Global Goes Local: Popular Culture in Asia

Karen Danielson, Ph.D., is a research consultant at Laurentian
University who specializes in leisure, textiles, family life, and Japan.

This book will interest anyone who worries that popular culture is being
oppressed by global forces. Although the prevalence of Hulk Hogan images
and rock music melodies in parts of Asia might suggest that global
forces have dictated popular culture, the editors make it clear that
strong local forces create hybrids and transformations with entirely new
meanings. Sharing of technology and technique may have enabled universal
forms to emerge, but they are adapted to serve local needs when they are
used. Five authors contribute to this discussion of global versus local
in the first part of the book.

Another five contributors discuss key questions about the ways in which
popular culture is being harnessed to serve political, ideological, and
spiritual purposes. The authenticity of “Tibetan” music and the
success of “Sister Drum” in the international marketplace is one
example. Others deal with the shift from propaganda to market forces in
Chinese television, the use of popular culture to deliver moral and
political messages in Malaysia, superstition versus modernization in
Thailand, and the analysis of religious and scientific truths in
Japanese comic books.

The third and final section of the book contains four discussions of
the ways in which popular culture has shaped and created identity.
During the war, the character of the enemy was portrayed with
unrealistic imagery that continues to reveal what people thought of each
other and of themselves. We also learn how sad and solemn songs helped
Japanese soldiers deal with the private pain of their war experiences
long after the battles were over. Musicians in Shanghai were part of a
wealthy cosmopolitan city in the 1920s, but they continued to work as
the city passed through war, unemployment, and the Cultural Revolution.
The final article is about censorship, state music, and music in the
homes and bazaars of the Uyghur people. The contributor concludes that
music may be important for reducing tensions because popular recordings
provide an outlet for open debate.