12

A Framework for Audience Study of Transnational Television

Chua Beng Huat

Introduction

As a consequence of satellite and cable technology, there has been a proliferation of television stations and channels in many urban locations around the world, and hence the quantity of global television programming time has exploded in the last three decades. Outside developed nations, the rapidly growing footprint of television has led stations to import programs from the global market rather than to engage in relatively more expensive in-house production. Television is thus a transnational industry – a situation exemplified by the dominance of the US as a major supplier of ready-made programs and formats to the rest of the world. The transnational character of media is indexed by ideologically laden concepts such as “cultural imperialism” and “cultural security”; the first refers to the presumed cultural influence an imported TV program might have on the culture of the importing locations, and dovetailing with this presumption; the second refers to the perceived need to preserve the local culture from such foreign cultural invasion or contamination. Beyond these imprecise and politically motivated concepts, which are always challenged whenever they are evoked, is the emergence of a transnational audience for TV products; namely, local audiences watching imported foreign TV programs, where the culture in which the audience is embedded is different from the culture of the location where the programs are produced.¹

A part of this global expansion of transnational flows of TV products consists in the emergence and consolidation of a loosely integrated East Asian television industry – Japan, Korea, People's Republic of China (PRC), Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore (Chua, 2004; Iwabuchi, 2002). Since the mid-1990s the organization, the formation, and the cultural and political impact of this regional transnational audience have been the focus of media scholars in East Asia. Using the regionally organized East Asian television industry as an illustrative instance and drawing on the empirical research of media analysts from the region, this chapter outlines a set of research topics for the investigation of the character and consequences of the transnational consumption of television serial dramas. By emphasizing intra-regional flows, this analysis veers away from the prevalent tendency to examine transnational media in terms of US dominance over the rest in media globalization – an enduring academic trend that has directed both empirical research and conceptual discussions of audiences. The relative “cultural” proximity that exists within the regional audience in East Asia, along with the cultural distance from the US, demands new ways of thinking about transnational audience studies.

East Asian Pop Culture

Since the early 1920s pop culture – pop music, movies, and street operas – in different Chinese languages – primarily Cantonese, Mandarin, and Minnan/Hokkien/Taiwanese – has traveled throughout East Asian locations where ethnic Chinese (henceforth Huaren, ),² are numerically the absolute majority, namely the People's Republic of China (PRC), Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. In Singapore, which is geographically positioned in Southeast Asia, the ethnic Chinese represent an overwhelming majority – more than 70% – of the national population. This historically consolidated regional network of pop culture financing, production, distribution, and development of transnational Huaren audiences served readily as the foundational structure for the subsequent flows of television programs, once TV stations were established in quick succession in Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore during the first half of the 1960s; PRC was by then closed off to the rest of the region.³ Pivotal in this history of regional pop culture is the Shaw Brothers enterprise. From the 1920s onwards, the company built a regional entertainment empire throughout, with the movie industry as the core business. Production was primarily based in Hong Kong, and the films were exhibited throughout the region in the company's own movie houses (Yung, 2008). In 1970s the Shaw Brothers established TVB, which swiftly became (and remains) one of the two dominant stations in Hong Kong. By the 1980s Shaw Brothers shut down the movie studios (Curtin, 2002), while maintaining the cinemas. Its TV programs, particularly serial dramas, were widely distributed throughout Huaren-dominant areas; for example, the internationally famous Hong Kong actor Chow Yun Fatt was first introduced to Singapore audiences on the small screen, in the very popular television drama Men in the Net, in the 1970s.

During the mid-1990s trendy Japanese dramas were added to this well-established television distribution network.⁴ The visual pleasure of watching these generic romance stories – of love gained and lost among urban young professionals, and with agonizing twists and turns – is derived from the beautiful men and women actors who represent the major and minor characters. The well-dressed and glamorous characters sport designer clothes, live in cosy small apartments, and eat in expensive – usually Western – restaurants in the high end sections of the city's entertainment districts; hence these programs epitomize the idea of “trendy.” Ota Toru (2004), a television program producer who works with Fuji TV, recalls that, when he first began producing these dramas during the bubble economy years of the 1980s, his aim was to eschew serious themes in favor of shows that emphasized instead fashion, setting, cast, and music, in order to target female viewers in their twenties. The regional popularity of these dramas, which attracted loyal audiences in East Asia, was largely accidental and circumstantial. Media liberalization in Taiwan, after the lifting of martial law in 1987, resulted in the sprouting of satellite channels, which then required inexpensive content to fill the radically expanded programming time. Taiwanese businessmen would travel to Japan and return with digital versatile disc (DVD) sets of Japanese dramas for illegal broadcasts. Meantime, the very porous and ineffectual ban on the import of Japanese cultural products to Korea – a ban that was in place since the end of the World War II, as a political response to Japanese colonization – was lifted in 1998.⁵ With the lifting of this ban, Japanese pop culture, including TV dramas, freely and openly flowed into Korea. The popular reception given to Japanese programs in other parts of East Asia came as an unexpected surprise to Japanese producers, who had actually given little consideration to the likely export markets for their dramas.

By the end of the 1990s, just as Japanese trendy dramas were becoming part of the routine programming of TV stations in East Asia, the region was inundated with Korean pop culture. In 1995 the Korean government had taken a policy decision to make pop culture a new export industry (Shim, 2002; 2006, pp. 31–35). The almost immediate regional success of Korean TV dramas was largely due to the fact that they were much cheaper for the importers, namey about one quarter of the cost of Japanese dramas and one tenth of that of Hong Kong dramas (Shim, 2006, p. 13). Taiwanese TV stations were the first to import Korean dramas; they also acted as agents in re-exporting them to Hong Kong, PRC, and Singapore. The huge popularity of the very first drama to be broadcast in the PRC, in 1997 – What Is Love All About – caused such a sensation that PRC media writers dubbed the arrival of Korean pop culture, particularly TV dramas, as the “Korean wave” (Shim, 2006, pp. 28–31). In 1999, in Singapore, a new Mandarin language television station (Channel U)⁶ used Korean dramas as one of its primary vehicles to successfully carve out a significant audience base. The popularity of the Korean dramas pushed the established, government-owned dominant channel to compete for similar imports. The bidding war that resulted led to the merger of the two stations into a single corporation, MediaCorp, in 2004, an event that put an end to mutual financial cannibalization. Finally, in 2003 Winter Sonata was first broadcast in Japan on late-night satellite stations, but its popularity was such that it had three successive broadcasts within a two-year period (Mōri, 2008). Five thousand Japanese fans, largely middle-aged women, descended on the Tokyo airport in April 2004 to welcome to Japan the lead actor, Bae Yong Jun, whom they nicknamed Yongsama (“Prince Yong”).

