visual communication

ARTICLE

Who initiates a global flow?

Japanese popular culture in Asia

YOSHIKO NAKANO
University of Hong Kong

ABSTRACT
This article examines the diffusion of Japanese television programs in
Hong Kong and China. It demonstrates how dramas designed for the
Japanese younger generation proliferated in the form of pirated video
compact disks (VCDs), without being on the air and without marketing
campaigns. Far from being cultural imperialism pushed from the economic
center, the Chinese people have actively initiated the in-flow of these
dramas. The complex combination of local demand, digital technology and
the Chinese people’s highly developed literacy in regard to Japanese
popular culture made this flow possible. Tokyo was not even participating in
the diffusion when the dramas crossed the border into China. To better
illustrate globalization processes, this article argues that we should not
focus solely on the story of corporate-led cultural flow, but should also
examine its twists and turns from the perspectives of unforeseen consumers
and unauthorized intermediaries.

KEY WORDS
cartoon • China • cultural literacy • globalization • Hong Kong • Japanese
television drama • piracy

‘Yoshiko, what does “GTO” stand for?’, asked my Hong Kong Chinese
colleague in the summer of 1998. ‘GTO’ just did not ring a bell. ‘You mean’, I
thought to myself, ‘the World Trade Organization’? It turned out that she was
asking me about a brand-new Japanese television drama series starring
heartthrob Sorimachi Takashi.1 The show had been on the Japanese airwaves
since 7 July, a few weeks before this conversation took place in Hong Kong,
but would not reach Hong Kong cable TV until nearly a year later, on 25 June
1999. And yet, for weeks the young English Department instructor had been
reading about this hit series over her morning coffee in the Chinese-language
newspaper Pinggwoh Yatbo (Apple Daily) (see Figure 1). Just a few weeks
later, she managed to watch a few episodes on pirated video compact discs

Copyright © 2002 SAGE Publications

(London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)
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 (VCDs), and proudly announced that ‘GTO is Great Teacher and his name
O-ni-zu-ka’, a wild motorcycle rider turned hip high school teacher whom
Sorimachi played in the show.
My colleague is by no means a Japanophile or ‘harizu’ (the tribe
obsessed with Japan) as they are called in Taiwan, and lately in mainland
China. She would not miss a movie of Canto-pop star, Andy Lau, enjoys
watching Ally McBeal on an English-language channel, and waits eagerly for
sales at an upmarket British department store in town. She is one of many
young adults in post-colonial Hong Kong who counts VCDs of Japanese
dramas (J-dramas from now on) among her home entertainment choices,
along with four terrestrial channels, some 15 cable channels, as well as local
and Hollywood movies.
By the year 2000, the craze for J-drama VCDs would reach computer
centers in China. ‘I can’t think of any other film that illustrates student-life
better’, said a GTO fan who is a college senior in Nanjing (formerly Nanking).
He borrowed a complete set of pirated GTO VCDs from a friend, sat in a
computer lab for over 10 hours, and finished watching the entire set in one
day. ‘This drama touches upon so many social problems. It captures students’
disorientation, their frustration with education, and the distrust between
teachers and students. It just expresses them so well.’ As of April 2001,
Shanghai VCD rental shops stocked over 50 titles of Japanese TV dramas
featuring 20-something stars. ‘The J-dramas are very hot’, said a shopkeeper
in a Shanghai equivalent of Blockbuster.

Figure 1 J-drama GTO in Hong Kong’s Apple Daily. The headline reports a high rating
for its first episode in Japan. © 1998 Apple Daily.

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 This article examines the diffusion of Japanese popular culture in
Asia, with an emphasis on Hong Kong and mainland China. The two central
frameworks for this article are the methodology for consumer culture
research proposed by Du Gay et al. (1997) and the theories on Japan’s
globalization proposed by Befu (Befu and Guichard-Anguis, 2001). Du Gay
and his colleagues have shown how Sony produces and markets its Walkman
around the world, how it is consumed, and what mechanisms regulate its
distribution and use. Building on this framework, I consider how dramas
from the Japanese small screen have been distributed and consumed in Hong
Kong and China, in ways the Tokyo producers never imagined. The main
difference between Walkmans and Japanese cultural products is that the
Japanese cultural products have been crossing Asian borders largely at the
initiative of the Asians who are on the ‘receiving end’ (e.g. Bhusdee, 1994;
Honda, 1994; Shiraishi, 1997; Ishii, 2001; Iwabuchi, 2001; Ng, 2001). In other
words, the cultural flow was not pushed from the economic center.
Anthropologist Befu reminds us that studies of Japanese globalization
should not simply be modeled after theories about corporate America
formulated in western traditions. He notes that Asian empirical data are
essential for new perspectives. I therefore hope to provide these data without
becoming Asia-centric.
I also use consumers’ experiences to examine the recent J-drama boom
in Hong Kong and China, and chronicle how these dramas proliferated
without being on the air and without marketing campaigns. ‘The new global
cultural economy’, notes anthropologist Appadurai (1996), ‘has to be seen as
a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be under-
stood in terms of existing center-periphery models’ (p. 32). This article
points to such disjuncture between cultural producers in Japan and
consumers in Asia. To better illustrate globalization processes, I argue that we
should not focus solely on the story of corporate-led cultural flow from the
production centers, but also examine its twists and turns from the perspectives
of unforeseen consumers and unauthorized intermediaries.

