by CHIKAKO NAGAYAMA
From left, Good-bye Hallyu (Kitahara 2013b) and Patriot Housewives (Kitahara and Park 2014)
Summary
Japanese mainstream media have stereotyped Japanese Hallyu fans as “middle-aged,” asexual and unhappy women. A right-wing backlash since 2012 further made them targets of xenophobic as well as sexist attacks. After socio-historically contextualizing this constructed fan image, this article probes Kitahara Minori’s Good-bye Hallyu to ask, “if Hallyu has empowered the audience, how has it done so?”
Introduction
The television drama series that stands for the rise of the Hallyu in Japan is Winter Sonata (Ky?ul y?n’ga in Korean, Fuyuno sonata in Japanese), starring Pae Yong-jun and Cho’e Chi-u,1 which aired in 2003 (Kim 2010; Han 2012).2 Although Winter Sonata, centering upon a tragic romance, was largely supported by female viewers, the historical drama, Dae Jang-geum (The Great Jang-geum) starring Lee Y?ng-ae which aired in 2005, successfully captured male as well as female viewers. Yet Japanese mainstream media have stereotyped Japanese fans of these dramas as “middle-aged,” asexual and unhappy women. Meanwhile, the economic impact of Hallyu triggered the quick development of the Shin-?kubo entertainment district in Tokyo, catering predominantly to female fans (Kitahara 2013b, 61-62). The boom also inspired Hallyu enthusiasts to take Korean language and culture courses; and to travel to the shooting locations of Winter Sonata, which signaled “changes in gender dynamics and inter-Asian cultural flows,” since tours to Korea were previously dominated by Japanese male travellers (Hirata 2008, 143).3 This shift in cultural flow has triggered distinctive – sometimes politically charged – inquiries by scholars and audience members due to the complex history of Japan-Korea relations. These complexities include ongoing tension regarding Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula, the colonial gaze maintained by many Japanese through sex tourism after Korea’s independence, and South Korea’s official ban of cultural imports from Japan until the late 1990s (Hirata 2008). As discussed below, the political context faced by Hallyu fans has become even more complex since 2012, when anti-Korean backlash against the Hallyu wave became predominant in Japan.
While some academic authors dealing with the Japanese fans have shown that Hallyu had a positive impact on their perception of Korea (see Ahn 2008; Hirata ibid; M?ri 2008; Kim 2010), the concept of women’s desire has allowed the feminist popular writer and entrepreneur Kitahara Minori to go farther to explore both the liberating effects of Hallyu and the ideologies behind a right-wing backlash against it. This article will contextualize Hallyu fans’ resistance to and negotiation with dominant norms about heterosexual desires and national belonging by probing key issues raised by Kitahara and her collaborators in the collection of interviews and essays they published entitled Good-bye Hallyu (Sayonara Kanryu, 2013b).