Abstract: This essay examines the transcultural consumption of new Korean masculinity in Japan using the star construction of Bae Yong-Joon byj/aka
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New Korean Masculinity, BYJ BYJ’s Kang Joon-Sang character in Winter Sonata has changed many Japanese people’s perceptions of Korean men. A Korean women’s studies’ scholar Kim Eun-Shil, who is researching the effects of the Yon-sama syndrome on postcolonial relations between Japan and Korea, states: “to the Japanese, Korea used to be associated with images of the ‘dark, noisy and smelly,’ but now Yon-sama’s middle-aged fans associate Korea with ‘beautiful things’ and see Yon-sama as an idealized man” (Onishi 2004). In particular, it is evident from the result of research questionnaires that Japanese women’s perceptions of Korean men has changed from that of a previous uncivilized macho image to one that is highly idealized, such as BYJ. For the question “is BYJ’s character/image different from those pre-existing images of Korean men which you have seen from other movies, dramas or in your real lives?” among 56 participants, who answered this question, 46 participants answered “Yes”. Among them, 38 participants described the pre-existing Korean men’s images using negative expressions, such as “dark, scary, sly, aggressive and violent”. In particular, many of them use the word “scary”. Dan explained as follows: “Before, they had scary images. After I knew BYJ, the images of Korean men have become better and I feel friendly towards them.” Nan said “Previously [Korean men’s images were] violent and scary. But BYJ is tender, gentle and he takes his life seriously.” According to the above quotes, since the Japanese fans were introduced to BYJ from Winter Sonata, their perception of Korean men has dramatically changed from a scary machismo to that of a tender gentleman. One of the participants, Kan, explains that these scary images are mostly from the media representations of “protesting students against the dictatorship during the 1980s”. Ba also points out that “some Korean middle-aged men I see in [television] dramas are quite bossy and they don’t treat women fairly”. As Kan and Ba described, the Japanese built up the pre-existing idea of Korean men through the media presented images. These negative images were represented mostly due to the historico-socio-political crisis and its source traces back to the Japanese occupation era. During the 35 years of Japanese occupation, Korean people were exploited and Korean traditions, industries and culture were completely oppressed. Following the Liberation in August 1945, another traumatic historical event, the Korean War (1950-1953) further devastated Korea. Due to these national tragedies, Koreans have always has been portrayed as a poor and filthy people, living in a dirty and undeveloped country. In particular as a neighbouring country and a former colonial empire, Japan has always treated Korea as an inferior country with a second-rate culture. An article in the Wall Street Journal describes this prejudicial view towards Korea: (But) in Japan the Korea craze is particularly surprising, because it has gripped a generation that has never shown much interest in Japan’s nearest neighbor. Japan’s colonial rule in Korea, from 1910 to 1945, left some now-older Japanese conflicted about the country or dismissive of it. For decades, many Japanese looked down on Koreans as inferior both racially and economically. (Fuyuno 2004) This article points out that the old generation, who were born during the period of Japanese occupation, has changed its point of view after the advent of BYJ. Most of these fans express their surprise at seeing a new Korean male image, in the form of the tender and soft BYJ. How, then, this new Korean masculinity has been created and why this is well resonated especially with the Japanese female fans? For this, I will explain the kkon-mi-nam syndrome in Korea within the framework of the popularity of mu-kuk-jok pretty boy images in the region. Asia’s shared imagination, Mu-kuk-jok kkon-mi-nam BYJ According to my field research, along with his ‘noble’ smile and “well-mannered” attitudes such as politeness, BYJ’s feminine “pretty” face seems to appeal to Japanese middle-aged female viewers the most. In this manner, he is often described as so called a kkon-mi-nam star. The literary meaning of kkon-mi-nam is a ‘flowery pretty boy’. Kkon-mi-nam refers to pretty looking, with smooth fair skin, silky hair and a feminine manner. Originally starting from Japanese shojo manga (Korean term sunjeong manhwa), the pretty boy images have been repeatedly produced in the Korean entertainment industry since the late 1990s. Television commercials, dramas and billboards have glorified pretty boys. A scholar of Korean literature, Kim Yong Hee explains that “the kkon-mi-nam syndrome is developed from a consequence of deconstruction and hybridization of female/male sexual identities rather than males merely becoming feminized” (2003: 104). She argues that the new mixed sexual identity, in the