1. CARTOONS AS BASES FOR J-DRAMA LITERACY

Japan’s cultural power in Asia goes far beyond Pokémon: children have been
growing up watching more Japanese cartoons than American or local
cartoons. Approximately 80 percent of animation programs shown on Hong
Kong’s four terrestrial channels, according to Poon (in preparation), are
produced in Japan. Sailor Moon and four other Japanese cartoons dominated
a children’s favorite cartoon list in 1997 (Apple Daily). Even in Korea, where
Japanese popular culture was banned altogether until 1998, Japanese
cartoons have been on the air since the 1970s with all traces of Japanese-ness
edited away (Kobari, 2001: 99).
The cartoon and comic character Doraemon is an Asian icon. The
blue time-traveling robot made its debut in a monthly comic magazine in

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 1970, and its 45 volumes have sold over 100 million copies throughout Japan
(Shogakukan, 1996). The first overseas stop for its animation series was
Hong Kong’s TVB station, in 1981 (Japanese Information Network, 2000). In
the following two decades, the robotic cat has captivated children of the
rising middle classes of Bangkok, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Jakarta, Kuala
Lumpur, Singapore and Taipei (Shiraishi, 1997; Igarashi, 1998). The children
have seen Doraemon and his friends fly by means of simple propellers
attached to their heads, and travel to beaches and jungles through
Doraemon’s Anywhere Door.
‘Of course, I love Doraemon’, said a graduate student from north-
eastern China who watched the show in her junior high school days.
‘Doraemon always helps out his friend Nobita with new gadgets out of his
pouch. I guess part of the reason I enjoyed Doraemon so much is because
Nobita didn’t do so well in school.’ The main character, Nobita, is an anti-
hero: the fourth grader is slow, lazy, and always gets into trouble. When I
attended Chinese-language classes in Beijing, there was a male Thai student
who wore round glasses. He was sweet, but was always late for class and always
reading from the wrong pages of his textbook. A 19-year-old Indonesian
student aptly nicknamed him Nobita.
Asian parents have a high regard for American animations, but
teenagers tend to identify more with Japanese cartoon and comic characters.
Although China’s state television, CCTV, had launched children’s programs
as early as 1959 (Yu, 1993: 75), there were no regularly scheduled TV
cartoons in China when Deng Xiaoping announced the Open Door Policy in
1978. American and Japanese cartoons were broadcast to fill the void. For
Asian cultural producers, it was often more economical to import American
or Japanese products than to develop their own, just like some Japanese
television stations used to resort to American shows in their early years. As a
result, foreign cartoons were a staple in children’s lives until CCTV began to
produce serialized cartoons in 1991. This was two years after the students’
protest in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and one year after Jiang Zemin
emphasized the need for the journalism, broadcasting and entertainment
sectors to provide good ‘food for the minds’ of children so that they would
learn to love their motherland and socialism (Zhonggong Zhongyang
Zhengce-yanjiushi, 1999).2
The American cartoons broadcast in reformist China were the classic
animation films featuring Mickey Mouse, and Tom and Jerry, that were
acquired before the Cultural Revolution (1966–76). The Japanese cartoons,
on the other hand, were relatively new productions from the 1960s and 1970s
such as Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy), Ikkyu-san (Little Monk Ikkyu) and Hana
no Ko Runrun (Lunlun: Flower Angel) (Li, 2000: 69). In the spring of 2001,
when I asked 42 Chinese undergraduate students to list their favorite
cartoons from their childhood, their top three choices were all Japanese:
Saint Seiya (Saint Star Warrior), Doraemon and Ikkyu-san, followed by
Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. A Chinese cartoon producer commented

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that Chinese young people find it easy to identify with the characters, who
are usually about their age, and often less than perfect. ‘Junior high school
students’, said the producer, ‘think that American children’s stories are good,
but the characters are not what they aspire to be. But Japanese cartoons are
different. When the students see them, they want to be like the characters.’
Those who grew up watching Doraemon in Hong Kong fondly refer to
the 1970s-style Japanese house in Cantonese as ‘Ding Dang’s house’, or
‘Doraemon’s house’. This is a typical two-storey house in newly developed
suburbia where middle-class families lived. It may have been a ‘rabbit hutch’,
but a 25-year-old Hong Kong woman who grew up in a public housing high-
rise says that Doraemon’s house was her dream house because no other
family would live above it, and ‘you can see the sky…. In Hong Kong’, she
continued, ‘every place is so crowded. Ding Dang’s house is so different and
so foreign to my everyday life.’ It may be foreign, but as Kurasawa (1998: 183)
and Iwabuchi (2001: 236) argue in the context of J-dramas, the lifestyle on
television is not entirely out of reach. In short, the program encapsulates
middle-class aspirations.
Today, the early Doraemon viewers in Asia have come of age. On Hong
Kong subways, I sometimes find myself chuckling at the blasting digital
sound of Doraemon’s theme song that businessmen set as their mobile phone
ringer. Through extended exposure to Japanese cartoons and comics, the
younger generation in Asia has developed a high level of literacy in regard to
Japanese visual narratives (Shiraishi, 1997: 240–5). Literacy, in this case, is the
ability to infer systematic and yet dynamic links between symbols and
meanings, and appreciate various elements of style such as the storyline,
characters and structure of a program and the pace, body movements,
relationships and customs that are represented in the show. It is the
Doraemon generation who has been reaching out for J-dramas that are not
on their local channels, in the form of pirated VCDs.

2. JAPANESE INDUSTRY IN THE BACK SEAT

Asia has been the number one destination for Japan’s US$40 million total TV
content exports. Japanese private broadcasters, according to a 1995 survey,
direct 47.3 percent of their exports to Asia compared with 25.7 percent to
North America (Japan Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications, 1997).
Despite these numbers, Japanese TV content producers have been rather
passive toward their product distribution in Asia. An overseas distributor of
Doraemon comments as follows:

In the last few years – since a few years before Pokémon – we have
begun to see some competitors (who distribute Japanese TV content
in overseas markets). Many people are just beginning to see (the
overseas distribution) as business. Until then, the attitude of the
Japanese side was: ‘we don’t care as long as you bring us some cash.’
The overseas market wasn’t a part of their plan. It was good enough to

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 make money in the Japanese market. The overseas market was a mere
extra. (Interview, 29 February 2001)

Pokémon, a multimedia product involving 251 pastel-colored monsters, was

introduced in Japan as game software in 1996. As of June 2000, the TV
cartoon program is being shown in 51 countries and over 4 billion Pokémon
cards have been sold around the globe (Hatakeyama and Kubo, 2000: 537).
The overseas distribution business gained momentum only in the late 1990s.
Why have Japanese cultural producers taken a back seat in the Asian
market? In addition to lingering reservations because of Japan’s imperialist
history, there are four reasons. First, the Japanese domestic market has been
strong and growing steadily. As a result, according to former TV producer
Ozawa (1999), the Japanese media industry did not have to turn to the
overseas market for profit:

