Over the past two decades, Japan’s popular culture has been massively disseminated and consumed throughout Northeast and Southeast Asia. A wide range of products, such as music, animation, comics, television programs, fashion magazines, and movies, have been endorsed by local popular culture markets and now constitute an integral part of the cultural lives of many young people in this region. These products not only introduce a multitude of consumption options, but also have an impact on the way young urban consumers imagine and think about Japan. This paper examines the extent to which popular culture can change the perception of a country abroad. Based on questionnaire surveys conducted with university students from Hong Kong, Bangkok, and Seoul, it focuses on the appreciation shown to Japan’s popular culture, and how it shapes young people’s image of the country. The central argument presented is that exposure to Japanese popular culture disseminates new, favorable images, which modify the way the country is perceived. These images arouse feelings of affinity and a sense of proximity, but unlike the “soft power” argument, they are generational, implicit, inconsistent, and subject to different interpretations. As such, the practicality of generating state power in terms of authority or control is doubtful.

Throughout most of the twentieth century, Asia was a relatively divided continent.1 In terms of regional formation, the term "Asia" itself was not much more than a matter of nomenclature, which merely indicated the continent's geographic location. Previous attempts to promote solidarity among Asians did take place,2 but those seemed to have been futile or stagnant at best. However, in the last two decades, areas within Asia are increasingly being "pushed" towards each other. A new international maneuvering away from the American and Soviet Union dominated Cold War era politics, together with the ever-evolving political and economic integrating forces, provided the right incentives for this region's governments and markets to come closer together. In addition, ideas and ambitious possibilities regarding the emergence of some sort of "Asian region" and sub-regions in Asia have been repeatedly mentioned and discussed.3 During the period following the financial crisis of 1998, the necessity of cooperating in order to maintain political-economic stability was further realized. At the beginning of the twenty-first century, "Asia" and subregions within Asia have become more closely integrated within the last half-century than ever before. This continues despite an obvious lack of formal regional institutionalization and an emphasis on the informal, negotiated, and inclusive approach in regional policy.4 Regions in Asia might even now possess a few common, regionally shared characteristics.

In recent years, popular culture production in East and Southeast Asia has undergone major changes with the emergence of a system that organizes and relocates production, distribution, and consumption of cultural goods on a regional scale. Freed from the constraints associated with autonomous national economies, popular culture has acquired a transnational character and caters to multinational audiences. Using insights drawn from a number of academic disciplines, the authors in this wide-ranging volume consider the implications of a region-wide appropriation of cultural formulas and styles in the production of movies, music, comics, and animation. They also investigate the regional economics of transcultural production, considering cultural imaginaries in the context of intensive regional circulation of cultural goods and images. Where scholarship on popular culture conventionally explores the "meaning" of texts, Popular Culture Co-productions and Collaborations in East and Southeast Asia draws on empirical studies of the culture industries of Japan, Korea, China, the Philippines and Indonesia, and use a regional framework to analyze the consequences of co-production and collaboration.

The article reviews the book "China and the Global Politics of Regionalization," edited by Emilian Kavalski.

This article examines the linkage between entrepreneurship and the making of popular culture in East Asia. The central argument presented here is that the notion of entrepreneurship is central for understanding and conceptualizing the process of constructing trans-national markets for popular culture and for building new circles of 'Asian' recognition. In other words, entrepreneurial vision is not only transforming the local cultural markets by underpinning a region-wide cultural production system but also un-intentionally spurring feelings of 'Asian' sameness. The study itself focuses on four cases of entrepreneurship which exemplify the driving forces and the intended and unintended consequences of entrepreneurship, and outlines the wider theoretical and methodological implications for this concept by defining the relations between structural determinism and human agency in popular culture.

How is a policy initiated and implemented toward a newly arising industrial sector? This paper addresses that question by looking at the way the Japanese and the South Korean governments respond to the massive production and export of pop culture. The investigation focuses on the emergence of the local cultural industries, the policy issues they raise, and the domestic discourse they initiate. The central argument of this paper is that these governments no longer perceive the cultural industries in only ideological terms, but following the success of the private sector, they have recently shifted their attention to the economic benefits derived from the commodification of culture. However, their efforts to foster the pop culture sector heavily emphasize investment in infrastructure as a part of a developmental-state strategy. This attitude is too rigid to accommodate the dynamism of the cultural industries and should be supplemented with a more nuanced approach that considers the distinctive structure and the organization of the cultural industries.

During the last two decades, Japanese popular culture industries have massively penetrated East Asia's markets and their products have been widely disseminated and consumed. In this region, Japan has recently emerged as a cultural power, in addition to representing an industrial forerunner and model. The aim of this article is to explore the connection between popular culture and soft power by analyzing the activities of the Japanese popular culture industries in East Asia, and by examining the images their products disseminates. This study is based on export data, market surveys, and interviews with media industry personnel and consumers in five cities in East Asia, arguing that the impact of the Japanese popular culture lies in shaping this region's cultural markets and in disseminating new images of Japan, but not in exerting local influence or in creating Japanese-dominated 'spheres of influence'.

The article proposes a regional paradigm for analyzing the dissemination of culture throughout East and Southeast Asia, including Japanese popular culture. Not only does it seek to capture the expansion of popular culture into several national markets, but it provides a topology of East and Southeast Asia's cultural flows by highlighting the region's geopolitical, economic, and societal densities and specificities. It argues that it is essential to view the regional not only as a process which facilitates cultural flows across national boundaries or as a manifestation of global-local relations, but as an analytical unit containing particular characteristics which differentiate it from other regions and localities caught up in globalization.

In order to characterize and explain regional formation processes, theories in the field of international relations have focused primarily on political and economic parameters that were drawn from experiences in Western Europe. In East Asia, however, it is often mentioned that "regional dynamism" and cross-border economic activities, rather than formal agreements between governments, or shared historical or cultural "Asian" background generates the formation of the region. This article, however, examines the role popular culture plays in shaping and regionalizing East Asia. It focuses on the process by which confluences of culture have diffused throughout East Asian markets in the decades surrounding the 1990s and the concurrent formation of regional media alliances. An attempt is made to go beyond state-centric explanations of regionalization and extend the cultural approach to regionalization, demonstrating how popular culture can affect regional formation.