postmodernist popular culture, increases the hallucinated imagination and satisfies the complex human desire (2003: 104). According to Kim, a kkon-mi-nam fulfils a complex human (especially female) desire, which macho men are deficient in. The phenomenon declares that the era of the machismo male has passed and the epoch of the new hybrid masculinity has arrived. This is well explained in the trend of transcultural mixtures of male star sexuality in Asian countries; J-pop Bishonen bands such as SMAP, Arashi and winds; K-pop boy groups such as HOT, Shinhwa and Dongbangshinki and Taiwanese boy bands such as F4. Specifically the kkon-mi-nam images of male Korean stars are the embodiment of hybridized Asian pop cultural icons. The above listed Asian male pop-stars share the images of the hybridized masculinity of girl-like prettiness. Due to these similar feminine images, it is almost impossible to recognize their nationalities by their appearances. This is, I argue, because of a mu-kuk-jok (non-nationalistic) trait which has appeared as a result of the Asian transcultural flows of various pop-cultures and pop-cultural products. Asian pretty boy pop-stars possibly can be described as a globalized, transcultural and non-nationalistic (mu-kuk-jok) product. The Korean term mu-kuk-jok means ‘no nationality’ which implies no particular national taste or odour, i.e. culturally odourless as Iwabuchi suggests (2002: 27). BYJ’s image is actively accepted in other Asian countries because it reflects the ‘odourless’ aspect of a mu-kuk-jok pretty boy. This can be also explained Appadurai’s term mediascape which recognises the media’s capabilities to produce and disseminate information and images through transcultural flows (1996: 35). He also suggests the concept of “shared imagination” to explain non-nationalistic sentiments, arguing: “part of what the mass media make[s] possible, because of the conditions of collective reading, criticism, and pleasure, is what I [have] called … a “community of sentiment”, a group that begins to imagine and feel things together” (1996: 8). What Appadurai claims here is that collective experiences through the mass media can create ‘sodalities’ of worship and taste. Likewise transcultural media influence between various Asian countries creates odourless – culturally acceptable – presentation of pretty boys. The consequences of mediascapes, various pop-cultural flows, cultural mixing and metamorphosis all combine to create the odourless and mu-kuk-jok image of the pan-Asian pretty boy. I argue that BYJ is popular amongst Japanese audiences due to his odourless kkon-mi-nam image. This image is culturally acceptable in Japan, because it shares similarities with shojo manga’s pretty teen boys or J-pop Bishonen bands. BYJ’s hybrid masculinity is a localized form of regional feminine masculinity. Therefore the Japanese audiences can readily desire BYJ’s hybridized masculinity as they are already used to the regionally circulated pretty boy images. The mu-kuk-jok hybridized masculinity of BYJ as a result of the transcultural flows is one of the driving forces behind the Yon-sama syndrome in Japan, and it is based on the geographical familiarity – “spatial proximity” – between the two countries. Another significant impetus is Japan’s nostalgic desire for their “past” which BYJ’s polite body signifies. This implies that there is a “temporal lag” between the two countries. Sunjeong manhwa’s typical pretty boy BYJ’s pretty boy image Desiring the past: our memory is in your present body Japanese fans’ desires towards BYJ’s hybridized masculinity represented in his polite and feminine image, is heavily dependent on the cultural proximity between Korea and Japan based on the geographical familiarity and the transcultural flows of mu-kuk-jok. I also argue that another element of Japan’s desire towards BYJ’s hybrid masculinity is their sense of counter-coevality. The middle-aged Japanese fans desire BYJ’s hybrid masculinity to commemorate their olden days. Shin Kyung-Mi argues that the Yon-sama syndrome reflects the Japanese people’s yearning for the “good days” of the Sho-Wa era (2006: 241). The Sho-Wa era lasted from 1926 to 1988, when the former Japanese emperor Hirohito died. During this era, Japan experienced rapid economic growth. Shin states that “Sho-Wa nostalgia is a phenomenon which reflects the yearning for the era of the fast economic growth of 1950-1970 by the Japanese who are tired of today’s economic depression (2006: 241). As observed above, the fans’ quotes mentioning BYJ’s politeness, by watching his polite gestures and images, Japanese viewers could fulfil their Sho-Wa nostalgia. Shin also adds that the main themes of Winter Sonata (pure love, devotion and politeness) resonated deeply with the desire of Japanese viewers in their 30s, to 50s who spent their youth during the Sho-Wa era. Ma Jung-Mi argues that “star image is a signifier which can exemplify ‘the flow of consciousness’ of the time” (Ma 2005). In the case of Yon-sama syndrome, BYJ became a star in Japan because of his polite and feminine image which