Not only broadcasting but also various media industries have enjoyed
continuous growth since 1945. Therefore, the priority was to compete
for a bigger share of the pie in the expanding domestic market. The
domestic market was sufficient. (p. 100)

The copyrights of the programs were usually designed exclusively for domestic
distribution. In Ozawa’s analysis, digital broadcasting, more channels and the
internet are some of the factors that will force Japanese cultural producers to
think globally and look toward the Asian continent.
Second, two of the four Asian Tigers had official bans on Japanese
popular culture. The former British colonies, Hong Kong and Singapore,
began broadcasting Japanese drama series in 1970 and 1982 respectively.3
Their new middle classes had consumer power, but the markets were small:
Hong Kong today has 6.9 million people, Singapore 3.2 million. On the other
hand, the bigger tigers, Taiwan (population 22.1 million) and Korea (47.3
million), were former Japanese colonies where, until the 1990s, policies
against Japanese cultural products were in place.4 Today, the Taiwanese
people are the most enthusiastic consumers of Japanese popular culture: over
70 cable channels continuously look for new content to fill airtime, and five
channels broadcast J-dramas and variety shows around the clock. In spite of
this, the official ban on Japanese TV programs and movies was not lifted
until 1993 (Ishii, 2001: 48; Iwabuchi, 2001: 179).
Similarly, South Korean women take fashion cues from the Korean-
language version, inaugurated in January 2000, of the Japanese magazine An-
an. But until October 1998, there was a blanket ban on Japanese popular
culture, and restrictions still remain (Kobari, 2001).
Third, as Iwabuchi (2001: 140–1) points out, while distribution in
Asia may be labor intensive, it is not so lucrative. Asia consists of many small
countries with different languages, writing systems and cultures. Doraemon’s
distributor says that it takes enormous effort to seek out a local licensee, cut a

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deal and repackage the programs according to local specifications, especially
because there are often multiple copyright owners for TV programs in Japan.
The fourth reason is geopolitical; the American spotlight has been
considered more important than the Asian ones. Many Japanese artists long
to be on the Hollywood screen and the Billboard chart where their
inspiration came from, and to be a part of the financially rewarding North
American market. For example, the most successful Japanese music producer
ever, Komuro Tetsuya, made a business deal with Rupert Murdoch in 1996,
organized sophisticated concerts in Greater China, and has been recruiting
new Asian talent through his website. His ultimate goal, however, is the
United States. The plan is for Murdoch to provide channels and Komuro to
provide the content (Schilling, 1997: 104).
The political bans in some countries and the lukewarm attitude
among executives in Tokyo did not stop Japanese cultural goods from
gaining popularity in Asia. It was mostly people in Asia who chose the
cultural products and initiated the flow. It is quite telling that the first
overseas distributor of Doraemon, previously engaged in trade in high-tech
machine parts, got involved in the TV business because Hong Kong people
asked him to negotiate broadcast rights.

3. HONG KONG
Hong Kong reverted to Chinese government on 1 July 1997. Despite the
doomsday scenario often predicted in the international media (Nakano,
1999), the most visible change in Hong Kong since the handover has not
been limiting democracy or freedom; rather it is the influx of Japanese
popular culture into the territory. Japan, which occupied Hong Kong from
1941 to 1945, has now become a major supplier of pop culture products.
Hong Kong’s best-selling tabloid weekly Yat Chow Hong (Next Magazine)
published approximately 380 pages of Japan-related articles and advertise-
ments in 1997. The number of pages jumped by almost 50 percent to
approximately 580 in 1998.
The motivating factor behind this boom was the Japanese romantic
comedy Long Vacation. This 11-part J-drama series, which had never been
broadcast on Hong Kong channels, became a cult hit among young people
through word of mouth. The program, which began to circulate in the form
of pirated video compact disks (VCDs) in early 1997, triggered a series of
articles about J-dramas in tabloid dailies and weeklies in 1998, and
contributed to the active and yet informal in-flow of J-dramas. This fueled a
strong consumer drive, and by 2001 drew similar J-dramas into the prime
time slots of the terrestrial channels.

3.1 Japanese TV programs: 1970–89

The popularity of Japanese culture in Hong Kong is often explained by the
concept of ‘foreign but not-so-foreign’. Hong Kong people have been

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 developing a high level of literacy in regard to Japanese cultural products
through the serialized Japanese dramas and cartoons on the air since the
1970s. In the early years of Hong Kong television, Japanese dramas were
prime time entertainment. The first Japanese television drama, Sign wa V
(The Sign is V), was aired at 8 pm on Sunday 6 December 1970, three years
after TVB established the first terrestrial service (Ming Pao, 1970). Sign wa V,
which was called Young Sparkler in Cantonese, was a 45-part series about a
women’s volleyball team (Furusaki, 2001). The series, a hit of the 1969–70
season in Japan, celebrated the ‘can-do spirit’ inspired by Japan’s gold medal
in women’s volleyball at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Other Japanese dramas,
featuring sports, romance and lone samurai, continued to fill Hong Kong’s
small screens in the 1970s. By 1971, 72 percent of Hong Kong households
owned a TV set. Movie tickets were often too expensive for working-class
families who had to resort to assembling plastic flowers to make ends meet,
but the TVB channel offered free entertainment. These 1970s dramas, how-
ever, are not just a thing of the past; the local channels have repeatedly shown
reruns.
As Hong Kong’s TV industry gained maturity, Japanese dramas
retreated from prime time. Instead, numerous Japanese cartoons, including
Doraemon, Dr. Slump, and Maho- no Tenshi Creamy Mami (Bewitched Creamy
Mami), began to occupy children’s afternoons. A female undergraduate
student majoring in Japanese Studies recalls coming home from kindergarten,
taking a nap, and waking up to Doraemon at 4.30 pm every weekday.
Although classic cartoons such as Tetsuwan Atom (Astro Boy) had been
around since the 1970s, it was in the 1980s that Japanese animation truly
became a part of children’s daily lives. And unlike mainland China, which
eventually invested in domestic cartoon production, Hong Kong continues to
import the majority of its cartoons from Japan, including ones for young
adults.
The 1980s was also the period when Japanese cultural products began
to turn from being luxurious to popularly accessible. As more people gained
affluence and moved to suburban communities, Japanese department stores
followed them to suburbia. Yaohan supplied daily necessities, cute stationery
for school bags and Japanese-style fast food to Hong Kong’s emerging middle
and lower middle classes (Wong, 1999). By the time the first Yaohan opened
in 1984, approximately 90 percent of electric cookers for rice and 70 percent
of television sets in the territory were made in Japan (RTHK, 1984). This was
a far cry from a common saying from the previous decade, ‘all Japanese tankers
will eventually sink’, that ridiculed the poor quality of things made in Japan.
Japanese popular music that had formerly been heard for the most
part through Cantonese cover-versions provoked enough curiosity to be
played in the original Japanese versions (Ogawa, 2001). Teenage pop singers
Nakamori Akina and Kondo Masahiko charmed Hong Kong teenagers and
became household names, along with more mature local as well as Taiwanese
stars (Lee, 2000). In the mid-1980s, Hong Kong was Japan’s biggest overseas

