Transnational Popular Music Culture and Local Cultural Politics: Korea's Open-Door Policy on Japanese Popular Culture (1998-2004) and its Antecedents

Despite Korea's official ban on importing Japanese cultural products from the liberation of Korea in 1945 until 1997, various forms of modern Japanese popular culture, including music, have influenced contemporary Korean popular culture during this period through various legal and illegal routes. However, because of the sensitive political relationship between the two countries, these influences have been intentionally downplayed. In this essay, I examine what I call the "presence" of Japan through its popular music in Korea during the Open-Door Policy period between 1998 and 2004. Since 1998, under the Kim Dae-Jung government, which emphasized cultural exchanges with foreign countries as a way of developing and globalizing Korea, cultural interactions between Japan and Korea have begun to flourish. However, Korea's longstanding antagonism towards Japan and fear of being dominated by the powerful Japanese cultural industries became important forces for negotiating the Open-Door Policy. With a focus on popular music, I discuss the Four-Stage Plan of the Open-Door Policy between Korea and Japan, in the political and economic contexts of the late 1990s when Korea modified its economic and foreign policies. I examine the contradictory responses to this policy in the context of nationalistic attitudes in Korea, reinvigorated by controversies over Japan's misrepresentations of its colonial history in government textbooks, but mitigated by their successful collaboration in hosting the 2002 Soccer World Cup. By exploring imported popular musics from Japan in terms of genres, vocal techniques, visual representations, lyrics, and audience reception during this critical transitional phase, I trace major trends in Japanese influence on Korean popular music, which is not a simple matter of borrowing or imitation, but a complex cultural issue bearing on Korean taste, musical aesthetics, and cultural self-image.