Korean Television Dramas in Japan: Imagining “East Asianness” and Consuming “Nostalgia”

In this article, we explored how Japanese Korean drama readings have identified in resonance with their imaginations of spatial locality and postcolonial consciousness. Throughout the in-depth interviews, we discovered how to inscribe Korean dramas into the Japanese audience’s minds as well as what elements in reading Korean dramas particularly empowered the Japanese fans to re-imagine their belonging within the East Asian community. Korean dramas, reproduced by Japanese fans as the cultural text, provoked the imagined, culturally-mixed space in embracing subtly foreign but nostalgic East Asian sentiment. The Japanese audiences of Korean dramas, past and present, have preserved Korean dramas so to happily transport themselves to this dramatic reality. The imagined sense of East Asianness influences the dispersed audiences in Japan; often relating fans to the cultural output from Korea as part of their everyday lives.