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market for records; Hong Kong businessmen acted as the cultural
intermediary by packing Japanese records into their suitcases for sale back
home (RTHK, 1984).
By the late 1980s, tiny shops that stocked Hong Kong celebrity
posters, Japanese cartoon character toys, and comic books began to emerge
in shopping arcades located in the densely populated downtown district of
Mongkok; some of these shops would evolve into the center for pirated J-
dramas in the late 1990s.

3.2 J-drama: the story of our generation

Digital technology initiated a new flow of Japanese cultural products in 1997.
It brought in J-drama series that had too narrow an appeal for prime time
TV in Hong Kong. Long Vacation, the most celebrated J-drama series in
Hong Kong, was first broadcast in Japan from April to June 1996, and finally
aired in Hong Kong more than four years later from October to December
2000. But in these four years many young people in Hong Kong, and
eventually in mainland China as well, viewed the show on VCDs, which are
lower-resolution cousins of DVDs. Unlike the United States or Japan, where
DVDs immediately followed video cassettes as the favored home entertain-
ment medium, VCDs have been the choice in Hong Kong and in China since
the mid-1990s. A VCD works like a CD-Rom and can be viewed on
computers, some computer game machines and, of course, VCD players.
Leung (1999, 2000) notes that VCDs, besides being portable and
inexpensive, have two additional advantages for young viewers of J-drama.
First, viewers do not have to share a TV with their parents because VCDs can
be played on computers. Second, if young viewers choose to play a drama
using a VCD player attached to the living room TV, they can adjust their
viewing of the programs around their parents’ schedule.
Hong Kong’s most popular weekly, Yat Chow Hong (Next Magazine),
captured the J-drama VCD hype in a February 1998 article entitled ‘J-drama
Banzai Ban-banzai’:

Ah, there’s so much to say. Long Vacation has been the must-see
introduction to J-dramas. We can’t cope without talking about it and
seeing it ...

We don’t mean to glorify the show any further, but the very fact that
J-dramas and their pirated VCDs go hand in hand today is due to the
absolute victory of Long Vacation. It turned the pirated VCD dealers’
eyes to J-dramas, and offered an alternative to Hong Kong TV
programs made for aunties. (Yan and Yuet, 1998: 101)

When we asked 26 Hong Kong undergraduates what their favorite Japanese

entertainment was in a series of interviews between November 1998 and
March 1999,5 without ever having been on the air, Long Vacation came in

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 Figure 2 Pirated VCDs of J-drama Long Vacation.

third with seven votes. It followed a broadcast, Hitotsu Yane no Shita (Under
One Roof) and the Japanese fashion magazine Non-no, which each received
eight votes.
In Japan, Long Vacation ranks in the Top 10 list of most-watched
dramas produced by commercial broadcasters in Japan’s TV history, with a
whopping 36.7 percent audience share for its final episode (Furusaki, 2001).
This is a stunning achievement, since there were nearly 60 dramas from
commercial broadcasters in that year alone and dramas, according to Ozawa
(1999: 50), are the ‘killer contents’, or the genre that attracts the largest
audience in Japan.
Long Vacation stars Brad Pitt-handsome Kimura Takuya as a 25-year-
old aspiring pianist, and vivacious Yamaguchi Tomoko as a 30-year-old
unemployed fashion model. They become roommates after Yamaguchi’s
fiancé disappears on the day of their wedding. After ‘When-Harry-Met-
Sallyesque’ twists, Kimura wins a piano competition, and the roommates are
united happily ever after in the series’ 11th and final episode. Unlike Ally
McBeal and ER, J-dramas end after three months, no matter how popular
they are. J-dramas usually come with a high-profile theme song. Long
Vacation’s producers invested in top Japanese R&B star Kubota Toshinobu,
and supermodel Naomi Campbell who whispered in the interlude, ‘Wanna
make love, wanna make love song, hey baby!’
In Japan, Long Vacation falls into the genre of ‘trendy drama’, that
usually stars 20-something Tokyo residents. The good-looking hero lives
alone in a chic apartment with no sign of his parents, and falls in love with a

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woman whose apartment is equally chic, with no sign of her parents. Steamy
scenes, however, are rare.
The trendy dramas were the products of the Japanese bubble
economy and marked a departure from the one-program-for-all mentality of
TV production and viewing. A second TV set and a VCR freed a young
woman from sharing a TV set with her parents; she did not have to see on-
screen troubles with sisters and in-laws any longer (Schilling, 1997: 272).
Instead, young people, who grew up watching cartoons, found programs that
featured actors of their age group, revolved around their problems, and
illustrated their aspirations. The trendy drama format first appeared in Japan
in the late 1980s and has been flourishing in the prime time slots ever since.