There is no doubt that, by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, a loosely integrated regional television cultural economy has emerged in East Asia. As producers build the regional market into their business and creative plans, television programs from different regional locations travel across national and cultural boundaries routinely, albeit in unequal flows. Japan and Korea are primarily exporting countries, while Singapore and the PRC are largely locations for consumption of imported dramas. Taiwan and Hong Kong are exporters of Chinese-language dramas and importers of Japanese- and Korean-language ones. The unequal patterns in this regional flow are a consequence of market forces. Japanese and Korean dramas are dubbed and subtitled by their importers into Chinese languages, for distribution in the massive combined Huaren market of PRC, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore and in the global diaspora. On the other hand, the dubbing or subtitling of Chinese-languages dramas into Korean or Japanese is, financially, a process much less viable – although not entirely impossible – than the Japanese dubbing of Korean dramas. Television dramas from different locations in East Asia are now an integral part of the daily programming of local stations in different contexts; for example, the Mandarin language channel in Singapore carries several hours of Korean, Japanese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese dramas daily. The formation of a transnational audience for television programs that circulate across national borders in East Asia has taken place in tandem with the development of this regional television industry.

TV Drama Audience

The generic and technological features of popular media products determine to some extent the methodological and substantive issues concerning audience consumption that become possible avenues for academic inquiry.⁷ The serial quality of a TV drama demands that an audience maintain viewing at regular intervals, usually once a day or once a week for one episode. In order for people to form a committed drama audience, they need to sacrifice many other activities, or at least displace them, so as to catch the new episode each week. Sometimes audience members have to make special arrangements to video-record an episode if they cannot avoid missing it. They may have to carve out time to catch up with, and watch, the missed episode before the next installment is screened in the scheduled program slot. These active forms of engagement with screen culture draw the audience into an intimate virtual relationship with the characters of their favorite dramas. Unlike the open-ended format of American TV dramas, which can run until their audience wears thin, East Asian dramas typically conclude after a number of episodes. Arguably, knowing that there is a conclusion may encourage an audience to be more committed to sustained and regular viewing over the length of the series; significantly, it is commonly observed that the concluding episode of a popular drama series tends to secure much higher audience rating than any intermediate episode. Together, the demand for sustained engagement and the ease of access, since these dramas are brought unto TV screens at home, make the act of watching television dramas one of the most intriguing and important popular practices in the realm of audience reception studies.⁸

Domesticating/Preserving the Foreign

In analyzing transnational audience, one should logically begin by examining the details of the actual viewing practices. If “recognition” is indeed central to viewing pleasure (Ang, 1985, p. 20), then it is necessary to examine how recognition is facilitated across linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. This is usually done by either subtitling or dubbing or both. Analysis needs to pay attention to the mediation of subtitling/dubbing in the process of generating not only recognition and identification, but also difference and distancing from what is on the screen in transnational audience viewing practices.

As mentioned above, the flows of TV dramas within East Asia tend to run from Korea and Japan into the massive regional Huaren market, where the distribution of Korean and Japanese dramas is facilitated by dubbing into a Chinese language – Cantonese for Hong Kong and Mandarin for Taiwan, Singapore, and China.⁹ In dubbing, “visual synchrony” between the translated words and the lip's movements on screen – that is, lip-sync – creates “the impression that the actors on screen are pronouncing the translated word” in order to generate the belief that one is viewing a “local” program; emphasis should be placed on the term, local.¹⁰ Constrained by this need to lip-sync, the translator must “move away from the source text to focus on the function of the text and on the viewer” (Varela, 2004, p. 35). Where expressions and contextual references of the source language have no equivalent in the target language, the translator/translation has an obligation to orient toward the cultural context of the target language and to change the source dialogue accordingly in order to “to provide the viewers what they are used to” rather than cater for the greater demands of professional written norms (Agost, 2004, pp. 68–69).¹¹ Elements of the culture of the target audience are thus introduced into the dubbed text. Therefore ideological dubbing is a process through which “a particular target culture for historical, social, and political or economic reasons, seeks to domesticate a foreign product and to make both the translator and the translation invisible” (Varela, 2004, p. 39).

In the case of East Asian TV dramas, dubbing adds to the domestication possibility/process, which is already facilitated by the relatively similar physiognomy, a shared ideographic Chinese script, a common Confucian worldview, and overlapping histories, both of conflicts and of diplomatic relations.¹² These factors – including “a sense of living in the shared time and common experience of a certain (post)modernity” (Iwabuchi, 2001a, p. 56) in contemporary times – constitute a multilayered “cultural proximity” that significantly accounts for the possibility of a regional East Asian television culture and industry.¹³ For example, the very popular Korean period drama series Jewel in the Palace (Dae Jang Geum, ; henceforth Dae) chronicles the rise of a palace cook who subsequently became the first female physician to the Korean emperor in the sixteenth century.¹⁴ During that historical period, Chinese characters were commonly used by Koreans. Thus the written scripts that appeared on screen were often in Chinese ideograms. This contextual element further facilitated translation and dubbing into Chinese languages; the script was dubbed in Mandarin in Taiwan for one year, before it was dubbed in Cantonese in Hong Kong.¹⁵ To further domesticate this particular drama, the Hong Kong TV station intervened directly to provide additional “explanations” in Cantonese voice-over, that is, to offer the Chinese equivalents of the Korean recipes and medicinal items featured on screen. These localizing practices have effectively transformed Dae into a “local” drama. Audiences are drawn into consumption of the familiar, which facilitates identification with the characters on screen, and such production practices contribute undoubtedly to the popularity of imported film and TV dramas among the Huaren.

