"The most perfect metaphor for the West's present switch-over from Japanmania to the Korean Wave." if this is a thing, it has been largely unnoticed. I think educated people think of SK as one of the few countries competing with US tech income (others being Australia, Japan, Singapore, and some (but very few) parts of England (London Finance), Germany (not sure on this one), and Switzerland (banking )). Other than that, Korea goes mostly unnoticed by the west.
We're talking in a pop culture context here, where even just in 2020-2022 Korea and Korean culture/heritage has had significant soft power success in a number of markets/media:
- Export of majorly successful pop music (e.g. BTS, Blackpink - those hits are often penned by Western composers however, so a bit murky on what product is flowing there)
- Ditto TV (e.g. Squid Game setting TV records with a lot rooted in Korean schoolyard games)
- Ditto cinema (Parasite, a story about social mobility woes in Korean society, winning all the Oscars)
- Ditto gaming (PUBG, other MMOs)
- Ditto literature (bestellers including "Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982", again on social issues in the country)
- Ditto cosmetics exports, beauty trends ("Korean Week" in malls, say), etc.
- Even some Western productions focussing specifically on Korean diaspora/ethnicity (e.g. most recently the expensive "Pachinko" on Apple TV+ (and the novel it's based on), or stuff like Kim's Convenience)
I think you can definitely make a case that Korea is the Asian-country-du-jour among the Western audience (and that's before you get into, say, Latin America, which is far deeper into Korean TV content, also bleeding over into Latin minorities in the USA).
That's an interesting perspective. The only thing I can relate to here is Squid Game, but it went mostly unnoticed as a "trend shift" by me, because it seems to just fit the trend of Korea having pretty good movies (Chingoo, Old Boy) for the niche audience that liked things like Japan's original Battle Royale.
Also, the trends of Korea seem to very much run in parallel with the trends of Japan - overworked business people tired of working all the time with a lack of meaning.
Thanks! I do think there's a shift there from niche audience to much more significant mainstream attention (which can of course be fleeting, which was also kind of built into the original argument: attention moves on from time to time ...). I do recall the time when movies like "Old-boy" were favorites among the arthouse track/festival circuit-going audience as well, but those were never the headlining poster in a multiplex the way that a "Parasite" now pulls off.
I lived and worked in Korea for a German tech company for a few years (since returned to Berlin), working on-site with customers, and since about 2018/19 there's a very significant uptick in other people showing an interest and asking me questions about the experience. This often takes the form of "my teenage daughter is a BTS fan and learning Korean" and things like that.
Korea and Japan have a lot of shared history and have deeply affected one another, and in particular the business culture and the economic structure of Korea are heavily informed by Japanese influence, yes.
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On a completely separate note, re interesting depictions of fantasy-Asia in a Western popculture/punk context: The headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", is set in a future Bangkok. I've never been to Thailand and can't comment on how ham-fisted or not this may be, but it was also an interesting step away from the Japanese culture-dominated vibes of speculative fiction pre-2000.
>The headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", is set in a future Bangkok.
Bacigalupi falls for japanophilia with the Japanese fetishization of geisha (the windup-girl of the title). His emphasis on mechanical power (i.e. springs and animal labor) was interesting though.
I find the storyline of the titular Windup Girl is the least interesting part of that (pretty great) novel.
The setting, the Thais, the Contraction, the genetically engineered foodstuffs and plagues, and the story arc of Hock Seng, the Chinese aid of the AgriGen exec, are all more interesting.
I agree the Japanese windup girl is heavily fetishized though. But the Japanese themselves are unimportant in the novel. AgriGen is an American company.
Besides Squid Game and Parasite, I've not heard of most of them and in the case of PUBG, I wasn't aware it was from SK or in any way special in this seemingly endless pool of "the same game with another skin"-genre.
Sure, but is there a Chinese or Japanese or Indonesian film or TV show you think just as many people around you know from the same time frame? And I mean, that's still anecdotal - what isn't anecdotal is that the upscale KaDeWe department store I live nearby in Berlin had a Korea week a while ago, and so on. And whose pop music export has flash mobs and dance troupes dancing to it in the streets of every major city for years now?