3.3 Niche love stories and the ratings war

One of the earlier mega hits in this genre was Tokyo Love Story, based on a
girls’ comic book series. It was originally broadcast in Japan in 1991, and later
created a sensation throughout Asia when the Pan-Asian satellite broadcaster
Star TV, as well as various terrestrial channels, picked it up (Bhusdee, 1994;
Igarashi, 1998; Kurasawa, 1998; Ishii, 2001; Iwabuchi, 2001; Ng, 2001). Star
TV used the label ‘idol drama’ for this genre, calling attention to the youth of
the cast members and their refined looks. The people in Hong Kong and
mainland China, however, commonly refer to a trendy drama as a J-drama,
pronounced yatkek in Cantonese and riju in Mandarin.
Although it is a drama made in Japan, Oshin does not count as a J-
drama. This story of the life-long struggle and ultimate success of a peasant
woman, shown in Japan between 1983 and 1984, would later reach viewers in
over 50 countries. Oshin was originally a weekday morning show aired
between 8.15 and 8.30 am (with a repeat at 12.45 pm); it was for housewives
taking a short break after they sent their husbands and kids off for the day
(Harvey, 1995). Poverty, misery and life history are alien to J-dramas.
In Hong Kong, where there are only four terrestrial channels (two
Cantonese and two English), fragmentation of programming was not viable
in the early 1990s. Tokyo Love Story was broadcast on the trailing ATV
Cantonese channel, from 1 June 1993, on Tuesdays from 10.30 pm (Dongfang
Xindi, 1993). Although many young people in Hong Kong still talk fondly
about the two main characters, Kanchi and Rika, the show did not score high
ratings. Iwabuchi (2001: 209) found that Tokyo Love Story failed to attract
women over 40 years old, who are the most loyal TV audience in Hong Kong.
So J-dramas retreated from primetime TV.
In 1997, most primetime dramas on the two Cantonese channels
revolved around family problems and legendary figures from ancient
dynasties. Cheng Ka-fai, a video jockey who specializes in Japanese pop, com-
mented that Long Vacation commanded a large following because the TVB
Cantonese channel was playing Judge Bao, set in the Northern Song Dynasty
(960–1127).6 It was too dull for young people. What’s more, cable TV was not

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 yet common in Hong Kong, which was ‘dismally behind in cable TV
connections at 5.64 percent of households’, the local English daily South
China Morning Post reported in April 1997.
This explains why the digital piracy culture flourished.

3.4 Tabloids as a J-drama buyer’s guide

Pirated VCDs of Long Vacation first appeared on the market in early 1997,
nearly a year after the show was broadcast in Japan. By then, pirated VCDs
had been around for almost four years, but the titles had been mostly
Hollywood and Hong Kong movies, along with pornographic videos that
were often from Japan. Within a few days after Hollywood blockbusters
began to show in Hong Kong theaters, pirated copies showed up in stalls and
tiny shops in arcades (RTHK, 1999). The piracy was accelerated, the South
China Morning Post (1998) reported, by the copyright ordinance in June
1997 that banned parallel imports of products that are authentic but
originally produced for other countries. This meant higher prices and fewer
choices for genuine VCDs. In August 1997, Romeo and Juliet cost approxi-
mately US$22 while Braveheart cost approximately US$30, compared with
US$2 to $3 for pirated copies.7 At the height of the pirated VCD boom in
April 1998, Hong Kong Customs estimated that 1000 retail outlets for pirated
CDs and VCDs were in operation (Hong Kong SAR Government Information
Services, 2000a). Customs seized 39 million pirated CDs and VCDs in 1998,
and 16.5 million in 1999 (Hong Kong SAR Government Information
Services, 2000b). Leung (2000) argues that the cat-and-mouse-game added
to the thrill of the pirated VCD consumption.
The Long Vacation craze first spread through word of mouth, but by
the summer of 1997, found its way into the Chinese-language tabloid the
Apple Daily and weekly Next Magazine, both publications of the 1990s
newcomer Next Media. Japanese lifestyle news, including material on J-
dramas, became a weapon in the circulation war. Hong Kong’s newspaper
and magazine markets are extremely crowded. When the Apple Daily joined
the market in 1995, with its anti-Beijing stance and strong entertainment
coverage, there were 59 newspapers, including 38 Chinese-language ones, in
the colony. The population was a mere 6.2 million (Hong Kong Government,
1996). The Apple Daily quickly gained young readers, and was soon in fierce
competition with the Oriental Daily for the highest circulation, in the range
of 400,000 copies a day.8 Although tabloids, these papers are not for people
who are interested in space aliens and Diana-spotting. Young women are not
embarrassed when they are caught reading it. On the contrary, the Apple
Daily is where many of them get their news, hard or soft.
The Apple Daily offers three to four pieces of foreign entertainment
news in its daily ‘Foreign Showbiz’ section. In April 1997, the section was
usually dominated by the celebrities from Hollywood or London, with only
one piece of news from Tokyo. But only four months later, the Japanese news

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had expanded to three to four pieces a day, including minute details about J-
dramas that had not yet been on the Japanese airwaves.
On 30 August 1997, the Apple Daily introduced eight J-dramas
scheduled to be aired in Japan during the coming season, starting in October. It
gave a preview of each story along with pictures of the stars; it even included a
summary chart of the titles in Chinese, the broadcasters, starting dates and the
names of the actors and actresses. Next Magazine printed a similar article with
a summary chart in its 15 August issue (Next Magazine, 1997).
In Goffman’s frames theory (1974), it would seem that the Apple
Daily framed this J-drama article as a piece of show business news, but the
readers reframed it as a buyers’ guide, and the pirate VCD makers and dealers
reframed them as industry news. Within a matter of days of being broadcast
in Japan, J-drama VCDs appeared at a shopping arcade in Mongkok with the
original Japanese-language track and faulty Chinese subtitles. The arcade in
Mongkok was an old stomping ground for buyers of Japanese cartoon
character toys or celebrity posters. A complete set of 11 or 12 J-drama
episodes went for US$20 to $25. Although they ran more than 10 hours in
length, Hong Kong’s young adults often watched the entire series in a single
day, often with their friends.
Good Japanese entertainment coverage became critical for tabloid
sales; other tabloid dailies and weeklies soon joined the competition, and
became constant sources of Japanese entertainment and product news in
Hong Kong. They developed a catalogue-style presentation of Japanese
dramas, stars, fashion, cosmetics, foods, gadgets and travel information.
Those who cover Japanese lifestyle news say that, besides attending press
conferences, they gather their information from Japanese weekly TV guides,
various Japanese magazines, as well as Japanese tabloids and sports dailies on
the internet. A monthly Japanese-magazine allowance is common in both the
print and electronic media industries in Hong Kong. Some reporters,
according to the Hong Kong Post (1998), receive more than US$500 a month
to keep themselves up to date. As a result, the Japanese coverage in Next
Magazine expanded 150 percent from 1997 to 1998. Apple Daily readers knew
more about Japanese entertainment news than Japanese expatriates who
relied on the Asahi or Yomiuri newspapers.
As soon as a new hit J-drama series emerged, it received exhaustive
coverage. The colleague who asked me about GTO must have read an Apple
Daily article on 10 July 1998 whose headline screamed:

New Hairdo Adds to his Badness, Fans Fall for It

Takashi Sorimachi’s GTO, Strong Showing for its First Episode.