Yet, as mentioned earlier, the “foreignness” of imported Korean and Japanese dramas is an integral part of the viewing pleasures of such transnational audiences as the Huaren. Foreignness is preserved on screen through various visual elements, especially those that signify “tradition,” for example ethnic food and traditional costumes. “Ethnic” costumes are, possibly, a most convenient and commonly used signifier of culture to display and represent the foreign readily; thus there is no mistaking the origin of an East Asian historical period drama, because Japanese, Korean, and Chinese traditional costumes are distinct from each other. In the case of Dae, for example, the costumes of the Korean court are heavily emphasized through visual imagery.

However, most of the regionally circulated dramas are urban contemporary ones, in which few ethnic costumes are featured. In such urban dramas, if the sound is turned off, the relatively similar physiognomy of East Asians renders it difficult for one to recognize the national origin of a drama, especially in indoor close-up shots of the characters on screen, unless one is able to identify the specific actors and actresses. Under such conditions, other vehicles are needed to signify foreignness. The foreign is inscribed in iconic or “slang” images (Khoo, 2006) that metonymically represent the city represented on screen: Tokyo Tower, the telecommunication tower in Shanghai, the Hong Kong ferry, public housing flats in Singapore, the Jeju Island in Korea, and, most generically, street scenes where the neon signs are in local language – the language of the nation producing the programs. The significance of such visual symbols of the foreign for a transnational audience arises from the fact that many of the locations that are featured on screen have also been successfully marketed as tourist sites. TV images are transformed into tourist sites, and TV audiences are transformed into tourists.¹⁶ The pleasure and exoticism of watching the “foreign” is also realized through the tourist gaze (Lee, 2004; Hirata, 2008).

In audience reception, translated and dubbed dialogue domesticates imported TV drama in order to facilitate identification, while the visual exotic foreign raises obstacles to it. Altogether, watching imported TV dramas is a fragmentary process of intermittent moments of identification and distancing rather than one of sustained and unwavering identification with what is on screen (Chua, 2008). This fragmentary process is borne out by empirical studies of transnational audiences in East Asia.

Fragmentary Audience

As in every communicative instance, TV drama narratives construct a reception space and a subject position for the audience; this is a space that induces identification with the on-screen character preferred by the director. However, resistance or rejection of the assigned audience space and its implied subjectivity is obviously always a possibility. In resistance, one would be distancing oneself from the character, the action, and the message on screen. Alternative moments of identification and distancing, where and when on-screen characters are “like me/us” or “unlike me/us,” are generated during real-time watching. For transnational audiences, this identification/distancing process is mediated – and thus complicated – by an awareness of the foreignness of imported programs, which simultaneously facilitates the process of distancing and raises hurdles for identification.

Identification Ladder: From Human to Asian

From empirical investigations it appears that, during actual viewing time, identification shows a certain order of abstraction: the most immediate level of identification is also at the most generalized and abstract level of simply “being human”; as in some version of the audience response, “I understand the character because we are all humans.” For example, a Singaporean audience member comments:

Variations of the “we are human” identification can be achieved when a specific element is added to the interpretative frame, for example in a situation where a Taiwanese person refers to a trendy Japanese drama thus: “Love stories in big cities are more real for us. We are young. It is what we dream of” (Ko, 2004, p. 123); or when a Hong Kong audience member writes on his website: “The major attraction of Tokyo Love Story [a Japanese drama] to me is that is not a story about somebody else. It is a story about our generation, about us, about myself” (quoted in Iwabuchi, 2002, p. 146). In these instances a generational claim is made, which thus indexes a more specific segment of humanity.

In a regional context, shared elements – such as language, history, geography – between audience locations and production locations can provide more specific bases for identification, which are less inclusive than “humans/anyone.” In East Asia this phenomenon can take the form of “I identify with the character because we are Asians,” which, ideologically, also says “we are not like non-Asians,” thus implicitly invoking an East–West dichotomy that is pervasive in the public sphere of the countries in the region. This attitude generates and affirms a sense of “Asianness” despite cultural differences between the production and consumption locations. It may be an instantiation of the claim of “cultural proximity.” Iwabuchi (2001a) suggests that such abstraction of being “Asian” generally embraces a loose combination of elements that include, significantly, the shared contemporary global modern consumer culture in all the developed capitalist economies of East Asia. Again, the abstract and general claim of “Asianness” (Iwabuchi, 2002, p. 151) can be further specified with particularistic elements. As the extensive comparative study of Hong Kong and Singapore women audiences of Korean TV dramas illustrates, “the Confucianist/traditional version of femininities” commonly portrayed in the dramas “provides the most comfortable subject positions for them” (Lin & Tong, 2008, p. 121). This evocation of “Confucianism” as a cultural source of identification isolates East Asians from other Asians.

Significantly, audiences interviewed in the various studies quoted above use the term “identification” to express their sense of “recognition” of themselves in the on-screen characters and narrative messages. However, analytically, this is obviously an overenthusiastic claim, and it cannot be taken literally, as implying that there are identical modes of thought and behavior that link viewers with on-screen characters. Rather, the different abstract frames that allow audiences to engage actively with their favorite dramas are closer to what reception theory has called “repertoire of interpretations” (Hermes, 1999). Nevertheless, despite not being literal, the “Asianness” frame has served as the conceptual basis for a regional “pan-East Asian” identity that has fuelled the cross-border consumption of popular culture – an issue that I take up later in the chapter.

