K-Pop takes over SE Asia, leaving J-Pop retreating back to Japan
"J-pop goes flat as Southeast Asia swoons for Korean artists"
Written by Shotaro Tani, Nikkei Asian Review - November 11, 2019
Nolan Matcovich - November 20, 2019
Japanese pop idols have been increasing losing their popularity and influence in Southeast Asia due to the rise in popularity of South Korean idol groups. This article presents this decline and trade off from a number of perspectives, but I found that there were three main points that seemed more interesting and important to me. First, both in and out of Japan, J-Pop (in the context of this article, mainly referring to pop, but also more broadly to most Japanese music) groups have relied much more heavily on physical music sales, television appearances, and hyped-up live performances, among other things, to gain and maintain popularity with fans. All of these, however, have been available to music groups for multiple decades, and have increasingly paled in the face of the social media-heavy fan engagement tactics of K-Pop and the Korean music industry. Especially in order to connect with foreign fans, social media can be especially useful, given that television appearances and live performances overseas can be costly and logistically, not to mention the potential that social media has, as the article mentions, to provide foreign fans a connected series of platforms on which they can provide other fans with translations and create and share their own fan works.
Second, and somewhat related, the article referenced ways in which Moon Jae-in's government has been using the popularity of K-Pop in Southeast Asia to its advantage in striking business and political deals throughout the region as part of its New Southern Policy. Although I wasn't able to find much on this and the article didn't mention anything about previous or current similar efforts by the Japanese government, I would imagine that this has not been as big of a political playing card for Japan. I would imagine this is partly due to its colonial legacy in East Asia as well as its continued importance in the region over the last century and a half, in contrast to Korea's role as the Asian underdog that it is only now beginning to shed as a result of its increasingly popular entertainment market and recently developed economy.
Lastly, the article discusses that one of the reasons why Korean pop groups may be overtaking the popularity of Japanese pop groups is due to many groups' inclusion of foreign members, usually from Southeast Asia or East Asia, along with North Americans of Korean descent. It mentions the fact that there are Japanese groups in Southeast Asian countries, citing the "cloning of AKB48," which has given rise to JKT48 in Indonesia, BNK48 in Thailand, MNL48 in the Philippines, and SGO48 in Vietnam. Since these groups are entirely made up of members from these countries, however, I feel that these groups are very prone to losing their statuses of "Japanese groups" in many people's minds. Thus, it is almost as if the Japanese music industry is helping to expand the pop music scenes in Southeast Asia (and obviously has some control over them), but the groups themselves are purely Southeast Asian, with Japan in the end fumbling an opportunity for it to project its pop cultural influence into the region.
This, however, reminded me about a K-Pop group I had heard of prior to this class called EXP Edition, who has received criticism both in and out of Korea amongst K-Pop fans for being a group of four American men with the tagline, "born in New York, made in Seoul." The group's members are "Croatian Sime Kosta, Portuguese-American Frankie DaPonte from Rhode Island, half Japanese-German Koki Tomlinson who grew up in Texas, and New Yorker Hunter Kohl." Prior to moving to Seoul, none of them spoke Korean or had listened to much K-Pop. This has led fans to be quite divided between those who see this as an opportunity for K-Pop to gain more ground in Western markets and for Westerners to be more included in Korean society (something Korea already has Japan beat out on in many ways) and those who see this as disrespectful and/or threatening to K-Pop and Korean culture and society, more broadly.
Supplemental sources:
https://kyotoreview.org/issue-11/korean-wave-in-southeast-asia/
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-46381997
https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/news/exp-edition-feel-like-this-video-kpop-group-american-south-korea-bora-kim-art-project-a7688286.html
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