(Apple Daily, 1998)

The article was accompanied by a picture of Sorimachi and his co-stars, and
reported that GTO scored a 26.6 percent rating for the first episode, which

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 had been broadcast three days before. This was higher than the rating for his
previous show, Beach Boys, and was the third highest rating in the history of
Fuji Television for a first episode, after Long Vacation and Love Generation. It
went on to say that Sorimachi’s character was a high-school teacher, and yet
had been a delinquent and a wild motorcycle rider in his high school days,
and frequented a game arcade with his students. Those who regularly
followed Apple’s Show Biz section had high enough Japanese popular culture
literacy to understand this information, and this article in turn added to their
literacy and helped them to enjoy the show. In other words, the transnational
flow of entertainment news paved the way for the informal flow of the never-
seen foreign dramas.

3.5 The fear of being left out

By then, J-dramas had become conversation pieces. From high school
students, to beauty care specialists, to financial analysts, everyone was talking
about J-dramas. Long Vacation certainly was a highly attractive text. J-dramas’
popularity in Asia, as Iwabuchi (2001), Ishii (2001) and Ng (2001) detail, lies
in the young good-looking casts, the strong scripts, the excellent production
technique, the catchy theme songs, the well-crafted sound tracks, and the
relatively short length. These elements certainly echo with Hong Kong
viewers’ impressions of J-dramas. But in addition to the text itself, the social
context added to the J-drama boom in Hong Kong: ‘I don’t like Long Vacation’,
a male university student who was studying in the United States told me, ‘but
I don’t want to be left out of conversations.’ So he watched Long Vacation
VCDs – twice – when he returned to Hong Kong for his summer vacation.
Chan (2000) observes that the current Japanese hype is rooted in
Hong Kong’s consumer logic:

The fear of being isolated, of standing out, or even worse, of being left
behind or missing out, drives the Hong Kong consumer deeper into
the logic of consumer society. Thus, latest trends in consumer culture
and news of innovative product designs travel across the city at high
speed, so as to satisfy the compulsion to be part of whatever it is that
is ‘happening’. (p. 43)

The J-drama’s role as a group identity marker also came through clearly in a
panel exhibition organized by the Hong Kong University’s Sociology Society
in April 2000. In the exhibition, entitled ‘If not Japanese, I don’t like it; if not
Japanese, I wouldn’t buy it’, the students wrote as follows:

Do you often watch J-dramas? If so, do you watch them because you
are interested? Or because your friends have seen them? You might
watch J-dramas just because you want something you and your
friends can talk about, or because you don’t want to be left out. Is that
you? (Hong Kong University Sociology Society, 2000)

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3.6 Crackdown and thereafter
Hong Kong Customs and Japanese commercial broadcasters finally moved to
crack down on pirated J-dramas in September 1998. Customs confiscated
200,000 VCDs worth over US$250,000 at the Mongkok arcade. ‘I had no
idea’, a Japanese representative remarked, ‘that so many of our trendy dramas
have been circulating as pirated VCD software’ (Hong Kong Post, 1998: 5).
Since piracy subsided, Hong Kong has been in search of a new
medium for J-dramas. Lesser shows are daily cable TV attractions. The highly
rated shows have gone through a process of trial-and-error: cable pay-per-
view began in October 1998; simultaneous broadcast of Nisen-nen no Koi
(Love 2000) in Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and Thailand from
January to March 2000; and official distribution of VCDs in April 2000.
At last, Long Vacation was broadcast on a terrestrial channel in
October 2000, and the first episode landed a top ten rating for the week (Sing
Tao Daily, 2000). On 13 May 2001, another highly claimed J-drama, Beautiful
Life, began airing as a Sunday prime time show in the 8.35 pm slot. This was
only 16 months after it first debuted in Japan, compared to 29 months for
Tokyo Love Story, and 54 months for Long Vacation.
A 10-year-old child who had seen The Sign is V in 1970 would now be
42 years old.

4. CHINA
In a suburb of Nanjing lies a peaceful green campus. It has, however,
witnessed a dark history: some of the classrooms were converted from stables
that belonged to the Japanese Imperial Army during World War II. Some 60
years later, one of the several VCD rental stores on campus stocked over 40
pirated J-drama VCDs. Among the items available was Strawberry-on-the-
Shortcake, whose final episode had been aired in Japan less than a month
before.9 Rental was no more than US$1.50 for three nights for a complete 10
to 12-episode set. This was the equivalent of four cups of coffee at Kentucky
Fried Chicken, or two hours on the net at an internet café. In addition, there
are internet sites that offer J-dramas for download.
Some Chinese students comment that the pirated J-drama VCDs are
their cultural ‘fast food’: pervasive, fast, cheap, often predictable but filling.
Female students a decade ago read Taiwanese novels when they sought
entertainment; students today watch VCDs of Hollywood movies, Hong
Kong movies and J-dramas. In China, it was the digital literacy on campus
that triggered the in-flow of J-dramas.

