The Birth of Korean Cool (21 page)

Hallyu’s penetration can be subtle at times. Wi Tackwhan’s
Hallyu: K-Pop Ehso K-Culture Roh
(Hallyu: From K-Pop to K-Culture)
¹
lists a number of surprising, little ways that Korea is getting the world’s attention, such as the popularity of Melona—green ice-cream fruit bars made by the Korean Binggrae
corporation—in Argentina. “How does that make sense in a country with plenty of much better fresh fruit?” Wi’s book asks. Russia is a huge importer of kimchi ramen, an
instant spicy noodle soup in a Styrofoam bowl.

But of course, the model for the spread of Hallyu, the one Koreans hope to repeat everywhere, is in Asia. How cool is Korea in Asia? Well, in a television advertisement for Lipton ice tea that
ran in Thailand in 2013, the premise is that a guy trying to impress a girl goes from loser to stud when he drinks Lipton, so much so that he suddenly starts speaking Korean (“I love
you”) for no reason. The ad’s slogan: “Never lose your cool.” Basically, Koreans are the Marlboro Men of Asia.

To get perspective on how Koreans are perceived in Asia, I interviewed Chinese American journalist Jeff Yang, the founder of
A Magazine
, the first-ever Asian American glossy magazine
(published between 1989 and 2002), the author of a best-selling book on Jackie Chan, and probably the foremost American expert on Asian pop culture. “Hallyu has become the standard, the
universal popular consciousness of Asia,” he said. He gives an example of something he witnessed on a recent trip to Bangkok: “I was on a subway and realized there was a very large ad
for a Thai telecom vendor featuring Girls’ Generation. Korean acts, including Girls’ Generation, regularly hit number 1 on the Thai charts, despite not being in the same
language.”

Asked to explain the tectonic cultural shifts in Asia, Yang said, “You have a shifting away of the locus of aspiration. A decade ago, it was Japan. A decade before that, it was probably
the United States. Now, it’s Korea’s pop aristocracy.”

So what is K-pop’s appeal in Asia? Basically, according to Yang, Koreanness is itself the appeal; unlike Korea, Japan and China tried to export their culture in a watered-down, pan-Asian
form.

I’ve said this elsewhere, but it always surprises me when people describe Korea as cool, given that I spent most of my life hating being Korean. I asked Yang what Asians found cool about
Korea. He summed up the general Asian view of Korea today:

“What’s
not
cool about Korea? It’s a land of sleek consumer electronics, long-legged and beautiful women, men who combine soulfulness and emotion with muscles and
manly good looks.”

In my youth, I had generally thought of Korea as a put-upon, victimized country. But, according to Yang, those traits are part of Korea’s appeal to Asia. Because basically, Korea has never
invaded anyone.

“I think there’s a geopolitical thing going on here,” said Yang. “Other countries that have had a pan-Asian influence have also been bad political actors. China and Japan
were imperial powers in the past and were perceived as colonialist, or at least big-footed, in the region.”

Korea, by contrast, has followed a different path: conquering through its consumer products, not by its might. “Just a generation ago, Korea was an emerging market. [Now, however], people
think of Korea as Santa Claus. In Asia, people think, ‘[Koreans] are the ones who bring that cool consumer stuff into our market.’ Koreans are not thought of as economic
occupiers—buying up natural resources or acquiring monuments, or otherwise stepping heavily into the culture.”

Yang shares the belief expressed by many experts that Korean cool originated with electronics. And Samsung and LG in particular made a strategically crucial move: going after the low end of the
market. Samsung, for example, released cheap phones for less affluent nations; Apple has made no cheap equivalent of the iPhone. Yang elaborates, “Samsung and LG were making refrigerators and
dishwashers that had enough of a design sense that people could pull themselves into the middle class.” In other words, Korean consumer goods became a symbol of hope and upward mobility.
“In a cultural unconscious sense, the striving markets of Asia see Korea more as the sibling who made good, as opposed to a godfather, which helps.”