As for gaming, I think another good example is the celebrity of various Korean e-sports athletes. I assure you there's plenty of young kids who can name them.
In the end, my assertion is this: Right now, in terms of attention/popularity in Western pop culture (since we're relating to Neuromancer and fiction here), there's only one Asian country that is gaining at such a rate and is the most comparable to the attention Japan enjoyed in the time Neuromancer was written.
I would also readily say that the Korean Wave isn't nearly at the same levels als Japanmania was in the 80s, though. Actually, not sure - I think it both isn't and is also dwarving it at the same time, due to changes in how media is consumed directly vs. impressions by proxy. Depends on the metric.
Obviously there's also a lot of attention on China, but that's more related to economics and politics - although Liu Cixin's works as a scifi author would be a great and very topical example to the contrary! (There's other interesting comparisons to China to make, e.g. both had successful stretches in arthouse cinema with Wong Kar-Wai for example, but so far it's not really converted over to the mainstream for Chinese film.)
I've also not noticed anything besides Squid Game and Parasite here in Germany. Also not sure about the esports thing, maybe I'm looking in the wrong corner. 20 years ago when StarCraft was still on people's minds there was a meme about Koreans, but since then I wouldn't say there was anything spectacularly popular.
And because a few K-Pop bands are now a bit more famous I wouldn't call this a hype cycle. Then again it's hard to tell, I've not been to a department store for 2 years, but I've not heard of any flash mob thingy in literal years. Maybe you're projecting Berlin's weirdness to the rest of us and it's just not there ;)
But it also raises the question of whether Japanmania was as big in Germany in the 80s as in the US to begin with (the pop song "Big in Japan" notwithstanding!), or if this was a BBS/Usenet discussion 30 years ago and I had written the same post about Japan instead, a hypothetical 80s you would have felt similarly.
My point is more if I, a reasonably informed person about pop culture, have not noticed because none of my friends (some of whom have been k-pop fans for years) have never mentioned it or posted about it, then I have to assume I am either living under a rock, all my friends are deliberately hiding it, are also part of a bubble of non-noticers, or it's simply not a *mania.
Japanophiles in the 80s were excessive. Scifi from the era has these undertones (Running Man, in 1986, has a bunch of execs being served sushi in post-apocalyptic california, by a geisha). Rising Sun in 1990 personified this fear that Japan would eclipse the US in tech, economy and culture, before they imploded with what we "now" consider an inevitable result of overheated economy.
Try flying through Minnesota, Wisconsin, the automaker capital states. Airports full of now-yellowed directions in Japanese for the consideration of what was frequent visitations by their competitors.
It was a no-brainer to bet on Japanese tech in next generation...even Gibson's dated "5MB of hot hitachi RAM" was far-sighted when he wrote it...just not far enough.
Another interesting contemporary work by a writer who’s still relevant is James Fallows’ “Looking at the Sun.” A solid attempt at sense-making the late 80s economic situation vis-a-vis Japan for the American middle management class, contrasting their institutions with ours… but China is just kind of a shadow in the background of the whole thing.
Blade Runner (filmed in 1981) has a famous scene in a street-side noodle joint where the characters speak a mishmash of Japanese and other languages. Another famous scene features a geisha on a giant computerized billboard.
Blade Runner was based on a Philip K Dick book from 1968. Neuromancer is pretty obviously influenced by these.
William Gibson actually saw Blade Runner before he finished his final draft for Neuromancer. He almost didn't publish it because he was afraid people would think he was ripping off the movie.
The West (specifically in my experience, the United States) have been buying up everything tech and auto South Korean for pushing over a decade now at this point. Kia and Hyundai automobiles are now running against the Japanese cars here. Samsung and LG electronics are highly popular, as the Japanese versions were a decade or three prior. It's now more Samsung, LG, etc here in the US than it is Sony, for example. Also in agreement with a poster above how the Korean cinema is just now taking off since around 2019. Prior to the movie Parasite, I can't even think of a popular South Korean film taking root here but most have seen Parasite and quite a few were into Squid Game. This is a relatively new thing.
