Creating the sacred places of pop culture in the age of mobility: fan pilgrimages and authenticity through performance

ABSTRACT

This paper clarifies the nature of Korean fans’ sacred meaning-making in popular culture pilgrimages. Travel to locations which have significance in pop culture has become a trend among fans. Interestingly, many fans do performances, sometimes ritual-like, at the destinations to express the value of the pop culture. Such ritual-like performances cross national borders in the age of mobility. Based on anthropological research, the paper analyses how a sacred place is created by fandom. The specific popular culture work chosen after five years of participatory research in Japanese popular culture-related events and festivals was an event related to the Japanese mixed-media work, Love Live! School Idol Project (Love Live!). First, the article reviews the research on how fans create a sacred place. Next, with a focus on the concepts of authentication and performance, the article analyses how fans authenticate the fan-made sacred places. Then, based on a qualitative survey of two sacred places created by Love Live! fans, the article traces the process of creating, authenticating, and maintaining a sacred place.

KEYWORDS:

• Authenticating
• Love Live!
• media-induced pilgrimage
• mobility
• performance
• pop culture

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Kyungjae Jang is an Associate Professor/Lecturer in the Graduate School of Integrated Arts and Sciences, Hiroshima University. He holds a PhD and MA in tourism studies from Hokkaido University, and a BA from Korea University. Dr Jang has conducted participatory research on transnational Japanese contents tourism, focusing on popular culture-related tourism and events in the USA, France, Tunisia, Korea, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. His recent publication is Contents Tourism in Japan: Pilgrimages to ‘Sacred Sites’ of Popular Culture (2017), with Philip Seaton, Takayoshi Yamamura, and Akiko Sugawa-Shimada.

ORCID

Kyungjae Jang http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8650-2324

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (KAKENHI) under [grant number 26243007].