Lee, I-yun; Han, Christine; (2013) Politics, popular culture and images of Japan in Taiwan. In: Morris, Paul and Shimazu, Naoko and Vickers, Edward, (eds.) Imagining Japan in Post-war East Asia: Identity Politics, Schooling and Popular Culture. (pp. 49-67). Routledge: Abingdon, UK.

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Abstract

In Taiwan in the 1990s, there was such an explosion in the demand for Japanese popular culture that the phenomenon was given the term ‘Japan Mania Boom’ (hari fengchao). The mania for Japanese products and, to some extent, for Japan itself, has since waned, but these products still remain in demand. The spread of Japanese popular culture (henceforth, pop culture) began with the lifting of martial law in 1987, and the mass importation of Japanese products that followed. It was enhanced in the early 1990s when Taiwan cable channels began to broadcast Japanese drama on local television. The importation of Japanese drama was accompanied by that for Japanese manga (comics), anime (cartoons), fashion, and pop music. These began circulating as part of an underground culture, but rapidly gained widespread acceptance and entered the cultural mainstream. As a result, even newspapers and broadcasting companies that had typically taken an anti-Japanese stance had no choice but to respond to popular demand. This demand, which began as a trickle in the 1980s, rocketed in the 1990s (see Figure 3.1).

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