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“Western” in East Asia is often filtered through Japanese culture (and increasingly through Korea and Taiwan as well

Korea is an interesting example these days and a great illustration of the complexities involved in analyzing cultural influence. Consider the following observations.

1. Since at least the mid-1990s (when I became aware of the phenomenon) , Japanese marketers have been worried about the growing popularity of Korean “culture” (mainly celebrities, music, movies) and products as competition for Japan, especially in East and Southeast Asia.

2.Visible evidence, gleaned mostly from watching local or regional versions of MTV suggests that Korean fashion has a more vivid, harder-edged quality than current Japanese styles. The look is bolder, more in-your-face, more in tune with Chinese tastes. More primary colors, more big gestures, more eye contact.

3. No question about it. Korean companies have been going after Japanese competitors in the way that Japanese a few decades ago were attacking competitors based Europe and America. I recall being at a big Telecom show in the late 1980s when the crew from the Samsung booth next door were all over the Canon booth that I was working on and how my Japanese colleagues commented on how “pushy” they were. I recall being on a business trip in Seoul in the 1990s and picking up a local business magazine in which LG was announcing its goal of becoming the largest electronics company in the world. LG hasn’t made it, but last year Samsung beat out Sony in the annual AdAge list of the world’s most valuable brands.

4. Strictly at the level of rumor, several years ago I heard someone asserting that while Japanese companies were all moving aggressively upscale, adding more bells and whistles and going after rich consumers in developed countries that the Koreans were doing an end run by producing very reliable, very durable, relatively inexpensive products for, in particular, other Asian markets, slipping under the Japanese radar and establishing a strong foothold in Asia.

5. It is interesting in terms of counterflows that one of the reasons most often cited in Japan for the recent success of Korean movies, TV series and, especially male, celebrities in Japan is their appeal to middle-aged and older Japanese, who identify with their clean-cut, hardworking, sharply distinguished gender roles image and few them favorably in contrast with their children, who are seen as, you guessed it, scruffy or fashion-obsessed, lazy, greedy, unmasculine and unfeminine.

Plainly there is a hot mix here of ethnic and generational stereotypes, together with the corporate strategies of companies that have turned themselves into major global players. “Westernization” doesn’t cut it, even as description, let alone explanation.

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Of course what a suit is for – what it signifies and the way it is used is very different between China and the US (I’ve never seen someone wearing a suit on an American construction site, but its common to see workers in China welding in a suit)

I don’t think that the clothes or photographic styles used by Chinese wedding photographers are the same as they are in the US. Even the same dress, the same suit signifies something different in the two cultures. Sure.

… Of course they don’t partake in any abiding Western essence, but then again neither do the Western counterparts. To study tai chi in New York City isn’t traditional Chinese culture, but neither is studying it in Beijing.

Where is the disagreement here? Just joking, see below:

I am not objecting to the word \”Western\” itself, but rather the framing of the article in these terms. There is nothing \”of course\” about the points you make above in the minds of most people who have not studied anthropology or traveled extensively, and the NY Times does not help by expressing this phenomenon entirely in terms of \”Westernization\” as if that explained everything.

And, as John McCreery points out, \”Western\” in East Asia is often filtered through Japanese culture (and increasingly through Korea and Taiwan as well). Not unlike how \”Eastern\” culture was once filtered through German literature and philosophy for many in the \”West.\”

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I don’t think that the clothes or photographic styles used by Chinese wedding photographers are the same as they are in the US. Even the same dress, the same suit signifies something different in the two cultures. Sure.

But since the end of the Qing dynasty and picking up speed at the May 4th movement (and of course stopping, twisting and turning at various points), the self-conscious desire to adopt aspects of “Western” culture that would be beneficial to China is a theme woven throughout a lot of modern Chinese history – from military modernization, various political ideologies, Wei Hu’s Shanghai Baby, etc. Of course, all of these take a very distinct Chinese form, but to the extent that they are conceptualized as being “Western”, how are they not a western influence? They’re certainly not completley unrelated to things that are happening in the West, and while they may be hybridized, transformed, fabricated, etc., it would seem to be a pretty clear cut case of cultural diffusion.

Of course they don’t partake in any abiding Western essence, but then again neither do the Western counterparts. To study tai chi in New York City isn’t traditional Chinese culture, but neither is studying it in Beijing.

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I’ve come to appreciate a naturalistic approach to the blending of cultures in the present (which accounts for the past or history of the movement of symbols and practices as well as their present uses and meanings).

Writing the history of the global spread of the idea of “bride” or “marriage” requires a careful managing of conflicting historical forces and a relatively sophisticated theoretical model of how human beings exchange, develop and modify cultural meanings. As American/western cultures and politics have spread around the world, even in Europe, it turns out that local communities don’t adopt full-scale the foreign cultural paradigms. Rather, they adopt certain American signs, objects, practices of community/identity/politics without adopting the meanings (at least not wholesale); they adapt and change them so they have meanings specific to their own contexts and experiences. Local cultures reject much of what they receive (or at least, some of the culture signs/practices don’t make the crossing). The emerging idea of “Western imperialism” destroying local cultures (or in the case of this article, of the fetishization of the west on the part of “silly” natives) for the past 40 years becomes highly problematic when the focus remains on the ground with the people whose cultures are changing. Although the power differential between the West/America and the rest of the World makes the exchange of ideas/practices/signs unequal and therefore problematic, I see people adopting the cultural meanings they find useful or salient, modifying those which are attractive but don’t quite fit, and rejecting the stuff that just doesn’t work at all.

The practice of Taiwanese wedding photography, including its fashion sense, must be unpacked in the context of its practice. The meaning of these practices can only be discerned by watching the practioners interact with each other and their objects.

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Also, a bit of nostalgia. I doubt that I could find it anymore, but once upon a time a wrote a paper titled “Unwrapping the Bride” about the adoption of white, Western-style wedding dresses in Taiwan. I had discovered that the traditional red Chinese wedding costume is worn over a white undergarment, and “red packets” (hong bao) are, of course, the traditional way of presenting gifts of cash to those with whom one wishes to maintain a carefully distanced relationship. So instead of seeing the switch from red+Chinese to white+Western, I noted the symbolic appropriateness of unwrapping the bride, removing the red outer wrapping associated with marriage as an arrangement between two families and revealing the bride in a more private and personal manner. It is, you see, an incredibly apt representation of the shift in public presentation from marriage as an exchange between groups to marriage as a relationship between individuals.

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