• Date: October 30th, Monday, 2023, 14:00 – 16:00
• Location: Room 303, SNUAC (Bldg. 101)

Presenter: Inkyu Oh (Prof., Kansai Gaidai University)

Before there was Hallyu, Japanese popular culture hit across the world first. Scholars of Japanese and American academia have created many misunderstandings regarding the two phenomena. For instance, there are arguments that Hallyu mixed Japanese popular culture well to gain popularity among Asians, that Hallyu is an ‘impure’ genre mixed with Japanese culture, and that the reason Japanese popular culture became popular in Asian countries like China, Taiwan, and Korea more than Western popular culture is that as East Asia became richer, how Japan Japanized Western popular culture was more attractive than Western culture itself. This study seeks to correct these misunderstandings and explain that Korean and Japanese fans consumed each other’s cultures, and the reason is due to strong gender inequality and social phenomena in each society, based on gender conflict theory. In particular, Korea and Japan, despite their rivalry, consumed each other’s popular culture, which led to an intensification of gender conflicts. As a result, the female suicide rates of the two countries rose up to 1st and 2nd ranks in the world, and the birth rate is the lowest in the world in the case of Korea. Based on gender theory in popular culture, this lecture examines the overall changes of global popular culture in the first half of the 21st century.