ABSTRACT
This chapter examines young Koreans’ subcultural engagement with Japanese popular culture, which was officially banned in Korea for decades. The chapter illustrates that the young fans developed subcultural strategies to bypass national gatekeeping and regulations. It shows that paradoxically the national regulations allowed young Koreans to engage reflexively with postcolonial histories, on the one hand, and to rethink the national, on the other. Moreover, the chapter discusses how young Koreans experimentally appropriated digital media technologies, which might later influence the evolution of the Korean Wave and its participatory fan culture.