Yang does not pretend that K-pop is particularly ground-breaking in and of itself. In fact, its lack of eccentricity is part of the appeal. K-pop is not producing the Mick Jaggers or David
Bowies of the world, said Yang. Rather, “Korea has done a great job of standardization. It’s provided a package of entertainment and entertainers who are sexy but safe. Adult yet not
out of reach.”

In other words, K-pop’s appeal is only partly about music. “When people buy into K-pop, they buy into a lifestyle. K-pop is pop culture as lifestyle brand.”

Hallyu is greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, the parts are not even sold separately, in a manner of speaking. Korea is a carefully wrapped package deal, whether the consumer realizes it
or not. And that may be why Korea has a chance to export its pop culture to the west. As Yang said, “I don’t think anyone has ever tried before to make an integrated blend encompassing
everything from consumer technology—the hardware, if you will—to the music, videos, and online content. It’s an all-out attack on foreign shores.”

Yang expressed cautious optimism as to whether Hallyu has a good chance of conquering the west. “It will be interesting to see how it plays,” he said. “A generation ago, I
would have said that it was impossible. Japan and Hong Kong didn’t succeed, why should Korea succeed? But  we’re facing a different world now. The K-pop engine is creating choices.
It’s Asian pop culture coming to the west on its own terms, in a nondefensive, nonapologetic, and noncondescending fashion. For the current generation, the global generation, the foreign is
aspirational.”

HOW JAPAN LOST THE CULTURE WARS

If, as Yang said, the locus of pop culture in Asia shifted from Japan to Korea in the last ten years, how did Japan lose the throne?

Japan’s pop culture dominance is hurting, and not just in music. Sanrio, the Japanese company that invented Hello Kitty, had a sales slump from 1999 to 2010 and is trying to bring in new
characters to reduce its reliance on Hello Kitty. The Japanese film industry suffered greatly from the decline of anime. As for the once dominant video gaming industry—well, it’s not a
good sign when one of Japan’s top game designers (Keiji Inafune, creator of
Mega Man
) announces, “Our game industry is finished.”
²

South Korea is ready to rush in where Japan now fears to tread. Japan lost its place as cultural tastemaker in Asia, about ten or fifteen years ago. There are a number of reasons for this. First
of all, Japanese pop culture, like the Japanese archipelago itself, is too isolated from the rest of the world to have remained a sustainable global influence. This is evidenced by the phrase Japan
Galapagos syndrome—coined by the Japanese themselves—which compares Japan’s cell phone market to the South American island that has its own species and ecology. In 2010, Japanese
electronics company Sharp launched a tablet in Japan that was initially sold nowhere else in the world, appropriately called the Galapagos tablet. Similarly, many of Japan’s video games are
for the Japanese market only.

Some say the problem is Japan’s reluctance to learn English; they’re an island nation, and like many countries with a long history of colonialism, they still have a sense that other
people should try harder to learn their language. J-pop bands don’t strategically include non-Japanese members, for example.

Others, like pop culture critic Lee Moon-won, point out that Japan is a big enough consumer market as it is (the population is 100 million) and is less dependent than Korea is on foreign
exports. For many Japanese companies, it’s not worth the huge risk of a very, very costly overseas marketing campaign.

It’s not just their large population that makes Japan an independently robust market. The Japanese consume a lot, in general. They like new things. On the streets of Tokyo’s
residential areas, it’s not uncommon to see large piles of consumer electronics left at the curb, in perfectly good condition—televisions, DVD players, stereos—because a family
has moved and they want to buy all new stuff, rather than take their old electronics with them.

Korea, by contrast, has less than half the population of Japan. Thus, says Lee, Korea had to rely on the export market, “which means they had to pay attention to international tastes to
make music that would have global appeal.”

Previously, however, K-pop had no international distribution channels. “In order to spread music, you have to have about twenty people pounding the pavement and visiting American radio
stations with vinyl records. The Korean music industry had no way of doing that.” Only with the advent of the Internet and YouTube was Korea able to break the distribution barrier.

