Korea’s Colonial Past and Present-Day Popular Culture

Korea’s Colonial Past and Present-Day Popular Culture
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Korea’s Colonial Past and Present-Day Popular Culture
Korea's present-day popular culture (K-pop) is experiencing massive globalization, with fandom rapidly spreading beyond its borders. Such a feat is supported by a fast-growing K-pop industry with talent factories churning out top talent across all areas of the industry. According to Maliangkay (2018), reality pop music has become the staple of Korea's primetime television. Other forms of K-pop talent shows comprise public auditions by amateurs to a panel of judges offering theatrical responses and accepting the audience's views. While studies and commentaries acknowledge that K-pop has grown in popularity and attribute such developments to the fast-growing culture industry, very few dig deeper into the historical roots of the industry. Key questions arise, including whether the Western inclinations of pop culture can explain the global reception and whether the country's colonial past has played a pivotal role. This essay seeks to dig deeper into these questions and provide a well-argued case that the colonial roots of K-pop gave it a global appeal.
In many ways, modern-day K-pop traces its roots to post-colonial nation-building, which arguably sought to move away from the country's colonial past. There are two arguments to support this position. First, colonial Korea was saturated with Japanese entertainment backed by an explosive growth of mass media in imperial Japan (Taylor, 2010). Korea and Taiwan were the major publishing frontiers for the Japanese mass media. The fact that Korean cultural products were regarded as highly marketable meant that even imperial Japan was invested in the widespread of such products, and they introduced mass media to Korea to help in this regard. Even during colonization, the Korean culture seemed to maintain its autonomy, as opposed to many cases where colonization sought to erode and replace the colonies' cultures.
Second, Korea’s quest for modernization during the post-colonial era reflected its desire to chart its path across all aspects of social and industrial existence. For instance, the post-colonial period coincided with the Cold War era, whereby most former colonies and newly-created states had to choose between the two competing ideologies at the time: communism versus capitalism. Many scholars believe South Korean science fiction work reflected the country’s desire for a techno-utopian state that opposed communism (Park, 2018). However, such desires were hindered by the emergence of a dictatorship that was seen as using technoscience and modernization as oppression tools as opposed to liberation and progress. Therefore, the end of colonization brought in an era of dictatorship. It means that social and political aspects of modernization acted together in assessing the challenges that the technologically saturated Korean society faced. Therefore, it can be observed that the country’s colonial past presented Korea with the tools necessary to market its popular culture.
However, the above a...