INTERPRETING TRANSNATIONAL CULTURAL PRACTICES

Abstract

This article explores the ways in which East Asian countries approach and understand the transnational flows of Korean cultural products. Specifically, it examines newspaper discourses from Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, and China concerning the high popularity of a transnationalized Korean drama, Dae Jang-geum, across those societies. By adopting a quantitative and qualitative discourse analysis, the article investigates both report types and news coverage topics, as well as how each society's newspapers appraise the drama's popularity and that of the Korean wave in relation to their own society. As a result, the research illuminates the differences and similarities between both the forms and contents of the various newspaper discourses. Simultaneously, it reveals how the discursive practices of newspapers differently situate and localize this Korean drama in their own social contexts. The research ultimately intends to expand our understandings of the relations between trans-cultural practices and the local societies in which they take place.

Keywords:

• transnational culture
• Dae Jang-geum
• newspaper discourse
• Korean wave
• discourse analysis
• Korean drama

Notes

1. The exports of the Korean culture industry in 2002, 2003, and 2004 are $585 million, $631 million, and $940 million, respectively. Its proportion to the total sales of culture industry increased from 1.43 percent in 2003 to 1.88 percent in 2004. However, its ratio to the total exports of Korea is quite stable around 0.3 percent between 2002 and 2004, since the total exports had increased almost at the same speed.

2. The total exports and imports of broadcasting programs in 2005 were $110 million and $36 million respectively. The exports to the United States, Japan, Hong Kong, and China are $2.6 million, $60.1 million, $3.3 million, and $9.9 million respectively; and the imports from each country are $62.5 million, $18.4 million, $0.6 million, and $2.0 million respectively. Korea is net-importing from the United States, and net-exporting to other countries.

3. Based on the CDA guidelines, several questions were generated to establish categories for content analysis. These were: what kind of social events and practices do the newspaper discourses relate to the phenomenon of Korean drama's popularity? How do they frame DJG? What kinds of assumptions are made in the discourses? What kind of news types do they adopt? What kinds of voices are included and excluded in the discourse? What kind of voices is endowed with authority? How do they deal with differences: do they emphasize them? Or suppress them to stress some commonalities? What other texts or discourses do they incorporate in their reports? What kind of vocabularies and metaphors are used to describe the event? All topic categories are derived from the preliminary discourse analyses of 10 newspaper reports of each country.

4. The newspaper discourses were mostly collected from either the newspapers’ main internet sites in China, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, or from a news database (such as KINDS in Korea) by using the keyword Dae Jang-geum. For Korea, two major newspapers representing two contrasting perspectives, the Chosun Ilbo and the Hankyoreh, were selected and searched from September 15, 2003 to March 30, 2004. For Japan, three major newspapers, the Asahi Shimbun, the Daily Yomiuri, and the Mainichi newspapers were searched. For Hong Kong, four newspapers, Wenweipo, Mingpao, the Apple Daily, and Asia Times, were examined between January 24, 2005 and May 1, 2005. For China, initially, a total of 359 reports from both the People's Daily and the Hunan TV's internet news site were collected. From the People's Daily 63 news reports between September 1, 2005 and October 15, 2005 were collected. Hunan TV which aired DJG first in China provided an internet site which collected all Chinese newspapers’ coverage of DJG. During the screening of the drama, a total of 296 reports were analyzed after deleting duplicated contents.

5. However, since the number of Chinese news reports is large, 100 cases out of 296 news reports from Hunan TV internet site were selected by sampling every third news story for full translation; and in the case of the rest 196 news stories, only the lead paragraph was translated into Korean.

6. During the period from which the Korean reports are collected, DJG had not yet aired in other countries. Thus, the interest in the sales effect of DJG seems confined to the Korean domestic market at the time being, although this economic impact frame is still found in reports of DJG's popularity among other countries later.