By contrast, in the words of a
Japan Today
article, “Unlike their Korean pop equivalents, most Japanese labels are allergic to promoting their artists’ work
abroad.”
³

Another reason behind K-pop’s overtaking J-pop in the west is that Korean culture is naturally puritanical and conservative, and that’s a good thing for global audiences. Despite
what you see in Korean movies, sexual puritanism in everyday South Korea is enforced to an annoying degree. A female Korean American friend of mind recalls not being allowed to attend slumber
parties as a child, because “You don’t sleep at another person’s house until you are married.” Korea made it easier for other countries to accept their music by emphasizing
a buttoned-down image and morals. The general theme of overprotectiveness is an appealing one.

Japan is a different story. It, too, is sexually repressed, but it’s not puritanical. Take the J-pop girl band AKB48, so named because the band has forty-eight members. It is currently the
most successful J-pop band in Japan. Band members frequently wear school uniforms while performing, and their songs have lyrics like “My school uniform is getting in the way.” A song
like that would unequivocally be banned in Korea. Not to mention that in Korea, schoolgirl uniforms are only worn . . . for school.

Shin Hyung-kwan, general manager of the Korean pop music channel MNET, explained the band’s marketing strategy. “The market for AKB48 is men aged thirty to forty years old. In Japan,
there is a culture of selling videos of young girls. The Lolita complex is a phenomenon there.” That said, Shin acknowledges that the Japanese music scene is very diverse, much more so than
the Korean music scene. “Japan is the world’s largest music market, so there is a lot of variety: reggae, ska, etc. But the most profitable is stuff like AKB48.”

J-pop bands have a different raison d’être from K-pop bands, according to Shin. “They’re there to model and do films. If you look at it from a music point of view, it
doesn’t make sense. If I look at these bands, there are people who can’t sing; some can dance but most can’t.” Korea, by contrast, is very conservative, which is in fact a
conscious K-pop strategy. When they’re in markets that like a little more skin, such as the west, Japan, and the more liberal Asian countries, they dress differently.

Lee Moon-won pointed out that in Korea, “there’s no one like Britney Spears with a slut image.” K-pop bands have to be mindful of their child fans. An inappropriate photo
spread or a drug or sex scandal is a career killer. The record label has the right to drop them if something like this happens. K-pop places a great deal of emphasis on boy bands, capitalizing on a
long-held Asian stereotype that Korean men are romantic and attentive. The K-pop boy acts (Rain, Super Junior, Big Bang) were popular exports in Asia before the girl bands ever were.

Lastly, it’s hard for Japan to compete with Korea in the global pop culture scene, when Japan itself has embraced Hallyu. The Korean music industry realized early on how important the
Japanese music market was going to become—despite the nation’s historic lack of interest in non-Japanese Asian music. It’s also remarkable in light of the fact that overall global
music sales are way down, thanks in part to piracy and to the many music subscription services that allow consumers to play thousands of songs for $10 a month.

Key to its success in the Japanese market was having Korean bands record some of their songs in Japanese—in some cases, only in Japanese. It seems like an obvious choice, yet no other
country’s music industry besides Korea has made a serious effort to meet Japan on its own linguistic turf.

It was a good investment, because Japan’s music market has been booming. In fact, in 2012, Japan overtook the United States in domestic CD and online music sales.
⁴
Japan saw $4.3 billion worth of sales in this area, as opposed to $4.1 billion in the United States—which is a big deal, considering that Japan’s population is just
over a third of the U.S. population.

A big reason behind robust sales is that Japanese people still buy CDs. CD sales make up 80 percent of Japanese record sales, and digital music downloads actually dropped by 25 percent in
2012.
⁵
As Bill Werde,
Billboard
editorial director, explained in an interview with Bloomberg, “[The Japanese] love packaging. You
can’t even buy a little trinket in a Japanese store without having it neatly wrapped and folded and handed to you. I think there’s something cultural in the want to have this sort of CD
booklet and the album art.”
⁶

Guess who’s been studying the Japanese market for years and is on top of the Japanese love for packaging? Strangely, this is one of those situations in which it frankly helps that Korea
was formerly colonized by Japan—Koreans understand how the Japanese think. I remember that my grandparents, and others in their generation who lived under Japanese colonial rule, wrapped
things in
furoshiki
—a Japanese silk cloth used to neatly wrap everything from gifts to your own daily lunchbox.