ABSTRACT
What is Asian popular culture? The chimera of Asian pop culture is perhaps perceived as something cute, something eerie, something fancy, and something exotic as opposed to the complex and well-established symbols and icons of western popular imaginaries such as Batman, Snoopy, E.T., the psychedelic pop music of the Beatles, and Hollywood. We as academics understand that this stereotypic understanding of Asian popular culture is not intellectually true, and therefore we tend to rebuff it and vilipend it ad rem. Yet, this attitude, at the same time, may compel us to easily brush off any debate on the core nature of Asian popular culture. In other words, despite imprecision and apocrypha, arguably we could use such characterizations, stereotypes, and even misrepresentations as a departure to help us understand the current phenomena and trajectories in Asian pop culture developments. In reality, it is evident that we do witness the lopsided flow of Hollywood cultures (such as Disney) to Asia. Very few made-in-Asia commercial imaginaries are sold and distributed in Europe or North America as they are believed to be unable to satisfy the appetites of those audiences, at least in the eyes of many distributors and producers. In this globalizing age in which transnational media industries predominantly control the flow of most pop culture imaginar-ies, the importation of pop culture from the “other global worlds” to Asia is the unpenetrable commercial strategy, while the reverse is always regarded as exceptional and something against the commercial, and perhaps cultural, norm. The formation of popular culture in Asia, therefore, has more or less been evolving in response to the globalizing culture that is imposed upon them (e.g. Allen and Sakamoto's analysis of the Japanese pop culture, 2006). That active global continuity used to largely define what Asian pop culture is, but what is emphasized in this volume, is that this phenomenon is changing.
