How Japan is losing its top position in the culture wars to South Korea

If, as journalist Jeff Yang said, the locus of pop culture in Asia shifted from Japan to Korea in the last ten years, how did Japan lose the throne?

Japan’s pop culture dominance is hurting, and not just in music. Sanrio, the Japanese company that invented Hello Kitty, had a sales slump from 1999 to 2010 and is trying to bring in new characters to reduce its reliance on Hello Kitty. The Japanese film industry suffered greatly from the decline of anime. As for the once dominant video gaming industry – well, it’s not a good sign when one of Japan’s top game designers (Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man) announces, “Our game industry is finished.”

South Korea is ready to rush in where Japan now fears to tread. Japan lost its place as a cultural tastemaker in Asia about ten or fifteen years ago. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, Japanese pop culture, like the Japanese archipelago itself, is too isolated from the rest of the world to have remained a sustainable global influence. This is evidenced by the phrase Japan Galapagos syndrome – coined by the Japanese themselves – which compares Japan’s cell phone market to the South American island that has its own species and ecology. In 2010, Japanese electronics company Sharp launched a tablet in Japan that was initially sold nowhere else in the world, appropriately called the Galapagos tablet. Similarly, many of Japan’s video games are for the Japanese market only.

Some say the problem is Japan’s reluctance to learn English; they’re an island nation, and like many countries with a long history of colonialism, they still have a sense that other people should try harder to learn their language. J‑pop bands don’t strategically include non-Japanese members, for example.

Others, like pop culture critic Lee Moon-won, point out that Japan is a big enough consumer market as it is (the population is 100 million) and is less dependent than Korea is on foreign exports. For many Japanese companies, it’s not worth the huge risk of a very, very costly overseas marketing campaign.

It’s not just their large population that makes Japan an independently robust market. The Japanese consume a lot, in general. They like new things. On the streets of Tokyo’s residential areas, it’s not uncommon to see large piles of consumer electronics left at the curb, in perfectly good condition – televisions, DVD players, stereos – because a family has moved and they want to buy all new stuff, rather than take their old electronics with them.

Korea, by contrast, has less than half the population of Japan. Thus, says Lee, Korea had to rely on the export market, “which means they had to pay attention to international tastes to make music that would have global appeal.”

Previously, however, K‑pop had no international distribution channels. “In order to spread music, you have to have about twenty people pounding the pavement and visiting American radio stations with vinyl records. The Korean music industry had no way of doing that.” Only with the advent of the Internet and YouTube was Korea able to break the distribution barrier.

By contrast, in the words of a Japan Today article, “Unlike their Korean pop equivalents, most Japanese labels are allergic to promoting their artists’ work abroad.”

Another reason behind K‑pop’s overtaking J‑pop in the West is that Korean culture is naturally puritanical and conservative, and that’s a good thing for global audiences. Despite what you see in Korean movies, sexual puritanism in everyday South Korea is enforced to an annoying degree. A female Korean American friend of mine recalls not being allowed to attend slumber parties as a child, because “You don’t sleep at another person’s house until you are married.” Korea made it easier for other countries to accept their music by emphasising a buttoned-down image and morals. The general theme of overprotectiveness is an appealing one.

Japan is a different story. It, too, is sexually repressed, but it’s not puritanical. Take the J‑pop girl band AKB48, so named because the band has forty-eight members. It is currently the most successful J‑pop band in Japan. Band members frequently wear school uniforms while performing, and their songs have lyrics like “My school uniform is getting in the way.” A song like that would unequivocally be banned in Korea. Not to mention that in Korea, schoolgirl uniforms are only worn … for school.

Shin Hyung-kwan, general manager of the Korean pop music channel MNET, explained the band’s marketing strategy. “The market for AKB48 is men aged thirty to forty years old. In Japan, there is a culture of selling videos of young girls. The Lolita complex is a phenomenon there.” That said, Shin acknowledges that the Japanese music scene is very diverse, much more so than the Korean music scene. “Japan is the world’s largest music market, so there is a lot of variety: reggae, ska, etc. But the most profitable is stuff like AKB48.”

