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Precis: " Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas" (2004) by Koichi Iwabuchi

In his introduction to the book, “Feeling Asian Modernities: Transnational Consumption of Japanese TV Dramas” (2004), Koichi Iwabuchi explains the significance of the transnational reach of Japanese TV dramas as a modern popular cultural form within the East/Southeast Asian region by providing an alternative and destabilising the once exclusive equation of ‘modernity as with the Western world’, and how this creates recognition and appreciation of the similarities among the “non-Western” experiences of urbanisation, modernisation, and globalisation, which does not exist in American popular culture (such as shared colonial experiences.) He introduces the main theoretical issues in the study of cultural transnationalism to which each succeeding chapter will address, such as transnational alliance, entangled perception of cultural distance, postcolonial questions, and the (im)possibility of cultural dialogue, and that theoretical reformulation is imperative in order to grasp the gist of the decentering forces of globalisation that make transnational cultural flows and power relations much more disjunctive, non-isomorphic, and complex than can be understood in terms of a centre-periphery paradigm. He states that empirical analysis is used to analyse how Japanese youth dramas are (re)produced, circulated, regulated, and consumed in East and Southeast Asia, with each chapter addressing different ways for intra-Asian cultural flow highlights the cultural resonance and asymmetry in the region using the decentering process of globalisation. In addition, he reiterates the significance of these studies as contribution to the study of TV drama in Asia is underexplored as compared to other popular culture form (i.e. music, film). This introduction was written with an intent to give a glimpse of the overarching themes of transnational cultural flows and by highlighting the main issues to be addressed, this is intended for future researchers and students of cultural studies as well as media studies.

(December 20, 2016)

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