Distancing/Embracing Difference

Crucially, during instances of identification with what is on the screen, the factual foreignness/difference of an imported TV drama for a transnational audience is never erased, but merely displaced and made to lie just beneath the surface of abstract identifications. These emerge as soon as on-screen characters act in a manner contrary to an audience's sentiment, providing the reasons for the latter to distance itself from what is on the screen. For example, Singaporean audiences of married women apparently have a tendency to reject the Japanese dramatization of sexual relations: “I wish these Japanese dramas would not encourage our youths to accept those one-night love relationships so easily, sleep with each other and that's it. This is very unacceptable” (MacLachlan & Chua, 2004, p. 163). Here the perceived difference between “they, Japanese” and “Singaporean us” is emphatic and unmistakable. “Foreignness,” standing in for the specificities of the “culture” of production locations, is evoked to create a distancing from more permissive sexual cultures.

This instance of distancing from/rejection of “Japaneseness” has greater conceptual and political implications. As Iwabuchi points out, “Japanese nationalists easily translate this spread of Japanese popular culture to other parts of Asia into the ‘Asia yearning-for-Japan’ idea, which confirms [for the nationalists] the shift of power from the United States to Japan that took place in the 1990s”; and this implies a “newly generated Japan's claim for its cultural superiority through asserting commonality with other Asian nations” (2002, p. 66). Iwabuchi further points out that this nationalist attitude is a reformulation and extension of a historically deeper “ambivalence of the Japanese conception of ‘Asia,’ a cultural geography that offers Japan at once a shared identity with other parts of Asia and is also the source of Japanese feelings of superiority” (ibid.) – a sense of superiority that underwrote Japan's attempt to colonize the rest of Asia during World War II, transforming it into an Asian “co-prosperity sphere” under Japanese imperial leadership. The possibility of audience distancing from/rejecting “Japaneseness” disrupts the simplistic Japanese right-wing nationalist reading and the cultural imperialist fantasy of interpreting the positive reception of Japanese TV dramas in East Asia as evidence of these audiences' admiration for Japan. Conversely, as Iwabuchi rightly points out, instead of an Asia desiring Japan, this particular reading is more symptomatic of Japan's nationalist desire to “return” to embrace Asia, a desire that has been suppressed as Japan became culturally marginalized after being defeated in 1945 in the Pacific War (Iwabuchi, 2001b). Beyond the specificity of Japanese nationalist sentiments, the possibility of an audience distancing from/rejecting the “foreign” in an imported TV drama undermines any simplistic conception of popular culture as the instrument of a nation's “soft power,” which supposedly operates through its ability to influence and win over others through the “attractiveness” of one's values and culture (Nye, 2004).¹⁷

Difference between the local and the foreign can, of course, be viewed positively and engenders a desire for the “other.” For example, Taiwanese women viewers express their desire to be like particular onscreen characters: “I have a strong feeling that she is exactly what I want to be” (Iwabuchi, 2002, p. 144) – and, one might add, “but am not,” or “but would not be able to be.”¹⁸ One particularly poignant instance of this “desiring” difference is that of the effects and changes that the Korean TV drama Winter Sonata wrought on middle-aged women in Japan. The first-hand experience of media sociologist Mōri Yoshitaka (2008, pp. 127–128), who was invited by his 65-year-old mother to watch this drama, is worth an extensive quotation:

Middle-aged Japanese female fans turned up in the thousands when Bae arrived in Tokyo airport, thus making visible an active audience practice that is generally associated with teenage pop culture consumers. The arrival of this demographic of older television fans in Korea transformed the nation from a male sex tourist site to a female “friendship” tourist location. Many Japanese women began to think of the possibility of becoming “cultural brokers,” who can work on changing the image of Korea/Koreans in Japan and even improve the international relations between the two nations (Mo¯ri, 2008). This particular instance of the Korea–Japan encounter in popular culture is obviously determined in part by the colonial/postcolonial relations between the two countries. It nevertheless demonstrates that foreignness or difference can become a source not only of visual pleasure, but also of embracing the other instead of expressing disdain or rejection.

To generalize, substantively what we find, empirically, in the transnational audience's real-time reception of imported TV drama is an intermittent process of identification with abstract elements attributed to the commonalities between the audience and what is on screen, which often discounts the “culture” of the production location, and a process of distancing from, or embracing, the elements of foreignness/difference that may be attributed to the “culture” of the production location represented on screen. What emerges is, unavoidably, a fragmented audience as a conceptual figure. The factors that can be (and are) invoked – one can imagine for example “global citizenship,” gender, and class – as grounds for identification or distancing are invariably contextual. This opens up opportunities for empirical investigations into how different historical, political, social, and cultural factors can, and have been, evoked in different locations, across different national, cultural, and linguistic boundaries, to anchor specific instances of identification or distancing.

Layers of Audiences

Leisure Audience Community

For the overwhelming majority of audiences, TV drama watching is a leisure activity that fills in the time after the necessary everyday life activities are done, in contrast to the commitments of the fans. Leisure consumers exceed the numbers of fans by wide margins. It is this large leisure audience that accounts for the “popularity” of TV dramas. Indeed, it is impossible to know in any precise manner the size of the leisure audience for a popular drama, except through proxy measures of relative audience ratings. Individual leisure audiences are as widely dispersed across geographic space as the pop culture products: the two cover the same radius. For these audiences, TV drama watching is largely a privatized activity in the home. As a rule, audience members do not seek each other out. The “community” of leisure consumers therefore remains latent and invisible. This may be a reason why the idea of a “community” of leisure audiences is underdeveloped and under researched. This community requires other social institutions to make it manifest and visible. An illustrative but ubiquitous example of the manifestation of this latent community can be readily observed.