exemplifies the Japanese viewers’ longings and desires towards old virtues, which they believe they once had, but now have been lost. For example, one of the participants, Tan stated: “I think he is a real man. [He is] Intelligent, humble, polite, takes care of others, elegant and has a strong will. We used to have that kind of man in Japan. But now it’s hard to find that kind of character [virtue] from young Japanese men.” As is evident in the above quote, his polite image, represented through soft body/hybrid masculinity, projects Japan’s imagined past, but his hybrid masculinity is not conceived as “an equal interlocutor but marked by a frozen, immutable temporal lag” (Iwabuchi 2002: 552). NHK producer Kuroiwa explained this as follows: Only one month after (the drama Winter Sonata has been aired) we received many long letters from the audience. “Oh… I had the same experience when I was young…” they recall the memories of their first love and really wanted to express themselves (…) When Bae Yong Joon visited Japan, he acted so gentlemanly and politely. We used to have such men in Japan but not any more. They [the Middle-aged Japanese female fans] really hate the way the Japanese young generations behave. Both Tan and Kuroiwa pointed out that Japan “used to” have such values, which implies a temporal lag between Korea and Japan. To the Japanese audiences Korea is still the “past” and pre-modern. The above quotes show – through desiring BYJ’s soft body – how the middle-aged female fans support Japan’s counter-coeval gaze towards Korea. His body has become the repository for the nostalgic desires and memories of the middle-aged Japanese women. Regarding the notion of nostalgia and memories commoditized in the modern world, John Frow, in his book Time and Commodity Culture, articulates that “many accounts of modernity view the world retrospectively, in sadness (Chow quoted in Frow 1997): a fortiori, many accounts of postmodernity mourn a loss of history and of memory” (1997: 7). In his view, this memory is not from the historical world, but rather from a world made up of an immense accumulation of “spectacles”. Citing Guy Debord’s The Society of the Spectacle, Frow says: in Debord’s analysis the ‘present age’ is defined in more precise terms as a set of social relations of production, and the ‘sign’, ‘copy’ and so on reappear as the category of the ‘spectacle’: the fetishized form of the commodity in a system of representation which is in part to be understood as the system of the mass media, including advertising and design; in part more specifically as the social force of television (which can often be directly substituted for the word ‘spectacle’); but at times more generally as the visual, or the forms taken by the gaze within a consumer-capitalist society (1997: 5). Therefore, in the case of television viewers, their retrospective gaze actually reinforces to desire the “spectacle”, which signifies and copies the real world and real history. In the case of BYJ, the Japanese fans’ retrospective gaze magnifies their desire towards the coded/imagined world, exemplified by BYJ’s politeness in his soft body. Through Japanese fans’ nostalgic gaze, his soft body becomes a spectacle of their glorious past. Their memories and nostalgia are commoditized through detaching the real world and actually exemplify the world’s real unreality. Frow argues that “the time of the commodity is irreversible time: the time of things, and of mass production, the opposite at once of an earlier, cyclical time and of ‘historical time lived by individuals and groups”(1997: 7). Therefore, the commodity demonstrates the images, time, space and even senses which have never existed. If the viewers’ commoditized memories reconstruct the non-existed time of the unreal world, what is it that these viewers are looking for – something that belongs to the past? Through desiring commoditized memories, these viewers might desire the Other’s primitiveness. This concept of desiring the Other’s primitiveness is derived from the idea of denial of coevalness. Frow says: The concept of coevalness or cotemporality is intended to specify the conditions under which the interests of both ‘observed’ and ‘observer’ societies can be put into relation. Coevalness is assumed to be grounded in the shared intersubjective time that precedes all more culturally specific experiences of time, and it is this that opens the way for ‘truly dialectical confrontation. The word coevalness is equivalent to the German Gleichzeitigkeit, and is meant to include the senses both of co-occurrence in physical time (synchronicity) and of co-occurrence in typological or epochal time (contemporaneity). (…) Its counter-concept, Ungleichzeitigkeit (non-synchronicity, the uneven layering of times within any historical formation) seems to me in fact to provide a more adequate way of understanding the unequal relations that hold within a synchronic framework characterized by uneven development and a global division of labour. Not everyone occupies the same NOW (…) (1997: 9). As Frow argues above, each cultural