4.1 Digital fast food

Many Chinese undergraduates have better access to computers than to TV
sets during the semester. The overwhelming majority of undergraduates and
many students in rural high schools live on campus. Although by 1997
virtually every urban family had a color TV set in their living room (Chinese

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 Statistics Year Book, 1998), TV sets on
campus remain often communal, and one
set is sometimes shared by an entire dorm of
(literally) a thousand students. Therefore,
visual entertainment on campus tends to
revolve around computers. While personal
computers are still rare, students have good
access to public computers. At the Feiyu
internet cafe in Beijing’s student district,
16,000 people go on the net daily through
1800 computers, by the cafe’s own May 2001
estimate.10 In addition to computers, VCD
players are quickly moving into living
Figure 3
Internet café in
rooms: 24.7 percent of urban households owned one in 1999 (Chinese
Beijing. Statistics Year Book, 2000).
In this country of 1.25 billion people, new technology meant a huge
demand for new software. And it created room for foreign shows to pour in.
Pirated VCDs are readily available in stores, stalls and on footbridges. Tong
Jiabo of the Anhui Province Traffic Department (Tong, 2001: 22) suggests
that 500,000 people work in movie-related industries in China, but they are
outnumbered by the one million people who are engaged in the pirated disk
business.
At the state-run Beijing Book Center, the three most popular genuine
VCDs in February 2001 were: (1) the Discovery Channel’s documentary
programs; (2) Stewart Little, a Hollywood production about a mouse that
was adopted as a child; and (3) Tiechi-tongya Ji Xiaolan [Sharp-tongued Ji], a
Chinese TV drama. Sharp-tongued Ji, which had just been broadcast and
represents a popular genre of Chinese TV drama, is a story about a Qing
Dynasty official who fought against political corruption and thus indirectly
criticizes some of today’s officials who take advantage of the rapidly
expanding economy. As in Hong Kong, dramas in China are tailored for the
older generation.

4.2 Search for an alternative

The Chinese people in relatively affluent regions have been seeking an
alternative to domestic programs with political undertones; in turn these
efforts have been met with new controls. In Guangzhou (formerly Canton),
only two hours by train across the border from Hong Kong, many people
have been enjoying an alternative since the mid-1980s: the spillover of Hong
Kong television. Students in Guangzhou list as their favorite programs those
that have been on Hong Kong channels but have not officially entered the
mainland Chinese market, such as the Japanese cartoon Crayon Shin-chan
[Naughty Shin] and Late Night with David Letterman. A female college
student, who grew up in a village without an elevator, says ‘of course’ her

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family has been watching Hong Kong channels since she was in primary
school.
The Chinese government believed that the spillover of Hong Kong’s
news, rather than the entertainment shows, might undercut China’s socialist
ideals. Therefore, before the 1997 Hong Kong handover, the government
took the pragmatic step of incorporating the Hong Kong terrestrial channels
into Guangzhou’s cable TV system, and began to censor ‘the negative
contents’ on the spot before it redistributed them to subscribers (Zhong et
al., 1998: 202). ‘It not only satisfied the people’s desire to see Hong Kong’s TV
programs’, Zhong et al. explain, ‘but accomplished the purpose of controlling
the content effectively.’ As a result, when a news presenter in Hong Kong hits
upon the Dalai Lama in Taiwan or detained academics, the screen turns to a
vast field of red and yellow tulips with the slogan ‘Protect the Environment,
Everyone is Responsible.’
Hong Kong is the place where many Chinese turn for the latest trends,
especially with regard to Japanese pop culture. A Beijing entrepreneur who
was considering investing in Japanese comic distribution first looked into
what was popular in Hong Kong. The editor of a Japanese comic information
magazine regularly goes to Hong Kong to buy Japanese comics in both
Japanese and Chinese versions. For them, Hong Kong is the center of
diffusion.
Another hub of Japanese pop culture is Shanghai, where cable TV
became a threat to existing channels as early as the mid-1990s. A terrestrial
TV station introduced the J-drama Tokyo Love Story in March 1995 to win
the young audience back. The comfortable lifestyle of Japanese young people
impressed a male high school student from a nearby industrial town. ‘I don’t
remember any parts of the story that impressed me. The only thing I
remember is the lifestyle of today’s young people in Japan’, he said. ‘I had no
idea how young people lived before I watched this TV drama’ (Nakano et al.,
forthcoming). Tokyo Love Story was followed by a dozen J-drama series. In
addition, Shanghai was the place where the 1997 boom for the Japanese
cartoon Slam Dunk took off. This story of a high-school basketball team was
embraced by high school as well as college students, who saw themselves in
the story.

4.3 Call for a national ‘idol’

The immense popularity of these Japanese and American programs in the
late 1990s led the Chinese government to impose quotas on foreign dramas
and cartoons in 2000. Foreign dramas, according to the State Administration
of Radio, Film and TV regulation (2000a), should make up less than 15
percent of programming during the prime time hours between 6 and 10 pm
in order to ‘maintain social order’ and to ‘help and promote national dramas
to prosper’. In addition, foreign cartoons were cut back to less than 40
percent of overall cartoon programs in order to ‘protect the well-being of the

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 children’, and ‘establish spiritual civilization based on socialism’ (State
Administration of Radio, Film and TV, 2000b).
The national broadcaster CCTV, however, is keenly aware of the need
for domestic programs that would replace Tokyo Love Story and Slam Dunk.
Li Jianping (Li, 1999), one of the animation program directors at CCTV,
published a paper entitled ‘Animation Also Needs “Young Idol Drama”’. He
writes that CCTV has successfully produced cartoons for children under 12,
but receives strong requests from high school students saying, ‘How come
there are no cartoons for us?’ and ‘Where are the programs that we need?’
Therefore, Li calls for Chinese cartoon characters based on the J-drama
formula: characters who are around the viewers’ age, and who go through the
kind of difficulties that the viewers would go through. In other words, Li is
calling for a domestic hero for those who liked GTO because it expressed
students’ disorientation, frustration and distrust so well.