The “popularity” of a TV drama or any other pop culture product is, to a very significant degree, a media-constructed phenomenon. The “heat” of a drama is generated by the attention and coverage it receives from the multimedia culture industry across all its constitutive components – magazines, radios, newspapers, and television channels. For example, when trendy Japanese dramas reached the peak of popularity in Taiwan, China Times, Taiwan's most widely circulated newspaper, “produced a weekly section [spanning an entire page] devoted to discussions of Japanese TV dramas.” Following its success, “many of Taiwan's publishers began to target the young Japanese TV drama fans. This led to the popularization of a new genre of writing, which combines information on Japanese TV dramas with discussions about Japanese fashion or lifestyle,” with the result that “Japanese TV dramas and other inter-referential texts bind together to create a “mega-text'” (Lee, 2004, p. 133).¹⁹ In places like Singapore, which import television programs (including dramas) from all the production points of the region, a similar production of mega-texts is constructed for the larger East Asian television culture. In such locations, for example, the entertainment pages of local newspapers may be metaphorically read as an “imaginary” geography of East Asian television land – a geography marked by the production locations and a land inhabited by the regional actors and actresses whose appearances in these pages corresponds to the rise and decline of their popularity with the transnational audience (Chua, 2006).

Those who read the pages of this mega-text form a multitude whose members are unknown to one another. When two or more of the readers of these pages happen to be co-present at a social occasion or event and when, as part of the free-flowing social conversation, they exchange impressions and opinions concerning the latest Japanese TV dramas that are drawn from these readings of the mega-text, then a “community of audience members” is instantly materialized. Any item in this mega-text can serve to realize this potential community of leisure audience members. The co-conversationalists would constitute a “community” of at least two persons who share knowledge of the said dramas. When the occasion is over, the community formation gets dissolved. Such instantiation, materialization, and dissolution of “occasional” and “occasioned” communities are part of the practices of the overwhelming majority of leisure audiences. Occasions that give rise to a community of transnational television drama viewers are grounded in incidental face-to-face encounters. Furthermore, they are ubiquitous, although ephemeral and difficult to track. The ephemeral character works against addressing these viewers as part of a stable “interpretive community” (Alasuutari, 1999, p. 7); the latter would be constituted by an identifiable and relatively predictable empirical collective²⁰ – such as colleagues in an office or members of a family – who may adhere to a set of cultural norms. Many questions arise here: Do these ephemeral and ubiquitous occasional communities help to sustain television watching as a dominant global leisure practice? And does the multiplying of occasions where casual viewers engage briefly with one another contribute to the “popularity” of the drama? Do such occasions provide leisure audiences with a sense of belonging to a larger “community,” outside of their private viewing activities, thus changing their subjectivities? Perhaps the most fundamental empirical question is whether there are any significant differences in the sense of “self” – such as feelings of being more “cosmopolitan,” of “liv[ing] in a larger world than in real life” (Hermes, 1999, p. 80) – when imported TV rather than locally produced dramas become the referential points of conversation.

Activist Transnational Fans

Beyond these ephemeral face-to-face communities of the leisure audience members are the conventional fan clubs, in which avid fans of a particular program, actor, or actress engage in collective activities of sharing information, exchanging paraphernalia, and organize celebrations around events and texts concerning their chosen celebrities. Fan clubs are often organized by corporate agencies to prolong the stardom of the celebrities they manage. The conventional activities of fans have long been a subject of audience analysis, and there is an extensive literature on fandom and fan culture. Constraints of space prohibit a review of this literature here.²¹ Beyond these conventional fan clubs, which remain location-bound in their organized activities, deterritorialized, and faceless but well coordinated, transnational audience fan communities of East Asian television dramas have been, and are being, formed by activist transnational viewers. Such deterritorialized transnational audience communities are enabled by new communication technologies, particularly the Internet, which facilitates immediate communication and organization between fans across geographic distances.²² The following analysis will focus on community formation among activist transnational audiences in the contemporary Internet age.

This is a summary of what happened with one of the Japanese television drama series, Pride, as recounted by Hu (2003, pp. 177–178):

The extensive quotation above has all the essential characteristics of a self-organized and self-affirming online community. What is very significant is that, in addition to being geographically translocal, this community is also transnational and transcultural, on account of the need to translate and subtitle the downloaded drama. This need has produced a new category of audience, known among East Asian media scholars as “subfans”; that is, fans engaged in subtitling. Among the subfans are doctors, lawyers, and other professionals, who are needed because of their special knowledge of medical, legal, and other technical terms in the on-screen dialogue. The quoted description of the fans' activities clearly points to the high level of organization and coordination work necessary for the entire sequence of downloading–subtitling–uploading–corrections–re-uploading to be accomplished smoothly on every episode of the drama; work is done at different locations without any face-to-face contact among the participants. What drives the language- and technology-savvy consumers, participants, or members to do the painstaking work of initiating and amending the translation and subtitling of their favorite drama series is their consuming passion for the drama. This immaterial labor, in which the audience is a producer of meaning and simultaneously “constitutes itself in immediately collective forms that exist as networks and flows” (Lazzarato, 1996, p. 145), is done entirely for the pleasure and benefit of other members of the cyber-virtual fan community. Such practices of fandom, which extend the economic and cultural reach of television programs, escape the clutches of profit-oriented producers and distributors and elude the radar of censorship and other legal constraints of the nation-state.

Internet fan communities of this kind open up a new research terrain for the study of fandom. Some of the possible research questions are:

First, what are the transformative effects of the activities of subfans – recall here the prior discussion, about the interventions of dubbing and subtitling to the original drama text – both on the actual subjectivity and on the concept of an “active” audience? What do they achieve by taking us beyond the audience interpretation of the message, to an audience that becomes a producer of narrative/message?

Second, how does the immaterial labor of the subfans, who bypass the circuit of commercial broadcast stations, affect how “profit” can be extracted by investors in program production? This is an issue very rarely raised in audience reception research; for now, the investors are left to grapple with the problem of how to configure the “means of the control of communication and information technologies and their organizational processes” (Lazzarato, 1996, p. 146).²³

Third, what kind of cultural politics does the transnational fan community generate in the locations of production and consumption? Some explorations on this last question will be undertaken in the rest of the chapter.

