• Date: June 28th, Wednesday, 2023, 12:00 – 13:40
• Online via Zoom

Presenter: Sungmin Kim (Associate Professor, Hokkaido University)
Discussants: Jin-kyung Park (Hankuk University of Foreign Studies), Gyu Tag Lee (George Mason University-Korea)
Moderator: Sojeong Park (The Center for Hallyu Studies)

It has been a while since we started to appreciate Japanese popular culture, such as manga, movies, and magazines, in our daily lives without much reserve. However, there was a time when Japanese popular culture was banned from entering Korean society. It appears that the matter of ‘popular culture’ is neglected in the complex Korean-Japan relations. This book deals with the ‘ban on Japanese popular culture’ that persisted from the post-liberation era of 1945 and disintegrated in 2004 when the fourth cultural opening started. The ‘ban on Japanese popular culture’ refers to the construction of borders and the banning of Japanese popular culture so that it does not flow into Korean society. Such a ban not only relates to whether Koreans enjoy Japanese culture or not but to the bigger issue of Korean society’s oppression and desire toward Japan as the Other and even to the cultural relation between Korea and Japan after the liberation. In this context, this book structurally and critically examines the ban on Japanese popular culture and the process in order to see how the ban was dismantled and how the cultural relationship between Korea and Japan developed through this process.