group has a different structure for the experience of time. Frow’s concept of ‘unequal time’ can be explained through my term “counter-coevality”. Counter-coevality stresses its negative view on not sharing the synchronic time structure between the observer/consumer and the observed/commodity while Frow’s idea of non-synchronicity emphasizes the aspect of multiple histories and relativization of cultures. In the case of the Yon-sama syndrome, the commoditized memory reinforces the Japanese fans’ desire for BYJ’s politeness – soft body, which is based on their sense of counter-coevality towards Korea and Korean cultures. Japan’s counter-coevality to Korea is mainly due to the temporally lagged procedure and phase of modernization. Unlike Japan’s voluntary active modernization since the mid-1800s, known as Meiji Ishin (Meiji Restoration), Korea went through the forced and compressed modernization during the early and mid-1900s led by Japan and America retrospectively. During the colonial era (1910-1945), Japan was able to build up the modern socio-cultural infrastructure relatively fast through exploiting the various colonized Asian countries, including Korea. Matsuzawa Tessei explains that under the Japan’s imperialistic aggression and colonization, there was an influx of Korean and Taiwanese immigrants, who were exploited by Japanese government in construction, transport, gravel yards, factory services etc” (1988: 154). Even after the occupation, while Japan experienced rapid economic growth from the 1950s to 1970s (Sho-Wa era), Korea had to go through the devastating Korean War and the post-War reconstruction. After the division of the Korean peninsular, along with America’s political intervention, (South) Korea experienced a dark era of dictatorships from 1962 to 1988. During the era, under the catchphrase of “turbo modernization”, Korea underwent rapid and compressed economic development but at the same time, faced up to the serious socio-political conflicts such as Kwang-Ju Massacre, and the retrogression of democracy (Min 2003: 25-58). While Japan experienced a flourishing modernity, Korean had to undergo a filthy, dark era. Likewise, the phases of modernization between Korea and Japan indicate a significant temporal lag. The two countries occupy a “different NOW and THEN”. This asynchronous temporal experience could be the main reason of the counter-coeval gaze of the Japanese fans towards BYJ’s soft body. This is well-described by Koichi Iwabuchi’s argument, which I will now turn to. As Iwabuchi states that “this is the “Asia” where Japanese consumers find their lost purity, energy, and dreams” ("Nostalgia for a (Different) Asian Modernity: Media Consumption of "Asia" in Japan" 2002: 550), the Japanese audiences find their lost virtues from BYJ’s hybridized soft body. Iwabuchi argues that “the politics of the transnational evocation of nostalgia is highlighted when it is employed to confirm a frozen temporal lag between two cultures, when “our” past and memory are found in “their” present” (2002: 549). In the case of BYJ’s images from Winter Sonata, the Japanese fans find their “past” and “memory” in Korean actor BYJ’s “present” body. BYJ’s soft body embodies the fans’ nostalgia. His body is, however, fetishized by these fans’ nostalgic fantasy. His hybridized body is stereotyped by Japanese fan’s retrospective gaze, which only has to be remained as pre-modern, feminine and soft. Likewise Japan’s nostalgic desire of Korea through BYJ’s hybridized masculinity can be described as counter-coeval and to some extent, imperialistic. This counter-coeval view is evident in the Japanese fan’s consumption tendency of BYJ’s photo album The Image Vol. One, which contains his sexy muscular images. His muscular body reflects the mom-zzang syndrome, one of the most popular socio-cultural phenomena in Korea during the early 2000s. Post-modern body, mom-zzang The hybridity of BYJ’s image is exemplified by its conscious mixtures of masculinity and femininity, and as observed earlier the kkon-mi-nam syndrome is the most significant driving force of this trend. Another possible force behind the construction of BYJ’s hybridized masculinity is the “mom-zzang syndrome”. The literary meaning of mom-zzang is ‘body-master’. The word mom means ‘body’ and zzang is the vernacular for ‘the great’ or ‘the best’. A neologism, mom-zzang refers to the socio-cultural phenomenon of having a good looking body in Korea. The term was first used in 2003 (Yu et al 2005). In the case of female, mom-zzang normally signifies a skinny and glamorous body while it means ‘muscular body’ for males. This phenomenon emerged from an Internet web-site run by a 40 year old mom-zzang woman and whom has a great – toned, skinny and at the same time curvy – body. Beginning with a couple of photos of this mom-zzang ajumma (means a middle-aged woman in Korean) the mom-zzang syndrome has swept Korea away. [Insert image 4 here] Korean people started building up their bodies to make themselves look good and sexually attractive. The result of this socio-cultural syndrome is often