The Politics of a Transnational Audience

Conventionally within media studies the politics of transnational media flows tends to be framed within the twin concepts of cultural imperialism – the perceived negative effects of contamination and transformation that the imported media products have on the local culture (Morley, 2006)²⁴ – and cultural protection/security – the perceived necessary protection of a local culture against foreign invasion of this kind (Tomlinson, 1997; Xu, 2010). Cultural protection tends to be discussed at the level of state policies that regulate both the quantity of imported media and the scheduling of imported programs, while cultural imperialism gets discussed at the level of US' global industrial dominance and its supposed ideological influence on the audience in the export market locations. The “discovery” of an active audience, whose members interpret the media texts within their own cultural and ontological horizons, effectively puts a dent on the reductionist assumption of hierarchical top-down “cultural influence.” However, the politics of cultural imperialism/protection plays out beyond the actual audience reception of transnational media programs. It spills over into this larger public political sphere, either in the location of production or in the location of reception. Two instances drawn from the East Asian television drama industry illustrate these two possibilities of the politics of transnational popular culture's flow and reception.

The first concerns Korean television actor Song Seung-Heon. In 2004, when he was a “hot” idol among East Asian audiences, the news broke that that he had “cheated” conscription to military service by faking his medical record. In a country that is still divided into a communist north and a capitalist south, where the veterans of the bitterly fought Korean War in the early 1950s are still alive, and where the two halves of the nation continue to be in a state of military alert because the uneasy peace is maintained by an armistice rather than a peace treaty, conscription is seen as a critical national duty of every male citizen. Furthermore, as a compulsory national duty, conscription is seen as the great “leveler” of social, economic, and political inequalities among Korean men. In such an intensely politicized atmosphere, any attempt to escape conscription is an extremely anti-patriotic act. The disclosure of Song's misdemeanor created a public outcry.²⁵ Pressured by such a nationalistic response, the government immediately hauled Song into the military, although at the time he was shooting a video on location in Australia. The government's action immediately provoked Song's fans across East Asia to mobilize and organize a letter-writing campaign designed to plead with the Korean government to allow Song to complete his video before enlistment. Knowing the sensitivity of military service to Korean citizens, the fans did not plead for exemption but merely for delay in enlistment. The fans argued that Song was making a much more significant contribution to the Korean nation, not only economically but also in cultural diplomacy, through his dramas. The campaign was to no avail. Song abruptly abandoned the shooting, returned to Korea, and was enlisted without undue delay.²⁶ This instance demonstrates the possibility of activist transnational fans organizing themselves to intervene in a sensitive political situation. From the national political point of view, fans organized an extraterritorial intervention into the domestic political sphere of the exporting location. Admittedly, as this instance demonstrates, it seems difficult to imagine how such transnational fans' activities could have any significant impact on the domestic politics of the exporting country.

In contrast, the second instance concerns the politics of audience reactions in the importing/reception location; and this is played out through contestations between audiences and non-audiences of imported TV dramas. Empirically, within any importing location, the size of the audience population of transnational media TV dramas is much smaller than the size of the non-audience population. This disproportion is of great significance in the cultural politics of the importing location. Issues arise when the non-audience – for whatever reasons, including broad nationalism, historical animosity between the importing and exporting nations, professional envy of local artistes against foreign ones – reacts negatively in public to the importation of foreign dramas.

The regional success of Korean popular culture has given rise to very vocal anti-Korean sentiments in many East Asian locations. In Japan, a series of “Hate the Korean wave” (Kenkanryu) comics has been published. In this context, the Japanese women, audience members of Korean TV dramas who imagined themselves as harbingers of change on the grounds that they “warmed” the relations between Koreans and Japanese, are likely to face a steep uphill task, especially with the continuing historical resentments of the colonizer–colonized antagonism between Japan and Korea. In Taiwan, the arrival of Korean pop culture has been metaphorically described as the “invasion of Korean wave.” Such anti-Korean public discourse “militarizes” the importation of Korean pop culture, suggesting a serious violation of Taiwan's national borders. On the day when Bae Yong Joon, the star of the hugely popular drama series Winter Sonata, visited Taipei to promote his movie, April Snow, self-styled “nationalist” Taiwanese rock musicians staged a concert to lambast Korean popular culture and Bae himself. Significantly, as the audience of Korean TV dramas is largely female, the rock musicians also directed their sexist masculine rage against “foolish Taiwanese women” who were fooled by the “love, smiles, and good looks” of male Korean TV stars (Yang, 2008, p. 203). In China and Hong Kong, media professionals, including the star of action comedies Jackie Chan, protested against the extensive coverage that local media gave to visiting Korean artists. In all these instances, cultural nationalism, professional jealousy, and self-interests are inextricably blended to generate a call launched by lay non-consumers and media professionals to support local artists. The rallying call is ideologically framed as “expressing” and “representing” national interests – indeed nothing short of “national cultural preservation.”

In both these examples, the sphere of popular culture rubs up against the larger public sphere – specifically, against the politics of confrontation between transnational pop culture and nationalism. The contestation that ensues is an ideological one, in which one side is reinforced not only by numerical superiority of “citizens,” but also by the availability of the rhetoric of “nationalism.” In the case of Song, the intensity of Korean nationalist investment in compulsory military service clearly overrides the extraterritorial politics generated by Song's regional fans, in spite of the fact that the export of Korean popular culture has become one plank of the nation's export industry. In the more pervasive case of anti-Korean popular culture, which can be found in different East Asian locations, the “foreignness” of imported TV dramas serves as an ideological resource for non-consumers to politicize local reception. Non-consumers and domestic producers of popular culture can readily use their demographic majority to “anoint” themselves as the “people,” the ones who “defend” the “national” culture against foreign cultural “invasion” or “cultural imperialism.”

In these two instances, the “nationalists” in the exporting and importing nations, respectively, made strategic use of the sign of the “nation” by discursively invoking its particular legislation on conscription, or the imagined threat to its culture from a transnational audience. The Korean nationalists ideologically prioritized national security ahead of the national economic interests invoked by the regional fans in their letters. The non-consumers of Korean pop culture in various East Asian locations frame and exclude the audience/consumers of Korean TV dramas as “anti-nationalist cultural traitors.” In both instances, obviously, the self-interested national government is complicit with the nationalists. This politics of transnational media culture flows inevitably raises obstacles to any theoretical or substantive desire to conceptualize a harmonious “pan-East Asian identity” among East Asian TV drama audiences. Such an identity, if it emerged at all, will be unavoidably an identity of a minority, which is fragile and contested in any locality.

