[Culture Op-Ed] Did the 1988 Olympics and the 2002 World Cup Lay the Groundwork for the Korean Wave in Pop Culture?

I have long argued that we should beware of public-sector thinking that is constantly looking for a chance to piggyback on the achievements of the Korean Wave that the private sector has built. This time, however, I would like to consider what kinds of measures to revive Hallyu might actually be possible from a public-policy perspective.

To give the conclusion first: bid to host major international sporting events such as the Olympics or the World Cup. Their effects are usually explained only in vague terms like “enhancing national prestige,” but if we focus specifically on the Korean Wave in popular culture, such events have consistently had an impact—and in many cases, a decisive one. Let us look at this in order.

What impact did the 1988 Olympics have on the global expansion of Korean culture?

There is a term used in Japan: “new comer.” It is not a formally defined legal term, but one that appears mainly in the media. At one point, some interpreted it as referring to Koreans who settled in Japan after the normalization of Korea-Japan relations in 1965, but that reading differs too much from actual usage, so these days it is usually interpreted differently. The newer explanation is that it refers to Koreans who moved to Japan after South Korea liberalized overseas travel in the late 1980s. But this too is an awkward standard. What exactly would travel liberalization have to do with such a distinction?

In reality, the correct interpretation is that it refers to Koreans who moved to and settled in Japan after the 1988 Seoul Olympics. Then why would the 1988 Olympics serve as the benchmark? The answer is simple. The Olympics themselves are seen as an event that only countries with a certain level of economic strength can host. This is especially true in Japan, where the 1964 Tokyo Olympics are widely regarded as a major turning point for the Japanese economy. In that sense, “new comer” can be seen as a discriminatory term: these were people who came over once Korea had become a country where one could make a decent living, and so they were treated differently from the old-comers who were thought to have come because they had been destitute.

How, then, did this 1988 Olympics-centered perspective appear in cultural terms? First of all, around this period, a boom in Korean food began in Japan.

Of course, there had already been Korean restaurants in Japan, mainly in neighborhoods where ethnic Koreans lived. But they had not spread beyond those areas. At most, yakiniku—a Japanese adaptation of bulgogi developed by ethnic Koreans in Japan—had reached the stage of popularization. Even horumon-yaki, referring to grilled gopchang, was still something you had to go to Korean neighborhoods to try. That changed.

You can see this even in Oishinbo, the cooking manga that began serialization in 1983 in Big Comic Spirits, a magazine affiliated with the major publisher Shogakukan. By 1986, it suddenly began referring to a “Korean cuisine boom” in Japan. It first ran a “kimchi” installment, and then, as soon as the 1988 Seoul Olympics ended, it launched a full-fledged “Korean cuisine” installment, even featuring a “Korean cuisine vs. Japanese cuisine” battle—the result, naturally, was a draw. As hosting the Olympics in Korea was publicized, and especially as the 1986 Seoul Asian Games approached as a kind of prelude, interest in Korea suddenly began to grow. Korean restaurants in Koreatown started moving one by one into central districts such as Shibuya under names like “Goodpa” (gukbap) and “Bibinba” (bibimbap).

Naturally, this was not only a Japanese phenomenon. In Hong Kong, for example, the 1986 John Woo film A Better Tomorrow used Korean singer Changmo Gu’s “Heenari” as background music. This became a talking point in Korea at the time, but from the Hong Kong side, the reaction was simply that “Korean songs had recently begun to be heard in downtown Hong Kong as well.”

The case of the United States was even more dramatic. In Do the Right Thing, directed by Spike Lee and produced by Universal Pictures, which came out the very year after the Seoul Olympics, there appears a Korean American character who runs a Korean grocery store, and the dialogue even mentions the Seoul Olympics. It became one of the first examples of a Hollywood major-studio film, nominated in major Academy Award categories, in which “Korea,” “Koreans,” and “Korean circumstances” were discussed in connection with issues other than the Korean War.

In the end, the flow was like this. Beginning with Japan, Korea’s closest neighbor, perceptions of Korea and Korean culture changed dramatically after the 1988 Olympics. Indeed, the first time Korean singers were suddenly invited onto NHK’s year-end music program Kohaku Uta Gassen—Japan’s public broadcaster’s annual song show, which still records the highest ratings of the year—was in 1987, just before the Seoul Olympics. Cho Yongpil appeared and sang “Woman Outside the Window” in Korean. In 1988, the number rose to two, with Cho Yongpil and Eunsook Kye. Then in 1989, the year after the Seoul Olympics, four acts appeared—Cho Yongpil, Eunsook Kye, Yeonja Kim, and Patti Kim—setting a record for most Korean invitations that has still not been broken even now, when K-pop is shaking the Japanese archipelago. In that way, Korean culture began spreading in Japan in the order of food → music → film.

