On the Hallyu Wave

I recently came across this article by Kayti Burt in Paste discussing the popularity of K-Dramas and I found it fascinating for a number of reasons. The article essentially rehashes what has become the received narrative on Hallyu in English language media: Korean cultural products spring forth from the nation, fully-formed and complete, as Athena from the head of Zeus. 

Here’s how Kayti describes it: 

“K-dramas started becoming popular around the world in the mid-1990s and into the early naughts, when Korea began to invest more heavily in its entertainment industries as an economic strategy coming out of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis.”

She goes on to imply that Korean dramas conquered mainland China in 1997 when China first officially imported a K-drama to be shown on broadcast television: 

“[T]he growth of the Korean entertainment industries relied heavily on the Chinese market in its early years. At this time, China was on the economic rise and looking for content. Korean entertainment—which was deemed more in line with Chinese values, compared to American pop culture—was ready to meet the demand. In 1997, What is Love? became the first K-drama to ever officially be exported to China, and ranked second in all-time imported video content at that point.”

And then after conquering all of China, the Korean wave jumped over the Sea of Japan/East Sea where it landed in 2002: 

“It took a bit longer for K-dramas to break into Japan, which had its own developed, culture-exporting industries. But, when a K-drama did hit, it hit big. In 2002, Winter Sonata became incredibly popular in Japan, especially amongst women; the drama is credited with driving a 35.5 percent increase in Japanese tourists in 2004…”  

Where to even begin with this, dear readers?

The story being sold here is that Korean cultural products just… emerged in a vacuum in Seoul and that they were simply SO GOOD—better, in fact, than the “developed, culture-exporting industries” of Japan or whatever nebulous offerings were available in China (Kayti doesn’t mention China’s domestic content producers or Taiwan, for that matter)—that every other country in Asia started exclusively consuming them, especially women. 

While the full story of the Korea Wave would take an entire book to fully unpack, this convenient narrative of cultural export doesn’t give anywhere close to an accurate picture of what happened in those heady late 1990s years.

Let’s start with the 1997 airing of What is Love, with its second highest ratings of an imported drama in China. What were those ratings? 4.2% audience share. Okay, so maybe that’s good for a Korean drama in 1997 but it’s not exactly a massive culture-changing hit in China. To contrast, My Fair Princess, a Mandarin-language drama which aired in 1998 (and which I discuss in Episode 27) had a 54% audience share and the second season had a truly remarkable 65% audience share--that’s what a hit phenomenon looked like in the late 1990s.

So, it’s a bit disingenuous to imply that China simply had nothing on television until Korea came along in 1997. In fact, My Fair Princess even aired in Korea, hitting 4% audience ratings there. Wow, the same number as What is Love in China! All hail the Chinese Wave in Korea!

Kayti’s narrative conveniently yada-yada’s over the massive impact of the Taiwanese Wave dramas, especially 2000’s Meteor Garden which was based on a Japanese manga and remade a decade later in Korea as Boys Over Flowers (a drama that she implies in her article has a story unique to Korean drama.) She also yada-yada’s over what exactly Korea has to offer in Japan that’s different from Japan’s own “developed, culture-exporting industries.” 

Japan offers plenty of woman-centered melodrama content. When Winter Sonata hit Japan in 2003-04 (not 2002, which Kayti incorrectly implies), it hit biggest with middle aged women and the appeal was primarily one of nostalgia. In other words, it was an old fashioned love story. That is not what Kayti is implying in her narrative. In fact, in 2003-04, in Japan, there was a lot of content for young women on television—dramas like Stand Up and Kimi Wa Petto starring Johnny’s and Associates Idols (the latter was remade in Korea in 2011) and in 2004 SMAP legend Kimura Takuya starred in the massive hit drama Pride. Winter Sonata did have great ratings on NHK, sure, especially for a Korea drama, but Pride almost cracked 30% ratings. 

Tell me again how Korea was offering women-centered romance that literally no other country in the world could compete with?

