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Yon-sama fans were portrayed as hordes of hysterical, nymphomaniac old biddies (Connell). Thousands of overexcited women were said to have besieged and swarmed Narita and Haneda airports during Bae's visits to Tokyo, causing mini-stampedes, sort of like buffalo.1 The old girls were reported on with much contempt for buying expensive memorabilia and for holding group birthday parties in yakiniku (grilled meat) joints to celebrate Yon-sama's birthday. An example of this sneering genre was an article entitled "Japanese Cellphone Charm Soothes Post-Menopausal Passions" (Levenstein). Famous film director Beat Takeshi asserted that the "Yonfluenza" of the Japanese "hags" was no different than their husband's sex tourism to Korea (Onishi).
But Yon-sama fever and the "Korean Wave" are important for numerous reasons besides the juicy opportunity for journalists to poke fun at female fans.
The New York Times called Bae the $2.3 Billion Man (Onishi). There was obviously an unavoidably huge economic impact to acknowledge, as well as the fact that fans did not simply watch Korean soap operas, they participated in fan culture in many other ways. The Korean Wave also put a formerly denigrated and neglected market segment, women over thirty, into the public limelight and presented them as active cultural agents.2
The Japanese concept of "Korean Wave" (kanryû or hanryû in Japanese) can encompass more than the popularity of Korean TV drama. Scholars have noted that there was already a mounting interest in Korean popular culture among young people prior to the Winter Sonata explosion, one that dates back to the 1990s and is seen in World Cup soccer mania, travel trends, and food culture. In my own research on the Japanese beauty industry, I found numerous instances of Korean Wave in that realm as well, in such things as kimchi diets and tourism to Korea for mugwort saunas and akasuri massages (Miller). The term Korean Wave most likely originated in Taiwan in 1999, and later surfaced in Japan in 2001 via the Asahi Shimbun, well before Winter Sonata came on the scene (Oguro).
If it were only female fandom that was a stake, interest in the phenomenon would have passed quickly. But the cultural and economic impact could not be ignored. It is claimed that Yon-sama changed Japanese willingness to give donations, once...