From there, Korean culture slowly began spreading into Asian countries that had never hosted the Olympics, and by the late 1990s, the term “Hallyu” (韓流) was first coined in Taiwan on the back of the popularity of Korean TV dramas.

The West, in fact, followed much the same pattern. In 1987, Korean cinema achieved a first by winning a major prize at one of the world’s three major international film festivals. At the Venice Film Festival, actress Sooyeon Kang won Best Actress for The Surrogate Woman. There is a famous story that she had not expected to win at all and therefore did not even attend the awards ceremony. That is how out-of-the-blue this interest was. After that, Korean cinema gathered momentum: in 1989, Im Kwon-taek’s Come, Come, Come Upward won Best Actress at the Moscow Film Festival, and from the 1990s onward, Korean films began regularly making it into the main competition sections of the world’s top three international film festivals. Meanwhile, Korean film directors also began entering the U.S. market one by one, starting with director Dooyong Lee, who made the 1987 Hollywood B-movie Silent Assassins for New World Pictures.

Everything began happening between 1987 and 1989. It is not at all unnatural to regard the 1988 Seoul Olympics as the trigger. The dominant view is that the image of being the host nation of a sports festival watched by more than 4 billion people worldwide—and, moreover, a host nation marked as a country with at least a certain level of economic power—clearly played a role.

The 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup, which served as a decisive trigger in promoting Korean culture

The 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup was not much different in context. But there was one added factor: the reaction in Japan, which had always been the nearest country and an early adopter of Korean culture, was far more intense. That was because it was jointly hosted by Korea and Japan. It was the moment when Japan and Korea suddenly became, in some sense, peers.

By the 2000s, Hallyu was already spreading across Asia. Korean TV dramas—from Star in My Heart and What Is Love? to trendy dramas and family dramas alike—were penetrating markets across the region, and first-generation idol group H.O.T. had successfully broken into China with smash concert success. Asian entertainment cable channels such as Star TV were soon becoming dominated by K-pop.

But Japan alone was the exception. Korean dramas still were not being properly distributed there, and K-pop likewise showed no sign of breaking through. Some Korean films did circulate and succeed, but only those with “hot-button” themes to which Japanese audiences were also highly sensitive—namely blockbusters related to North Korea. Films such as Shiri and Joint Security Area were examples.

Then, after the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup ended—and after it had effectively concluded as a complete Korean victory in terms of national image promotion—the situation began to change dramatically.

Singer BoA went to Japan in 2001. But the initial response was dreadful. She was even told by an official from Avex, which handled her Japanese management, that “it will take 10 years to hold a concert in Japan.” But strangely, in 2002 the atmosphere suddenly reversed, and she began receiving rapid, intense attention. Her first full Japanese album, Listen to My Heart, released in 2002, sold nearly 1 million copies in a remarkable upset. Then, with the single “Valenti,” released in August 2002 just after the Korea-Japan World Cup had ended, BoA achieved her first No. 1 on Japan’s Oricon singles chart. The K-pop boom in Japan, which now seems almost natural, effectively began right there.

The same was true of television dramas. No matter how hard people pushed them, Korean dramas had been unable to move beyond cable channels aimed at ethnic Koreans. Then in 2003 KBS’s Winter Sonata gained sensational popularity on the satellite broadcaster BS, and with that momentum it aired on NHK in 2004, finally becoming a full-blown phenomenon. No one really understood why. In fact, in Korea, director Seokho Yoon’s earlier work Autumn in My Heart had been much more highly praised, but in Japan it was Winter Sonata, introduced after the Korea-Japan World Cup, that took off. After that, countless Korean dramas such as Beautiful Days were broadcast on Japanese terrestrial television and became a kind of cultural phenomenon.

Film was also strongly influenced by the popularity of TV dramas. Korean films began producing more hits outside the framework of the Korean War or inter-Korean relations. April Snow, starring Yongjoon Bae and boosted by the popularity of Winter Sonata, became a sensation; then trendy romance films such as A Moment to Remember, starring Jungwoo and Yejin Son, and Windstruck, starring Jihyun Jun, also became hugely popular. At the same time, films about the Korean War remained popular as well, helping create the atmosphere for Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War to become a major hit.

At the very least, one can confidently say that Hallyu in Japan became truly mainstream only after passing through the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup. It is difficult to interpret it any other way. Up to that point, Korea had still carried the image of being “a somewhat dubious country,” but suddenly it became “a country capable of jointly hosting an international sporting event with Japan.” And football had by then overtaken baseball as the most popular sport in Japan as well, so one can infer the scale of the impact.

