In the last few years, Korean films, TV dramas and pop music have become immensely popular abroad, a phenomenon known as the Korean Wave. This is the 19th in a series of essays by a select group of foreign scholars and journalists looking at the spread of Korean pop culture in Southeast Asian countries and beyond. - Ed.

The popularity of Korean popular culture in countries such as Japan, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore - which are at least as advanced culturally and economically as Korea - certainly deserves analysis. This has much to do with the emergence of a global consumer group which selects culture not because of where it comes from but because of individual tastes and interests.

The consumption of culture highly depends on national image. The fact that Korean popular culture has been gaining popularity in countries where its national recognition is rather low shows that culture is separate from politics and has found an independent flow of communication. Conversely, the popularity of Korean mass culture has helped raise international awareness of this country. While producing a huge number of fans in Asia and the world over who crave Korean culture, Korea is now understood to have become a major brand in the domain of popular culture.

The Korean Wave, or Hallyu, started with popular music. Expanding to dramas and films, it now has become a phenomenon embracing Korean culture as a whole. Above everything else, however, TV dramas are considered to have taken the lead in creating Hallyu. Exports of Korean dramas have seen remarkable growth since 2000. Analysis shows that, in general, the sudden popularity of Korean dramas in Asia is ascribable to the content of the dramas, sophisticated technology and the attractiveness of the actors and actresses.

Common comments heard about Korean dramas, and the main factors for their popularity, include: The plots and content of the dramas are not old-fashioned but very original. The plots show dynamic changes and ups and downs. The stories have very familiar tones and deal with everyday events. Owing to outstanding production technology, the backgrounds, settings and music are excellent. The camera work is particularly outstanding. The graceful beauty and attractiveness of the stars, their outstanding personalities, their sensational fashions and excellent performances inspire admiration.

Korean popular culture has also presented an important cultural text with which people talk about conflicts between generations, jump over national barriers, and discuss disputes between men and women.

Take the case of Winter Sonata, which has been popular in Japan since 2003. This single TV drama has aroused favorable interest toward Korea more successfully than any other previous effort, on a government level, to better relations between Korea and Japan. Middle-aged Japanese women have created a Winter Sonata craze and the Yonsama phenomenon. Through another country`s drama, they have identified their desire for intimacy between a man and a woman, found their hope for new gender relationships and felt satisfaction; this in turn has led to their expanded interest in Korean society as a whole.

Bae Yong-joon`s Winter Sonata has become somewhat of an Asian version of Hollywood productions, but it has something Korean and something oriental which we do not readily notice. In contrast to this drama, Daejanggeum introduces Korea directly. This drama starts with the concept that food and medicine have the same roots, an idea alien to the West.

Compared to Winter Sonata, Daejanggeum has endless resources with which Hallyu may well be further developed. Though it is a single TV drama, it contains Korea`s true culture, Korea`s past and present. If the Yonsama boom is compared to a wave on an ocean`s surface, Daejanggeum is a rapid flow of undercurrents containing our history of several thousand years, particularly with its typically Korean theme song.

Instead of choosing between Yonsama and Daejanggeum, we may as well think of Yonsama and Daejanggeum as two wheels of a cart. The same mass media might be more interested in an Asian version of Hollywood, plus a Daejanggeum-style drama where ancient Korean court dresses and things Korean, including clothes, food and houses are shown.

In dealing with Hallyu, what is viewed as most important is how to connect it with the national image. In order for Hallyu to find its proper place within the realm of national cultural policy, we have to understand Hallyu`s meaning in the context of time and the region. We have to make an accurate analysis of Hallyu`s specific characteristics in each country. It is also important to find out which country is interested in importing what type of Korean popular culture.

The foreign currency crisis in 1999 coincided with the huge success of the blockbuster Shiri. The economic recession in 2004 ushered in an era of 10 million spectators with Shilmido and Waving Taegukki. Economic difficulties are good medicine for Korean films. It is common knowledge that economic recession results in reduced consumer spending, including on cultural activities, which have nothing to do with livelihood. A shrinking of the cultural industry is easily predictable. However, Korea`s software industry has been an entirely opposite phenomenon.

Since the foreign currency crisis, on top of the emergence of several blockbusters, the Korean film industry has had increased exports and has received more awards in major overseas film festivals, and is now enjoying an unprecedented heyday. Hallyu, which surfaced in China and Southeast Asia and then swept Japan after the economic crisis in 1999, also proved the competitiveness of Korean dramas.

Problems involving the Hallyu phenomenon

Numerous kinds of analyses conducted inside and outside the country regarding the Hallyu phenomenon have identified several typical problems.

First, there appears to be a one-sided, nationalistic superiority complex regarding the Hallyu phenomenon. This attitude reveals self-satisfaction with the excellence of Korean culture. This doesn`t fit with the goal of mutual exchange of culture in this global age. At the same time, on the contrary, there are self-humbling perspectives. Some say that Hallyu is a cultural optical illusion and is nothing but a temporary wind.

For example, they think it is a temporary trend, which has appeared during the cultural chaos following the decline of the production bases of popular culture in Japan and Hong Kong. Some devaluate the trend saying that it is only nonmainstream culture, limited to teenagers and juveniles. Some criticize it for being a B-class culture, too trendy and consumption-oriented. They have a negative view, likening it to a variation of the Zhonghua ideology of China and the cultural imperialism of the Co-prosperity Sphere of Great East Asia of Japan.