4.4 Hong Kong as a hub for J-pop culture

Now that they have been squeezed out of prime time, most J-dramas are
circulating in the form of pirated VCDs in China. These VCDs have
distinctive marks of Hong Kong origins. The vast majority of J-dramas and
cartoons keep the original Japanese sound tracks, with Chinese subtitles in
traditional characters (fantizi). These are the characters that have been
staunchly preserved in Hong Kong after the handover, and are also used in
Taiwan and overseas Chinese communities. China, however, uses a set of
simplified characters (jiantizi) that were products of language reforms
carried out beginning in 1955 for the development of mass literacy. Students
in mainland China are schooled in simplified characters, and the only times
they are allowed to use the traditional characters in school are in lessons in
calligraphy and Chinese classics. Thus, university campuses in Shanghai and
Nanjing, whose dialects are different from standard Mandarin Chinese, have
the following sign all over campus:

Please Speak Standard Chinese

Please Use the Standardized Characters

But J-dramas, which students consume like ‘fast food’, are mostly subtitled in
traditional Chinese characters. In addition, Japanese comic books, which are
also a part of many students’ relaxation routine, are more often written in
traditional characters than in simplified characters because they are pirated
from the Hong Kong or Taiwanese versions. Figure 4 compares a line from
Long Vacation in traditional characters and simplified characters.
Some undergraduates say that the traditional characters are difficult
to read; they are able to understand subtitles and comic books, but cannot
work their way through a serious book. Some say that they are getting used
to the traditional characters through watching VCDs and Hong Kong-based

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Figure 4 ‘I’ve never played the piano for someone special.’ A line from Long Vacation in
traditional and simplified Chinese characters.

Star TV, which subtitles all of its dramas in traditional characters for the
speakers of different Chinese dialects. But many university students say that
they have no problem at all reading them; one student in Guangzhou has
even surprised adults by writing personal letters in traditional characters.
Pan (1998) writes, in her study of various public signs, that young people in
Guangzhou reacted to public signs in traditional characters as if they were
nothing new, while the older generation regarded them as a capitalist
influence from Hong Kong or Taiwan.
Guangzhou residents who regularly tune into Hong Kong TV
certainly have had high exposure to the traditional characters, but the
younger generation in cities across China also seems to be developing literacy
in the characters through J-dramas and comics via Hong Kong. Scollon and
Scollon (1998) wrote that it was somehow ironic that traditional characters
are now being associated with the reformist discourse; it is certainly ironic
when the vehicle is often popular culture from the United States, Hong Kong
and Japan.

5. WHERE IS THE CENTER?

The term ‘globalization’ became fashionable as a marketing strategy in the
1970s, and has been closely linked to multinational corporations (Du Gay et
al., 1997: 78). Corporate ambitions and strategies are often seen as its driving
forces. McDonald’s and Microsoft intended to go global and crossed political
as well as cultural borders. Pirated J-drama VCDs, however, prevailed
precisely because Hong Kong and China had not been on Tokyo’s strategic
map. Far from being cultural imperialism pushed from the economic center
to the targeted market, it was a complex combination of unforeseen demand,
greed, digital technology, insecurity and highly developed literacy on the part
of local people that initiated the informal cultural flow and kept it going.
And Tokyo was not even participating in the diffusion when J-dramas
crossed the border into China.
There is, of course, nothing specifically Japanese or Asian about this

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 process. The executives in Tokyo will try to manage the unauthorized flows
to Asia once their MBAs find ways to make them profitable. In the season
starting July 2001, Japanese producers cast Hong Kong pop diva Wong Faye
in a J-drama with the Asian market in mind. In addition, the Japanese
Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry stepped in to assist further
globalization of Japanese cartoons by forming the ‘Animation Industry Study
Group’ in May 2001 (Yomiuri On-line, 2000). However, in the meantime,
informal cultural traffic thrives, providing the basis to consider globalization
processes without being confined to the binary modes of ‘the sender and the
receiver’ and ‘the center and the peripheral’.
In fact, the study of informal cultural flow is possible only if we put
Hong Kong and China at the center and ask how and why the people
incorporated Japanese cultural products at a particular point in time, and
how the Japanese products interacted with other local and foreign cultural
influences. Historian Hamashita Takeshi (1996), who has written extensively
on Hong Kong’s role as a global economic hub, emphasizes the need to
observe the historical development of Hong Kong from within, rather than
looking at it from the viewpoint of Tokyo, Beijing, or London.
This shift in perspective might help us break with the concepts of
Japanization as well as Americanization that put the economic power at the
absolute center of globalization. Our work has just begun.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This research was assisted by a grant from the Abe Fellowship Program of the
Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned
Societies with funds provided by the Japan Foundation Center for Global
Partnership. This article grew out of discussions with the members of the
‘Japan in Hong Kong’ project at the University of Hong Kong: Dixon H.W.
Wong, Okano Masazumi, Serizawa Satohiro and Ogawa Masashi. I would
also like to thank the Project research assistant, Au Yeung Kai Ming. I
received indispensable suggestions from Wu Yongmei, Peter Cave, Nagafuchi
Yasuyuki and Michael A. Meyer. Rachel Scollon provided editorial assistance.
While this article owes much to the support of these people, none of them is
responsible for any errors that remain.

NOTES
1. For Japanese and Chinese names, I have followed the local convention
in which the family name precedes the given name. The main
exception, however, is my own name in the headings; Nakano is my
last name.
2. The original Chinese phrase for ‘food for the mind’ is Jing1 Shen2 Shi2
Liang2.
3. For a history of Japanese dramas in Singapore, see Ng (2001).
4. The population figures are from the Country Briefings, in

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 Economist.com, http://www.economist.com/countries/ [accessed 17
May 2001].
5. The research team members were Pan Yuling, Maggie O.Y. Leung and
David C.S. Li.
6. Cheng Ka-fai’s remarks at a talk organized by the Hong Kong
University Sociology Society on 7 April 2000.
7. The prices for Romeo and Juliet and Braveheart are from the KPS
video store ad in Apple Daily, 23 August 1997: A8.
8. The average net circulation per issue from the Hong Kong Audit
Bureau for Apple Daily from July–December 1998 was 406,666.
9. Strawberry-on-the-Shortcake was broadcast between 12 January and
16 March 2001.
10. Feiyu at http://www.feiyu.com.cn/ [accessed 23 May 2001].

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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
YOSHIKO NAKANO is a Research Assistant Professor in the Department of
Japanese Studies at the University of Hong Kong. An Abe Fellow in 2000, she
received her PhD in Sociolinguistics from Georgetown University and has
co-edited Reporting Hong Kong: Foreign Media and the Handover (with Alan
Knight, 1999, Curzon Press).
Address: Department of Japanese Studies, University of Hong Kong,
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong. [email: ynakano@hkucc.hku.hk]

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