Pan-East Asian Identity?

The increasingly regional integration of television's popular culture economy in East Asia is evident not only in TV dramas, but perhaps even more conspicuously in blockbuster movies with actors, actresses, and investors drawn from the different countries in the region. With an expanding regional transnational audience population across different entertainment media, the question of the potential emergence of a pan-East Asian identity unavoidably arises. Indeed interviews with TV drama audiences often elicit comments that point to an identification with on-screen characters and actions on the basis of an unspecified idea of “Asianness.” The potential for such a regional identity is facilitated by the following factors: first, the relatively similar physiognomy, which allows for regional audiences' “recognition/identification” with on-screen characters; second, aspects of shared premodern histories and co-eval contemporary capitalist development and consumer culture; and, third, supposedly strong family themes that are often read as reflections of a Confucian emphasis on the family as the fundamental unit of society and filial piety.²⁷

However, analyses of TV drama audience reception have uncovered factors that present obstacles to the establishment of a stable “pan-East Asian” identity. First, the identification with any element that may be constitutive of an abstract Asianness is intermittently but persistently being disrupted by audiences' recognition of their difference and distance from the foreign culture represented on the screen, which makes identification unstable. Second, for the overwhelming majority of audiences, viewing is a leisure activity, residual to the necessary routines of everyday life. In the unending layering and interaction of a constant stream of cultural knowledge acquisition that goes into individual identity formation, the impact of such residual activities is likely to be rather weak, as there are no social institutions that enforce compliance and offer payoffs to viewing. Third, both the life of a TV drama and the length and depth of audience loyalty are equally ephemeral. While there may be identifiable East Asian TV drama audiences that belong to either loyal fan communities or to ephemeral collectives of casual viewers, membership in these groups is always changing; as one fan grows out of a group, a new one joins in quick succession, simply following the rise and fall of a constellation of dramas and related celebrities. The duration of active consumption, even fandom, is often too short and amorphous to produce a stable community, and therefore such phenomena may not be capable of generating lasting effects on individual identity formation. Finally, as suggested earlier, we have to recognize that, if a pan-East Asian identity were to emerge at all among audiences of East Asian TV dramas, it would be that of an “excluded” minority in all the local national contexts, because such an audience formation can run up against local nationalist sentiments that resist foreign media culture products. At this point, the possibility and process of a pan-East Asian identity formation still remains at the level of an empirical question. Meanwhile, at the individual level, the TV dramas that viewers love to watch have definitely been etched into these viewers' memories, and may in some ways even change their personalities and their lives, as the case of the Japanese female audience for the Korean drama Winter Sonata illustrates. Today's audiences would undoubtedly be able to recall at some future date, with fond nostalgia, the period when such consumption of popular culture was an important part of their everyday life routines.

For an Analytic Framework

To begin to elaborate a framework for the analysis of a regional transnational audience, it is necessary to examine closely the actual viewing practices of such an audience. If “recognition” is indeed central to viewing pleasure (Ang, 1985, p. 20), then, it is necessary to examine how recognition is facilitated across linguistic, cultural, and national boundaries. For a transnational audience, the process of recognition/identification with on-screen characters and narratives is not a straightforward process of “seeing oneself” represented on screen. It is a process that is always mediated by an awareness of the differences between the culture in which the subject audience is embedded and the “foreign” culture of the production location that is portrayed on screen. The “foreign” can simultaneously raise obstacles to easy recognition/identification and constitute an intrinsic part of the viewing pleasure. This mediation is further complicated by the fact that viewing is usually facilitated, or mediated, by subtitling or dubbing – or both. Again, a double character is evinced. While subtitling and dubbing, particularly the latter, are aimed at suppressing, indeed erasing, the foreign in order to “domesticate” the content, they simultaneously remind the audience of, and in this sense they “preserve,” the foreign. Analysis needs to pay attention to the simultaneity of identification and difference and to the mediation of subtitling/dubbing in transnational audience viewing practices.

Second, it is necessary to differentiate the audience “mass” into conceptual/substantive categories of audience(s), with different viewing and related audience practices. The audiences of TV dramas can be categorized according to their commitment of time and activities, financial expenses, and “loyalty” to the genre in general – in the form of watching every drama possible; to a particular drama series; or, finally, to a specific celebrity stars/idols.²⁸ Three categories of audience can be identified: (1) the “leisure” audience, that is, one that does nothing more than watches TV for casual entertainment; (2) “fans” who go beyond merely viewing to participate in other activities of fandom, including joining fan clubs, going to fan parties, collecting memorabilia, and chasing after visiting drama actors in locations that range from airports to shopping centers; and (3) activist transnational fans who, in addition to doing all the conventional fan activities, will spare nothing to devote their time and energy to participating in internationally organized activities that support their television stars or idols. The emergence and consolidation of this last category of audiences has been facilitated by the development of new computer-based communication technologies that facilitate transnational communication, particularly the Internet. These fan categories obviously overlap. In terms of viewing habits, there is a descending order of engagement. A transnational activist fan is clearly also a fan and a leisure audience member, all rolled into one; while fans may not become activists in international organized fan activities, they are also clearly members of a leisure audience; finally, a leisure audience does not get involved in any serious fan activities. In terms of size of audience, the rank ordering is reversed: leisure audiences are demographically the largest, followed by fans, and then by transnational activist fans. Corresponding to the three audience categories, there are different notions of belonging to a “community” of viewers.

