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For a few years now it has been commonplace to talk about the Korean Wave - the increasing importance of Korean cultural production in East and South-East Asia - largely from outside. Admittedly, this reflects how Korean production has impacted on the music, TV and film markets outside the Korean peninsula, whether writers discuss the TV drama "Winter Sonata" or the pop artiste Bo'A. However, an imbalance has been apparent, where Korean writers typically celebrate the importance of cultural exports without analysing the local markets into which those exports are promoted, while non-Korean writers tend to overlook domestic production and to have limited knowledge of both the motives of the Korean companies and government agencies who seek to promote exports. This volume goes some way to overcoming that imbalance, by combining the efforts of a number of distinguished scholars and commentators from Taiwan (Eva Tsai and Fang-chih Irene Yang), Korea (Yukie Hirata, Dong-Hoo Lee, Keehyeung Lee and Doobo Shim), Japan (Yoshitaka Mori), Hong Kong (Lisa Y. M. Leung, Angel Limn, Avin Hei Man Tong) and Australia (Tania Lim). This gives a notably broad coverage, bringing together a number of national perspectives and disciplinary interests from journalism through globalization to feminist theory.
"Korean Wave" (hanliu) is a term that was coined in China in 1997, when the first broadcasts of Korean television dramas were aired. Taiwan also began to buy and broadcast soap operas, and within the next year introduced Korean dance and rap music performed by bands such as CLON, NRG and H.O.T. H.O.T., a band whose name comes from "High Five of Teenagers" went on to perform to large crowds of Chinese fans and sell over 40,000 albums on the mainland in 2000 alone (and, over their seven-year existence, they sold seven million...