J‑pop bands have a different raison d’être from K‑pop bands, according to Shin. “They’re there to model and do films. If you look at it from a music point of view, it doesn’t make sense. If I look at these bands, there are people who can’t sing; some can dance but most can’t.” Korea, by contrast, is very conservative, which is in fact a conscious K‑pop strategy. When they’re in markets that like a little more skin, such as the west, Japan, and the more liberal Asian countries, they dress differently.

Lee Moon-won pointed out that in Korea, “there’s no one like Britney Spears with a slut image.” K‑pop bands have to be mindful of their child fans. An inappropriate photo spread or a drug or sex scandal is a career killer. The record label has the right to drop them if something like this happens. K‑pop places a great deal of emphasis on boy bands, capitalizing on a long-held Asian stereotype that Korean men are romantic and attentive. The K‑pop boy acts (Rain, Super Junior, Big Bang) were popular exports in Asia before the girl bands ever were.

Lastly, it’s hard for Japan to compete with Korea in the global pop culture scene, when Japan itself has embraced Hallyu. The Korean music industry realised early on how important the Japanese music market was going to become – despite the nation’s historic lack of interest in non-Japanese Asian music. It’s also remarkable in light of the fact that overall global music sales are way down, thanks in part to piracy and to the many music subscription services that allow consumers to play thousands of songs for $10 a month.

Key to its success in the Japanese market was having Korean bands record some of their songs in Japanese – in some cases, only in Japanese. It seems like an obvious choice, yet no other country’s music industry besides Korea has made a serious effort to meet Japan on its own linguistic turf.

It was a good investment, because Japan’s music market has been booming. In fact, in 2012, Japan overtook the United States in domestic CD and online music sales.4 Japan saw $4.3 billion worth of sales in this area, as opposed to $4.1 billion in the United States – which is a big deal, considering that Japan’s population is just over a third of the US population.

A big reason behind robust sales is that Japanese people still buy CDs. CD sales make up 80 per cent of Japanese record sales, and digital music downloads actually dropped by 25 per cent in 2012. As Bill Werde, Billboard editorial director, explained in an interview with Bloomberg, “[The Japanese] love packaging. You can’t even buy a little trinket in a Japanese store without having it neatly wrapped and folded and handed to you. I think there’s something cultural in the want to have this sort of CD booklet and the album art.”

Guess who’s been studying the Japanese market for years and is on top of the Japanese love for packaging? Strangely, this is one of those situations in which it frankly helps that Korea was formerly colonised by Japan – Koreans understand how the Japanese think. I remember that my grandparents, and others in their generation who lived under Japanese colonial rule, wrapped things in furoshiki – a Japanese silk cloth used to neatly wrap everything from gifts to your own daily lunchbox.

Koreans have been using a variation of furoshiki to package their CDs. The CD of Brown Eyed Girls’ “Cleansing Cream” album comes with a forty-page photobook, a twelve-page calendar, four postcards printed with members’ signatures, and a folded poster, all neatly packaged in a lavender hard case, going for 12,800 yen (around $120) on Amazon.co.jp. The Big Bang “Special Edition” album weighed just over a pound and included a hundred-page photobook. The real wow factor was that the CD opens like the DVD drive of a computer; it slides open automatically if you lay the album flat and press a button. For all these extras, the CD costs around 7,000 yen (about $70). More typically, a K‑pop CD with fewer bells and whistles will run from $20 to $40, which is still quite expensive. And yet the Japanese buy them. In droves.

Japanese pop now seems like a distant memory, especially since the Japanese seem to have given up even on their own turf. For the last three years, K‑pop bands have swept all the major categories at the Japan Gold Disk Awards – based on music sales and downloads.

Excerpted with permission from The Birth of Korean Cool: How One Nation Is Conquering the World Through Pop Culture, Euny Hong, Picador.