evident in the feverous changes of their lifestyles – spending more time and money on their body through yoga, exercise and healthy food. Since then, the mom-zzang fever continued to the ‘well-being’ phenomenon. Professor of Won-Ju University, Lee Mi-Rim explains this phenomenon: In the post-modern era, along with the growing interest in human body, creating a great body became a phenomenon (…) The well-being life style – rather spending time and money for sports dance, yoga, meditation, exercise and low fat, organic foods – became a barometer of modernization. The general concept of well-being refers to a life style or culture which pursues a beautiful happy life through the harmony between physical and spiritual health. This well-being life specifies living well; living a healthy, easy and balanced life. It emphasizes the spiritual aspect more than the material aspect (…) (Lee 2005). Lee points out here that this socio-cultural phenomenon indicates that Korean people’s interests have changed from something modern (financial stability and economic growth) to post-modern (such as their bodies and health). The mom-zzang syndrome is neither new nor exclusive; it is a global phenomenon, as Appadurai’s concept of ‘mediascapes’ illustrates, spread by new media and communications technologies such as the Internet and satellite television, usually in a form of advertising or commercial application. This tendency is evident in the globally iconic post-modern lifestyle of “metrosexuality” which is often represented by David Beckham, a soccer player, and Hollywood actor Brad Pitt. According to a British journalist Mark Simpson, metrosexuality is ‘the trait of an urban male of any sexual orientation who has a strong aesthetic sense and spends a great amount of time and money on his appearance and lifestyle (Simpson 1994). As Simpson explains, a metrosexual refers a man with an aesthetic style and taste on fashion, beauty, art and culture. While a metrosexual embraces the homosexual lifestyle, it usually refers a heterosexual male who is in touch with his feminine side. BYJ is often referred to as being a symbol of metrosexuality. According to the article, “Rampant republic of Mr. Beauty, the era of male consumption” of Film2.0, in today’s Korea, fashionable and beauty-sensitive men have become an object of consumer marketing. At the centre of this trend, there are many metrosexual stars including BYJ (Han et al 2006). For example, from the LG-card television commercial, BYJ is portrayed in a relay of juxtaposed images of a busy urban living professional career man who knows how to enjoy his modern life through leisure, travel, fashion, music and arts. In this commercial, his image is similar to Joon-Sang from Winter Sonata (Ma 2005). He is an exact embodiment of urban cool guy: displaying typical metrosexual life style such as swimming, shooting, traveling in a convertible sports car, walking into the luxurious restaurant while holding a bunch of flowers, and playing a trumpet at a Jazz bar in a fashionable brand suit . (Ma 2005) BYJ is a commercial barometer for the popularity of metrosexuality. Regarding the global trend of metrosexuality, Kang Yu Jung, the chief editor of a cultural quarterly Cultura, argues that there are two major impetuses for the rise of metrosexuality; one is a natural manifestation of contemporary male desire of becoming more beautiful; the other is a support of gigantic industry capital (Kang 2006). It is a manifestation of hybrid male desire that still maintains an element of masculinity, but paradoxically incorporates feminine yearning of being beautiful. Apart from the adoption of updated fashions and styles, this paradoxical male desire is also exemplified though various fitness activities such as exercise, yoga and diet to transform his body into a more desired form. As observed from BYJ’s LG-card commercial, it is crucial for a metrosexual lifestyle to build an ideal body form through fitness. Starting from gay and metrosexual lifestyle, fitness soon became a vital element of global trendy lifestyle. Barry Glassner explains that fitness has become a widespread and growing interest over the past couple of decades, among middle and upper class Americans (1989: 180). He argues that fitness is a post-modern pursuit because it restores human faith which was lost during the modern era of machine, science and technology (1989: 181). Likewise, represented by a toned and well-being body, maintaining an ideal body form has become an essential part of a model post-modern lifestyle. The mom-zzang syndrome is a “localized” form of this global trend of the post-modern lifestyle. This phenomenon proves that Korea shares some post-modern values with the rest of the world, especially the developed Western world. Some scholars criticize that the mom-zzang syndrome promotes highly unrealistic ideals about the human physique, not to mention the commercialization of sex (Hong et al 2004). However, it also gives evidence that, having gone through the materialistic modern era, Korea has entered the ‘well-being’ post-modern era. |