In a public hearing on Hallyu held by the Cultural and Tourism Committee of the National Assembly in Korea on April 20, 2005, a strong issue was made of Hallyu seeking only short-term profits while standing in the center of popular culture. It may be pointed out that Hallyu has failed to develop into an overall interchange of culture and arts because it has concentrated on making profits doing domestic cultural business mainly by performing popular music and dramas. People responsible for importing Korean culture in Asian countries are very much concerned about the impatience and money-first attitudes by those dealing with Korean popular culture.

Problems involving Hallyu have also been analyzed from the viewpoint of cultural anthropology in Japan. Regarding Hallyu, they talk about Korean national policy and the roles of universities and the private sector.

Korea is really doing poor business. While complacent and passive at normal times, they are busy coping with the situation with a temporary expedience when Hallyu tourists suddenly swarm around, they point out.

Now in Japanese universities such departments and courses as cultural economics, cultural policies, cultural resources and cultural management are being established or expanded. Its influence has reached the domain of folk culture.

It has been also pointed out that Korea is not active in introducing traditional culture, pure art and high-level culture, which will help contribute to mutual understanding and trust between nations though it may require a long-range nonprofit cultural exchange. Concentration on performances by a few popular singers and drama actors and actresses only introduces TV dramas and shuns other important popular culture such as movies, animation and cartoons, they point out.

Quite a few people who had expected too much from Hallyu in terms of profit-making later found no guarantee of profitability and washed their hands of it. In the case of music discs, the popularity of Korean pop songs and stars doesn`t necessarily result in making profits on many occasions owing to rampant illegal reproductions.

All in all, almost every specialist is worried about the lack of content and the lack of strategy for Hallyu`s propagation. How to steadily provide good-quality cultural content, how to solve flooding problems of small-scale performance promoters, and how to strategically handle international negotiations are problems to be solved. Those arguments arose from economic concerns, not from interests in culture.

From localism to globalism

What is important in promoting Hallyu is that under no circumstances should the autonomy and openness of private citizens be hampered.

A recent issue of Yomiuri Shinbun carried a column titled Let`s learn from the restoration work of Seoul`s Chonggyecheon. The writer proposed that they pay attention to Hallyu in other fields in addition to Korean popular culture such as TV dramas and films.

This is important proof of Hallyu`s extension. It may be said that Korea has been relatively successful in concentrating its cultural force into democratization and economic progress. It was an explosion like the Big Bang. How to spread this explosive power evenly to Asia for the first time - not with Hallyu but with Korean culture - is the question; this localism is the first step toward globalism.

Asians for the first time started genuine cultural interchange through Hallyu. They share the same sensitivity while watching Hallyu dramas and films; they feel the Asian sentiment and the same quality as they listen to dance music. In Korean popular culture they have now found answers to their thirst for sophistication and high sensibilities whereas they used to turn to Hollywood for this. This is not a temporary phenomenon nor is it an affair to be underestimated. What has changed the deep-rooted Japanese prejudice against Koreans overnight is a single TV drama dealing with pure love between a man and a woman.

The Hallyu spirit has a thread of connection with the spirit of popular culture. Popular culture seeks and explores the spirit of human universality. The fact that Asians started their first interchange of sensitivity in modern times through Hallyu has more historical significance in that they were major participants in the formation and acquisition of mankind`s universality. Asians have been disgusted by the different quality, falsity and irrelevance of Western popular culture and have been seeking alternatives. Not as the object of an issue but as a subject, Asians have started sharing Asian popular culture. The Hallyu Hurricane is a diastrophism at this juncture.

The Hallyu spirit comes in contact with the spirit of the 21st century, symbolized by the cyber world and software power. It has the power to capture your mind, transcending national borders, time and space. Therefore, the more you look at Hallyu products, the more you feel the software power of our age. The compassion and dynamic nature found in Korean sentiment, the culture of group play, the original form of millennia-old traditional culture and the infrastructure of information technology - these are the very sources leading to software power.

These resources have helped plant the spirit of Winter Sonata and Daejanggeum, which are the motivating power of Hallyu.

Compared to Hollywood, Hallyu started with different cultural backgrounds. They have similarities in their pioneering spirit and professionalism but they have different origins and different methods of development. Whereas the overseas spread of the Hollywood film industry owes its success considerably to political and economic backing, the same is not true of the successful spread of Hallyu.

In Hallyu music and dramas, Asian esthetics have been dealt with by Korean dynamic sensitivity; game plots have been made in the belief that they are creations in another world. Whereas Hollywood culture is under the control of economics, Hallyu is still independent. Hallyu, which has seen simultaneous explosive popularity in several Asian countries, nonetheless has various positive meanings. It is significant to note that the nonpolitical sphere of popular culture has provided an opportunity to make mutual communication among a number of Asian nations.

The Hallyu spirit is the spirit of traditional culture. Traditional culture can be said to be cultural heritage, which also befits modern society and promises its future. Traditional culture manifests its intrinsic meaning as a source of power, which enables a connection between the past, present and future in the reality of daily life. Traditional culture modeling as a spiritual complex body provides a ground to enrich the future creation of culture; it provides an idea: There is a future in tradition. It is the strongest motivating power of creation and re-creation of new culture.

We are required to examine cultural policy in its entirety if we are to set up Hallyu as an end and a means to raise the national image as the government has continuously tried. It is true that until now culture has always been regarded as less important than politics and economics.

Basic cultural policy has always found restrictions and disciplines, giving way to a national identity based on nationalism. To continue to do so will make it impossible to paint a clear picture of our national image in the global community. We have to form a basic ground in our society if we are to understand Hallyu as a tool to raise the national image and to let the world know the manifest text of Korean relevance. It is important to perceive that to mak...

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