Who’s Your Daddy? The J Brand, the K Brand, and the West
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In bringing its “soft power” to bear on the world cultural and economic situation, South Korea has historically been at a disadvantage among its East Asian neighbors. In the wake of Japan’s 1868 Meiji Revolution and its defeat of a western power in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan successfully set out to capture a dominant market share of the West’s imagination. In the meantime, China, for centuries an object of westerners’ orientalist fascination continues to hold the West’s attention, especially since reemerging as a serious economic competitor. With the rise of “brand nationalism” in the 21st century, however, Korea’s Hallyu began to gain a foothold in East Asia, from which the country hoped to spring onto the global stage—for, inside both Japan and Korea, other Asians’ warm embrace could never inspire the national euphoria brought on by one hit single in the West. “Cool Japan’s” J Brand, which, by the arrival of the new millennium, had given rise to a new “soft nationalism” and clinquant, narcissistic pop cultural discourse, is, in the current decade, giving up significant ground to Korea’s Hallyu (“Korean Wave”)-driven K Brand. Under the rules governing branding and market share, though, when it comes to capturing the West’s attention, South Korean artists continue to find themselves somewhat hidden in the shadows of Japan and China, forced to fling their offerings across a broad cultural divide, where, even with the rising homogenizing force of global media, audiences still often don’t “get it,” or when they do, confuse the K Brand with the J Brand (and a West-conjured C Brand). Korean artists are increasingly crafting personas and works that, while imbued with Korean references, attempt to mirror to the West its own fashions and musical conventions, sometimes overtly building on prior western releases, as with Psy’s latest video, “Daddy,” a knock-off of a song by the American musician will.i.am. This adaptive response, while fun and interesting, remains marked by Hallyu’s now intergenerational growing pains—for the truth remains that the concerns of an emitting culture rarely coincide with those of the receiving culture. After surveying its historical setting, this paper explores Hallyu’s challenges in marketing itself to a western world that, but for the rare exception, has little interest in experiencing a version of itself translated by South Korean artists and sent back for its own re-consumption.
Abstract
In bringing its “soft power” to bear on the world cultural and economic situation, South Korea has historically been at a disadvantage among its East Asian neighbors. In the wake of Japan’s 1868 Meiji Revolution and its defeat of a western power in the Russo-Japanese War of 1905, Japan successfully set out to capture a dominant market share of the West’s imagination. In the meantime, China, for centuries an object of westerners’ orientalist fascination continues to hold the West’s attention, especially since reemerging as a serious economic competitor. With the rise of “brand nationalism” in the 21st century, however, Korea’s Hallyu began to gain a foothold in East Asia, from which the country hoped to spring onto the global stage—for, inside both Japan and Korea, other Asians’ warm embrace could never inspire the national euphoria brought on by one hit single in the West. “Cool Japan’s” J Brand, which, by the arrival of the new millennium, had given rise to a new “soft nationalism” and clinquant, narcissistic pop cultural discourse, is, in the current decade, giving up significant ground to Korea’s Hallyu (“Korean Wave”)-driven K Brand. Under the rules governing branding and market share, though, when it comes to capturing the West’s attention, South Korean artists continue to find themselves somewhat hidden in the shadows of Japan and China, forced to fling their offerings across a broad cultural divide, where, even with the rising homogenizing force of global media, audiences still often don’t “get it,” or when they do, confuse the K Brand with the J Brand (and a West-conjured C Brand). Korean artists are increasingly crafting personas and works that, while imbued with Korean references, attempt to mirror to the West its own fashions and musical conventions, sometimes overtly building on prior western releases, as with Psy’s latest video, “Daddy,” a knock-off of a song by the American musician will.i.am. This adaptive response, while fun and interesting, remains marked by Hallyu’s now intergenerational growing pains—for the truth remains that the concerns of an emitting culture rarely coincide with those of the receiving culture. After surveying its historical setting, this paper explores Hallyu’s challenges in marketing itself to a western world that, but for the rare exception, has little interest in experiencing a version of itself translated by South Korean artists and sent back for its own re-consumption.
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