The same was true elsewhere in Asia. If anything, soccer fever was even more intense there. Trust in Korea—the host nation that had drawn worldwide attention for its especially passionate cheering—grew even stronger. Right after the World Cup, Korean dramas spread not only through Hong Kong and Taiwan but all the way into Southeast Asia and the Middle East. The 2004 drama Dae Jang Geum went on to claim the title of “highest ratings ever” in countries across Asia. It was the moment when Hallyu products were transformed from merely “popular products” into products standing at the very top of the market. Korean films and K-pop then swept through Asian markets in turn and followed the path into the mainstream.

In the West, including the United States and Europe, the 2002 Korea-Japan World Cup is frequently cited as the moment when Korea established a distinctive national image within Asia. If the 1988 Olympics had given the world confidence that “Korea is also a country that has made it,” the 2002 World Cup left the impression that “even within Asia, Korea has some kind of uniquely distinctive image.” In particular, Korea’s cheering culture became a major topic in many places, and Western media even gave Koreans the nickname “the Latin people of Asia.”

Before that, the fixed image of Northeast Asians had largely been built around the image of Japan: passive, introverted, quiet, and hardworking. Then, all at once, people saw traits that shattered that stereotype, and this gave the impression that Korean culture was distinctly different.

After that, “that kind” of cultural product began drawing attention in the West. Oldboy, for example—after winning the Grand Prix at Cannes in 2004, and up until Parasite in 2019, it was effectively the most famous Korean film in the world—fit exactly that pattern. It was an intense and brutal revenge drama, and works such as Memories of Murder, I Saw the Devil, The Chaser, and Breathless continued to draw acclaim in the West for their rough, passionate energy. In other words, this was the point at which not merely “part of Asia,” but a distinctly Korean “unique image,” was taking shape.

“Cool Japan” and “Cool Britannia” were, strictly speaking, also state projects built on recognition of this same characteristic

And now it is 2020. Hallyu has already become so global that further explanation is almost unnecessary. Yet even in this situation, hosting international sporting events still plays a role. That became clear when European media such as those in France, while discussing the K-pop boom early this year, mentioned the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics. Even in TV interviews, quite a few people cited both the 2012 Gangnam Style craze—so-called “Korea’s Macarena”—and the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics as sources of the K-pop boom in Europe. In Asia, the reaction was not especially fervent, but northern European societies, where winter sports occupy an important place in everyday life, naturally saw things differently. In short, many responses suggested that through the PyeongChang Winter Olympics, people came to see an unusual and distinctive side of Korea—an image apparently shaped mostly by the opening and closing ceremonies.

At this point, the discussion returns to the original issue. Up to now, there have been virtually no cases in which public-sector thinking has produced effective results by directly intervening in Korea’s popular culture industry. Culture is not, to begin with, a field that can be fostered in that way. It is a sector in which quality rises through fierce competition, supported by the robust purchasing power of a country’s own citizens achieved through economic growth, and only then gains international competitiveness. Strictly speaking, the only place for public policy to intervene is in easing or abolishing related regulations.

But hosting international sporting events is a different story. It is commonly assumed that hosting major events such as the Olympics or the World Cup helps improve a country’s overall image, but among all the areas affected, culture is the one where the effects are most direct and appear most quickly. That is because sports and culture both function as part of the same “leisure industry,” making them naturally easy to connect.

And this characteristic is fully recognized overseas as well. For example, Japan’s “Cool Japan” initiative, established under the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry in 2010 with the aim of promoting a renewed image of Japanese culture abroad, was launched at exactly the same time as Japan’s Olympic bid campaign. It was a strategy based precisely on the idea that hosting such international sporting events and revitalizing the cultural industry go hand in hand. And when Tokyo was finally selected in 2013 to host the 2020 Olympics, the Cool Japan movement also began operating in earnest. The idea was to promote Japanese popular culture such as J-pop and Japanese animation, which had been losing ground to Hallyu, to the rest of the world.

And importantly, Cool Japan was not some uniquely Japanese strategy. Its original model was Britain’s “Cool Britannia” project under Tony Blair, and the dominant interpretation is that this too was a policy direction designed with an eye toward the 2012 London Olympics.

So at least up to now, this is the one area in which public policy can actually produce real effects in nurturing a country’s cultural industry. It is necessary to understand the situation clearly.

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Original title: [문화칼럼] 대중문화 한류의 발판은 88올림픽과 2002월드컵이었다?

Author: Mun-won Lee

Date: 2020-08-18

Source: https://www.cfe.org/bbs/bbsDetail.php?cid=column&pn=7&idx=23006