SMAP’s Kimura Takuya and the late great Takeuchi Yuko in Pride (2004)

Kayti goes on to explain that she came across K-dramas in 2010 via DramaFever: 

“Back then, before Netflix or Viki, video streaming website DramaFever was the major online hub for the distribution of K-dramas and other East Asian content around the world. It was my access point for series like Boys Over Flowers, Playful Kiss, and Secret Garden, unabashedly sentimental dramas about poor girls falling in love with rude rich boys, disapproving chaebol families, epic tragedy, bouts of amnesia, and main characters realizing they met and/or loved one another as children. In other words: melodrama (or, as the most extreme examples of this genre are known in Korea, “makjang drama”).”

Leaving aside that beginning with DramaFever is entering halfway through the story—the aggressive push of Korean content into easy access sites like DramaFever is glossed over here—everything she is describing here is not unique to Korean dramas. Boys Over Flowers and Playful Kiss are both based on Japanese girls manga and both dramas stem from successful Taiwanese adaptations of those manga in the early 2000s. Before the aggressive push of Korean content onto “official” streaming platforms, most viewers of this content watched it all pretty interchangeably—Korean, Taiwanese, Mandarin, Japanese materials were all on an equal footing.

What’s become unique about K-dramas is that people like Kayti have been led to believe that the format of a television drama is somehow unique to Korea. Even the ones that are remakes of dramas from other countries! All hail the Hallyu Wave!

Look, I love Korean dramas and I think it’s great that it’s so easy to watch them now versus the days I would have to watch them in pieces online or via my friend’s extensive VCD collection. But this narrative that Korean dramas are this unique special thing that nobody else does and that are aimed at women only and everybody in Asia consumes them exclusively, not only does a massive disservice to the genre but it also obfuscates the actual accomplishments of the Korean wave in raising the profile of Korea in the United States.

Daniel Dae Kim (who has appeared on many sexiest man alive lists from 2005 on) and Kim Yunjin

Take Lost, which aired on NBC from 2004-2010 and prominently featured two Korean speaking characters, played by American actor Daniel Dae Kim and Korean actress Kim Yunjin. Lost was covered in Korea as part of the story of Hallyu in America. This history been all but memoryholed as inconvenient to the current narrative which means Kayti doesn’t mention Lost at all but I’d argue the success of a general interest series like Squid Game on Netflix owes a lot more to a show like Lost which featured characters speaking Korean in Korea on mainstream American broadcast television than it does to the melodrama of Japanese girls manga adaptation Boys Over Flowers which would have been seen only by a relatively small self-selected group of fans.

Kayti ends by saying: 

“The rise in popularity of K-dramas is the result of many factors, but it’s hard to imagine K-dramas being quite as successful if Hollywood (which has more money and a massive head start) was doing a better job of building narrative structures for girls and women rather than stories that just give Strong Female Characters a gun or a superpower and watch them struggle with the same kinds of questions of power that white men and other people in positions of socioeconomic power seem to.”

Where to even begin. I don’t disagree that “Hollywood” (American entertainment generally) has been giving women absolutely nothing recently. It’s been years since we had something like a Twilight series that captured the levels of hysteria you currently see around Korean exports like BTS. However, Korean cultural products are not the only ones aimed at women and certainly the success of Squid Game is not down to aiming at a female audience. I’d argue that China’s Untamed was a far bigger success in this women-centered entertainment sphere Kayti is discussing than Squid Game was or indeed anything out of Korea recently. I’d also throw in Japan’s Kieta Hatsukoi as a drama that’s been quite big in the women’s culture sphere. 

Where I do think Kayti and I would agree is that melodrama, generally, has been unfairly dismissed by most critics and academics writing in English. I don’t think it’s a mistake that it’s the more violent South Indian masala films like RRR which have gained more positive attention from English-speaking critics than the weepy Hindi melodramas popular with women of the Indian diaspora and other viewers of export Bollywood but I think it’s extremely disingenuous to claim Hallyu as a victory for the female gaze when the story is far more complicated. For one thing, Kayti conveniently leaves out the element of exoticism in her article.

Hallyu is complicated and articles like this do nothing to help outsiders actually understand it.