Third, beyond the actual television screen and audience viewing practices, there is the politics that comes with the “penetration” of foreign media cultural products into local cultural space. Within these frames, analyses tend to be stuck at the level of ideological debates around the global dominance of the US media industry and the local resistance this generates. The analysis of transnational audiences needs to examine how perceptions of nationalism and cultural imperialism play out in the attitudes and behaviors of audience members and non-audience members of imported media products. The hostility of some non-audience members toward the consumption of foreign TV programs, as in the case of Korean or Japanese dramas in Taiwan or China, shows that transnational television can cause rifts and divisions among the citizens of a particular nation.

The above elements are by no means the only factors that are necessary in order to create a framework for the analysis of transnational audiences – a prevalent phenomenon in the age of media globalization. Indeed, when we draw on empirical analyses of the regional East Asian television industry, we may find that these elements offer material for substantive conceptual considerations, but we still need modifications, elaborations, and additions for a richer analytic framework that can do full justice to the phenomenon.

Conclusion

Airwaves respect no artificial national boundaries, and television as a medium is intrinsically transnational. However, television content and its audience are respectively embedded in the cultures of the location of production and of the location of consumption. Content that flows across national boundaries also traverses cultural boundaries, thus creating a transnational audience. One such formation in the past two decades has been the emergence and integration of the East Asian television industry. Drawing on empirical studies of the regional audience of East Asian television, this chapter has attempted to map out a preliminary framework for levels of analysis of audience reception and audience formation processes, from accounting for individuals to accounting for communities of the nation and, finally, of the region. At each level, the reception process and the audience formation process are tied to empirical specificities pertaining to the difference between the location of production and the location of consumption, which opens up discursive spaces for a comparison with transnational audience formation elsewhere in the globalized media world.

NOTES

1 This transnational audience is different from diasporic individuals who watch from their present residential location programs coming from the home country. The case of the latter has been discussed conceptually by Appadurai (1996) and analyzed empirically by Robins and Aksoy (2006).

2 Huaren is used as a relatively “neutral” term for specifying Chinese ethnicity, because the English word “Chinese” does not distinguish between national and ethnic identities; a Chinese from the People's Republic of China is Chinese with respect to both national and his ethnic identity; a Singaporean Chinese is Huaren by ethnicity, Singaporean by nationality.

3 Chua (2001) has discursively conceptualized this regional Huaren pop culture network as “pop culture China.”

4 There was an earlier history of popular Japanese martial arts movies, such as the Blind Swordsman series, the among Huaren audience. These movies were influential in the development of a martial arts genre in Hong Kong (see Yau, 2005).

5 The ban was lifted in October 1998, with the Joint Declaration of the New Twenty-First-Century Korea–Japan Partnership.

6 “U” sounds similar to the Chinese word , meaning “excellent.”

7 To the extent that pop culture is the culture of the masses, it is a constitutive part of the larger popular culture. The latter includes local cultural practices of long standing – what we call “traditions,” religion, and other folk practices that, according to Stuart Hall (1981), may have greater potential for political and social change.

8 The groundbreaking study here is Ien Ang, 1985 (Watching Dallas).

9 TV programs are often broadcast in “dual sound,” so that the audience can choose between dubbed local language and the original language with local-language subtitles.

10 In addition to lip-synchrony, dubbing must also pay attention to “kinetic synchrony” – synchrony with bodily movements on screen – and to “isochrony” – synchrony in the timing of characters' untterances on screen (Varela, 2004, p. 41).

11 Before dubbing can take place, a translation of the given script has to be undertaken; this is followed by “synchronization of the translated dialogue so that is matches the actors' mouth movements and the other images as closely as possible” (Martinez, 2004, p. 4).

12 In the East Asian instance, the question of audience's preference for the “cultural proximate” in foreign products is clearly multilayered, including physiognomic, historical, and civilizational layers. For a detailed discussion of these layers, see Iwabuchi (2002a).

13 Limitations of space do not permit a more detailed elaboration of this multilayered cultural proximity; see Iwabuchi (2002a).

14 To be consistent with actual practice during the sixteenth century, all written documents presented on the TV screen, from reports at the imperial court to personal letters, are written in Chinese characters, not in Korean alphabet.

15 Significantly, many in Singapore prefer the Cantonese to the Mandarin version, supposedly because of the “greater authenticity” effect of colloquial expressions, by comparison with the relative “stiffness” of the Mandarin version. This is more likely an expression of resistance to the official imposition of Mandarin as the only language of broadcast media.

16 The Korean tourism industry consistently uses Korean pop stars in all its advertisements.

17 Since the mid-2010s, politicians and policymakers in Korea, Japan, and China have been pushing the idea of popular culture exports as an instrument in soft power competition in the region; see Li (2008), Otmazgin (2008), and Lee (2009).

18 Iwabuchi invokes Dyer's (1992) explanation of such audience sentiments: entertainment provides consumers with the possibility of experiencing “what utopia would feel like.”

19 Lee borrows the idea of the “mega-text” from Su, 1999.

20 That the audience is an empirical collectivity needs to be emphasized against the idea of the audience as what Ien Ang (1991, pp. 33–37) calls the “taxonomic collective,” used in TV industry.

21 For a representative and comprehensive review of fandom, see Lewis, 1992.

22 Such self-organized community differs in very significant ways from the fan clubs organized by media agencies with a view to consolidating the popularity of its stable of actors.

23 I would like to flag here the immense potential, as yet unrealized, that the concept of immaterial power holds for the analysis of audience reception theory.

24 The central argument of the “cultural imperialism” thesis has become complicated; it has moved beyond the simplistic assumption of a direct cultural impact of the foreign on the local, to include the export of formats from the US and the incorporation of the US model and of the path of television industry development (see Shi, 2008, pp. 1202–1203).

25 Cheating of the draft, by children of the rich and powerful, always generates public criticisms and imposes heavy costs on the future of the perpetrators when they are exposed.

26 For more details on this case, see Eva Tsai (2007).

27 In actual fact, the family as an institution is portrayed very differently in TV dramas from the different regional countries (see Kang & Soo, 2009).

28 “Idol” is a common term of East Asian fandom, which designates a “personalized” relationship between the fans and the favored actor. It signifies someone to “worship” and to “emulate.”

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