popular Korean music network that might be called the “MTV of Korea” (except that MTV is in Korea and MNET is way bigger).

I’ll admit that my initial response was skeptical. Even as I accepted the invitation to speak, I suppressed a nagging fear that MNET was forcing into existence something that wasn’t there, trying to engineer a need among K-Pop fans to gather as a collective from the top down, rather than letting it spring up from the grassroots.

It’s a concern that worried the executive who spearheaded the event, too. “We knew that the fandom was out there. We’d seen these fan gatherings spontaneously manifest at other events we’d sponsored,” says Ted Kim, EVP and U.S. chief of MNET America’s parent company, CJ Entertainment America. “But we were struggling, because it’s very hard to get good data when it comes to phenomena like this. You’re just not able to quantify things. And at some point, you just need to make a leap of faith.”

That leap entailed booking the Verizon Amphitheatre in Irvine, California, for an event that combined workshops about organizing fan clubs and breaking into K-Pop, karaoke showdowns and dance-offs, autograph sessions, food trucks and merchandise booths and a grand-finale concert featuring some very attractive young people and a Technicolor SFX lightshow that could probably be seen from space.

“We kept on debating about how many people we should expect,” says Kim. The number they finally hit upon was 10,000. “We thought to ourselves, if we can get that many people to come out for this, well, that’s wildly successful. That’s fabulous validation that the fandom does exist and that they do want to gather together. But I’m going to say right now that there was tremendous nervousness. Behind the scenes, we were secretly whispering, ‘What if throw the biggest party in the world and no one shows up?’”

They needn’t have worried, and nor should I. Walking from the parking lot toward the Amphitheatre’s fairgrounds, I soon found myself in a delighted mob of fans, many of whom had been lined up since 8:30 am. Some had handmade signs: I LIKE LUHAN MORE THAN FREE WIFI, said one. They were well behaved, queuing quietly without complaint, despite most events and kiosks being crowded beyond belief or comprehension. The exception? The beer stand, whose two disgruntled-looking vendors said had sold exactly two brews all day. That’s because the vast majority of attendees were too young to drink, and looked even younger. The mostly teenaged crowd was also mostly non-Korean, and probably half non-Asian. Kim’s hoped-for headcount had likely been reached by midmorning, with more attendees (and their parents) arriving throughout the day.

“It wasn’t just the numbers, it was the energy,” says Kim. “On a scale of one to 10, I don’t think it dropped below eight all day. The fans…I had this one woman come over – 19 years old, a white woman from Oklahoma – she told me she drove 27 straight hours to got to KCON. And then she lifted up her sleeve, and showed me a Band-Aid and a bruise on her arm. She said she’d sold her blood in order to afford the trip. I was kind of horrified. But…that’s the kind of dedication you’re talking about.”

Now, don’t get me wrong: I never questioned the size of K-Pop’s audience. I’ve been covering its emergence for years, and am fully aware that K-Pop’s audience is huge and insistent both here in the U.S. and globally, and that Korea is now unequivocally the wellspring of Asia’s most popular and influential pop cultural phenomena – supplanting Japan as the primary source of Asian cool, as my friend Euny Hong, lifestyle editor of The Atlantic’s new online business mag Quartz, asserted in a provocative essay this past Friday.

K-Pop is here. K-Pop is now. And, riding the consumer dollars of its burgeoning tween-teen fanbase, K-Pop will thrive for the foreseeable future. There are real and educational reasons for its rise, some of which I’ve written about in the past, and some of which Hong details in her story, “Why it was so easy for Korea to overtake Japan in the pop culture wars.”

But I’m just not as convinced as Hong that K-Pop in its current incarnation can sustain itself as a long-term global phenomenon. Japan’s pop culture primacy spanned two decades, and while it is has fallen off its peak, it has hardly vanished completely. On the contrary, in fact: J-Pop has simply become so mainstream, so infused into the DNA of global pop culture that it has become immanent, and thus invisible. The aesthetics of J-Pop, its conceits and conventions, have become so much a part of the fundamental language of contemporary design, technology, entertainment and fashion that they’re no longer easily distinguishable as Japanese in origin, as opposed to in influence.

That’s also why I feel compelled to question some of the assertions Hong makes in her “king is dead, long live the king” piece detailing Korea’s dethroning of Japan from the top of the pop pyramid.

First there are the metrics that she cites as defining K-Pop’s ascent. PSY Oppa’s 770 million YouTube views. Google Trends showing that searches for “K-Pop” skyrocketed past searches for “J-Pop” beginning in 2010. Japan’s flagging recorded music industry revenues, which (like the rest of the world) have fallen every year from 2009 on, while Korea’s have grown. And then, the slump in revenues for Sanrio, parent company of Hello Kitty, among others.

