ABSTRACT
Recent years have witnessed numerous instances of celebrities caught up in nationalist arguments within East Asia’s highly sensitive media environment. In this chapter I consider cases in which celebrities appear with images of, or somehow evoking, flags and then become objects of discussion and/or abuse. I focus primarily on incidents of netizens hounding South Korean celebrities in relation to their (seeming) use of Japan’s Rising Sun Flag and thereby displaying what is treated as insufficient national consciousness. By doing so, I seek to underline how nationalism intersects with the processes of growing mediatisation, personalisation and commodification of celebrity as well as media consumption, democratised fan production and evolving relations between audiences and celebrities. In particular, I interrogate why celebrities are experiencing such panoptic online policing and being invested with increasing value as vessels of national sentiment, and ask what meaning this growing tendency holds for relations between South Korea and Japan.