Statistics obviously can be found to support just about any position, and more of them don’t necessarily translate into a stronger case. And these in particular are a bit questionable. PSY’s viral YouTube success is arguably not only exceptional, it’s actually a counterexample to K-Pop’s rise: Oppa is, quite consciously, the antithesis of the standard Korean pop poster boy, with a look, musical style, career history and attitude that make him an anomaly among the sleek, pretty, possibly bioengineered lads of the K-Pop Machine. His success is both welcome and puzzling to Koreans, and even to PSY himself: “I am not sure how I became so popular in the U.S., because [in Korea] I am a B-rated star,” he said at a press conference in September. PSY has drawn attention to K-Pop, but he’s a unique quantity, and still has to prove that he’s even able to duplicate his success himself. (I, personally, have faith.)

Regarding Google searches for K-Pop versus J-Pop: The trendline shows that searches for J-Pop were never very high, even at the peak of Japanese pop culture glory…because most fans of Japanese pop culture don’t use the term “J-Pop” for anything other than Japanese pop music, which has probably the smallest footprint out of the Rising Sun’s various fan-favorite emanations. Here’s an alternative Google search plot that’s a more relevant comparison.

Searches for anime and manga absolutely crush those for K-Pop. On the one hand, this could simply reflect the fact that Google searches are a pretty poor metric for determining the relative popularity of broad-spanning phenomena. On the other, it could be an indicator that anime and manga, here in the United States, are no longer imported culture – they’re part of the landscape. Go to any library or bookstore (there are still physical bookstores, right?) and you’ll see that manga has an enormous dedicated section all to its own, larger than many of the other genre sections, and generally surrounded with clusters of absorbed youth lounging like they own the place. It’s not a teen fad, it’s a teen consumption category: Snacks, fashion, manga.

Hong goes on to list a half-dozen  reasons why Japan has fallen off in the pop culture game relative to Korea. The first is that Japan has become increasingly idiosyncratic in its cultural output – that “Japan makes stuff only for Japan.” She cites comparisons of Japan to the Galapagos Islands, where Darwin first noticed the unique divergent evolution of finch populations on separated atolls. For what it’s worth this isn’t a very apt metaphor for Japan, given that it would imply the presence of a great diversity of ideas and products within the Japanese archipelago; a more relevant one might be Australia, a place whose species were isolated from other continents for so long that they evolved in drastically different and weird ways, e.g. koalas, kangaroos and platypuses.

But it’s not clear that this is a liability in global pop-culture competitiveness. In fact, this eccentricity is Japan’s strongest remaining asset. The more blandly similar a nation’s output is to your own, the less likely it is to tempt you to seek it out – it’s the sense of novelty, of fresh stimulus, of strange and fabulous dissimilarity, that leads us to explore alternative pop-culture horizons, after all. Which explains the popularity of PSY: Gangnam Style is weird. It’s weird in Korea, and it’s weirder in the U.S. And totally awesome.

Hong also states that Korean pop culture has the advantage of being “puritanical,” a reflection of Korea’s clean-cut and sexually restrictive society. This is a hard argument to make to anyone who’s watched a video by any Korean girl group. Yes, there’s no overt or even implied sexual behavior. But there are also legs that extend from the ground to the sky, propped under miniskirts that could probably do double duty as wristbands, and the dance routines invariably include plenty of pelvic thrusting and catlike stretching (and ugh, I feel like a perv just having written that). The primary difference between sexuality in Korean pop and Japanese pop is that the former is focused on willowy teens on the proper side of pubescence, while the latter – well, let’s just say that middle-school uniforms seem unaccountably popular in Japan. But intimations of sex are there in both cases, all the more suggestive because of the repressive mores of both cultures. And you’ll never convince me that the secret to global pop dominance in this day and age is virginal purity. Hips don’t lie, people!

Another reason that Hong gives is that Americans are seen as heroes of the Korean War, and as a result, Korea has been more “closely influenced” by U.S. pop culture than Japan – noting that even today, there are still 30,000 American soldiers (actually, around 28,000) permanently based in Korea. Yes, but there are also over 35,000 American soldiers permanently based in Japan, plus another 5500 military-employed American civilians and 10,000 American military spouses and dependents.

Did Korea embrace American pop culture more readily than Japan because the U.S. was seen as heroic? That’s not clearly the case. Despite, or more properly because of its defeat, Japan after World War II actively sought to immerse itself in the culture (especially the popular culture) of its triumphant occupiers, leading to a rapid “Americanization” period in which the media fantasies and material goods of the U.S. vision of the “good life” were prized above all. As Rikyo University law and political science professor Akio Igarashi notes, “In the immediate postwar period, what a majority of Japanese hoped for was the realization of a rational and affluent society… The spacious rooms and the big white refrigerator in the comic strip, Blondie, helped people to imagine the affluence of the American lifestyle….For Japanese at the time, America’s prosperous culture of consumption, symbolized by chewing gum, chocolate, and women’s fashion, represented ‘the American Dream.’”

Korea embraced American ideas, media, fashion and consumer aspirations after the Korean War too, but in the ensuing decades, a sharp and growing sense of ambivalence has emerged toward the U.S. Panmi, or anti-American sensibility, has generally strengthened since the Eighties, peaking in 2002 following controversy over short-track speed skater Apolo Anton Ohno’s Olympic gold medal over South Korean rival Kim Dong-Sung, and the accidental deaths of two Korean middle-schoolers under the wheels of a U.S. military vehicle. (This was the year in which a RAND survey found that over 60 percent of South Koreans felt “unfavorable” attitudes toward the U.S.; meanwhile Japanese favorability toward the U.S. has remained over 50 percent for decades and is the second-highest in the world right now, after only the U.S.’s opinion of itself. 2002 was also the year singer Yoon Min-Suk released his cult-hit song “F*ckin’ USA,” to massive media attention.)

And it’s not even obvious that embracing American ideas is necessarily the path to pop-culture export success for Asian countries anyway. In the U.S., Asian performers and products that have attempted to ape American sensibilities for the sake of global crossover have universally failed. Dozens of Japanese performers, from Seiko to Utada, Hong Kong’s Coco Lee and Korea’s BoA, Se7en, Wonder Girls and Girls Generation have all made runs at breakthrough success by singing English-language songs and engaging in massive media and PR campaigns, all without much to show for their hard work. The exception to this rule, PSY, was a pop-culture land mine who blew by accident, refusing to be anything but himself and performing a song with Korean lyrics that are incomprehensible to non-Koreans even in translation.

In fact, the most successful Korean pop exports that Hong cites, from its idols to its films and dramas to Samsung’s effervescent avalanche of consumer electronics and VOOZ’s winsome licensing franchise Pucca, all represent evolutionary improvements on Japanese templates — not American ones. Korea has effectively dominated the pop culture cosmos by out-Japanning Japan, and, as Hong points out, doing so even in Japan itself, which is still in the throes of a Korean-pop obsession.

The question remains, however, whether Korea’s impressive winning run can continue indefinitely, or even long-term. I’m not yet convinced that’s the case.

Japanese pop culture has come to the American landscape in the form of visual media — primarily anime and manga. (Games too, but up until very recently, Japanese video games came to the U.S. with most of their unique cultural context flensed away so as not to freak out American parents.) Because those media forms were naturally produced and presented in Japanese, J-Pop fandom erupted organically and grew epidemically out of a kind of language-hacking Underground Railroad of pirate BBS’s that offered downloadable English script translations and VHS-tape-trading marketplaces.

In short, fandom flourished because the only way to enjoy authentic J-Pop in that early era was through connections  to the fan community. (In fact, the hardest-core fans eventually became the U.S. anime and manga industry, launching the first legit English-language distribution houses, and thus laying the foundation for a subsequent generation’s total immersion in Japanese cultural products.)

K-Pop fandom is centered around music. (Yes, Korean live-action dramas and movies are popular as well, but they appeal to different demographic segments, and don’t tend to generate the fannish intensity that Korean pop idols do…unless they happen to star Korean pop idols). K-Pop fans don’t need translations of their music to enjoy it; as Ted Kim notes, when Mnet asked their viewers if they wanted their music videos to carry subtitles, the response was horrified: “No way, they told us, we want to see them the way they’re shown in Korea.”

And because music is auditory, not visual, it’s a medium that lends itself to addictive consumption and maniacal appreciation, but not the kinds of collaborative phenomena that are the pillars of most pop-culture activity and community — things like cosplay (dressing up as favored characters) and fan fiction (extending or re-envisioning beloved works through original fanmade stories and art).

All of these factors point to the reality that K-Pop in its current modes isn’t a very blendable medium. Its fans want to consume it in as pure and unadulterated form as possible — with incomprehensible language, odd visual idioms and untranslatable nuances entirely intact. The visual media of J-Pop have been culture-hacked and hybridized from the very beginning, often in ways that have caused hard-core fans to grit their teeth — but this flexibility has also allowed it to readily mainstream into U.S. culture, even to the point where even American-made homages (like virtually every cartoon now airing on kiddie TV) are as popular as the Japanese originals. By contrast, I don’t think it’s obvious that an American artist emulating K-Pop tropes can succeed either in the U.S. or abroad (though it’s not for want of a few earnest artists trying).

This would seem to sharply limit the market upside of K-Pop, and its ultimate long-term influence. It’s ironic: K-Pop’s recent success is in no small part because it has played on its own terms. But its long-term future depends on its ability to cling to the things that make it unique while relaxing its purist Koreanness. For it to become a truly global phenomenon, it needs ambassadors who are idiosyncratic but have universal appeal, who can speak English fluently but wear their cultural pride on their sleeve. It needs artists who can collaborate with foreign performers and who inspire mash-up creativity among overseas audiences.

There’s only one star in K-Pop’s constellation who could possibly fit that bill, and he’s the unlikeliest one of all. PSY Oppa: Please report to headquarters. Your mission, should you choose to accept it….