When one of the guest editors of this issue convened a workshop at the International Institute of Asian Studies (IIAS) in Leiden on 26 November 2008, it was titled ‘East Asian Popular Music, Small Sounds from Big Places?’. Was it out of ‘East Asian modesty’ for the European audience who were not expected to know much about the subject? One is reminded of the book from popular music studies scholarship, Big Sounds from Small Peoples (Wallis and Malm Reference Wallis and Malm1984). In this book, which includes case studies of the music industries of 12 small nations, there is not one chapter about an East Asian nation. Is this because East Asians are never small peoples or because their sound is never big in the world of popular music around the globe?

It cannot be denied that East Asia has been an almost forgotten area in the academic study of the popular music of the English language sphere. Even if you look at the edited anthology, The Popular Music Studies Reader, which collects together 43 ‘classic texts and essential new writings on popular music’ (Bennett et al. Reference Bennett, Shank and Toynbee2006), you cannot find any single article that touches on, let alone discusses, East Asian popular music. Even in the journal Popular Music, apart from the special issue featuring Japanese popular music in 1991, there have been surprisingly few articles concerning East Asian popular music.Footnote ¹

Considering that the region has a huge popular music market (Japan is the second largest in the world), and that distinctive and rich musical cultures have developed in China (as well as Hong Kong and Taiwan), Japan and Korea, it is unfortunate that East Asian popular music has been almost invisible outside the region. But it is not our intention to complain here that ‘our’ music is disregarded in international popular music studies. We are only discussing the specific conditions of this underrepresentation. A couple of years ago, one of the guest editors of this issue suggested that this regional limitation is firstly ‘because most studies about popular music in Asia had been written in local or national languages’, and secondly, ‘because studies written in English and other lingua franca were predominantly produced by Western-based scholars and remained outside of the inter-Asian network of knowledge production’ (Shin Reference Shin2009, p. 495). It is no accident that two recently published special journal issues on Asian popular music (Shin Reference Shin2009; Brunt Reference Brunt2011) have connections with the inter-Asia network.

In this special issue, we would add a third point. It has been regarded as common sense that East Asian popular music, unlike popular music in other areas such as Africa or South America, is merely an imitation of Euro-American music, and that East Asia is considered as an area of consumption rather than creative production. This kind of view (or bias) is even shared by music scholars, critics and enthusiasts in the region. Admittedly, on the one hand East Asia has accepted, embraced and appropriated popular music produced in other areas, while on the other, music products made in East Asia have rarely been exported, but rather circulated and consumed only within domestic boundaries. As a result, these factors contribute to the invisibility both of East Asian popular music and of its studies.

Yet, due to the market-driven process of globalisation, the development of digital information technology and the increasing transnational exchange of knowledge, the situation of East Asian popular music and its studies has dramatically changed over the last two decades. With the gain in popularity of Japanese popular culture in the region during the 1990s, the massive success of the Korean wave in the 2000s and the introduction of a market economy in China along with Hong Kong's handover in 1997, a new transnational landscape of popular music has emerged. Now it is not difficult to find a kind of pan-East Asian set of cultural sensibilities based on shared urban experiences in different cities. The advance of digital technology, in particular the Internet, has brought new ways of listening to music in relation to other cultural activities, including local/transnational/global fandoms. It should also be noted that the study of popular culture, or cultural studies, has been introduced as a new discipline through the process of the neo-liberalist transformation of higher education since the mid-1990s.

Facing and being critical of these transitions, scholars of popular music studies in and of East Asia have been loosely organised and eventually launched a transnational network called the Inter-Asia Popular Music Studies Group (http://interasiapop.org), an offshoot of the journal Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, and have held biennial conferences since 2008. Through these processes, an agenda for the continuous exchange of arguments and discussions has gradually been built.

The collection of papers in this special issue therefore follows this agenda, taking seriously the transformation of both popular music and knowledge production in East Asia. In spite of the differences in their nationalities, the locations in which they work, the music genres they deal with and the various methodologies they apply, all contributors share more or less the same issues: identity, politics and globalisation. This does not mean, however, that all the papers try to define these issues as fixed entities. Take the concept of ‘identity’ for example; no-one assumes identity to be something fixed or absolute such as ‘East Asian identity’ or ‘Chinese identity’, but rather they question how a particular identity or identities are constructed at a specific geopolitical conjuncture in the realm of popular music. How do musicians, audiences and cultural industries recognise their own national/ethnic/class/gender identities under conditions where, for the most part, music vocabularies, styles and forms are borrowed from Western music such as rock, R&B and hip-hop? And what are the consequences which result from issues of cultural politics?

Imagining that popular music plays a certain role in the terrain of politics, then how do we understand the concept of ‘politics’ in East Asia? It is, of course, important to understand politics at a national level, considering the transformation of politics in relation to economies in the region: the rapid growth of the Chinese economy, the relationship between mainland China, Hong Kong and Taiwan, the unresolved Cold War tension between North and South Korea, the legacy of Japanese colonialism and imperialism, the everlasting US political and economic hegemony, and so on. But it is also necessary to consider the politics of everyday life, the body and signifying practices with which popular music is more likely to be easily associated than other economic products. The question then is how we can discuss and connect different levels of politics and reorganise new understandings of politics through the study of popular music.

In a similar vein, the term ‘globalisation’ should be understood in a rather contradictory way: it is the process of both homogenisation and differentiation. In terms of popular culture, while globally dominant cultures such as American popular culture sweep local cultures away under the banner of a global standard, they simultaneously accelerate the processes of localisation, indigenisation and hybridisation. Globalisation is not only a one-way process from the West to the non-West, but it is often reversed or takes place within/among local regions. It also helps to create forces of counter-globalisation and sometimes leads to localism or even to (ultra)-nationalism. Furthermore, thanks to the development of communication and transportation technology and the rapid flow and exchange of human resources, information and capital, everything is almost simultaneously taking place in different locations, and this would add a further twist to issues of globalisation/localisation.

Although it may be difficult to answer all the questions above, the papers in this issue try to offer new ways of understanding based upon empirical research into local East Asian popular music. The first paper by Eva Tsai and Hyunjoon Shin is a comparative study of ‘pop-rock screen’ made in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan in the 2000s. It shows how gender relations are expressed and constructed differently in films of rock-pop musicians and their friends in different locations. In the next paper, Philip Benson looks at the way in which two Asian superstar divas, Tata Young from Thailand and Hikaru Utada from Japan, changed their public images and identities when they sang in English in order to enter the US market. Philip also discusses how fans received these changes through the examination of YouTube comments on their English songs. These two papers show us how differences and diversities informing gender issues are regarded within pop-rock scenes in East Asian countries as well as specifically addressing East Asian questions of identities in popular music.

The next two papers deal with hip-hop culture from different angles: Noriko Manabe examines the way in which Japanese hip-hop DJs incorporate Japanese traditional musical instruments to invent new identities to enter the global market, while Hae-kyung Um delineates the development of hip-hop in South Korea and argues about how it has been localised – that is, nationalised – within a South Korean context. One focuses on the outflow and the other on the inflow of the global subculture and music. Both examples re-interpret hip-hop culture, which is supposed to be of African American origin, as both a hybrid and newly invented ‘national’ product. However, both papers imply that ‘the national’ should be defined in the globalised world.

Three papers then follow which discuss ‘Chinese’ popular music. These explore the ways in which the concept of ‘Chineseness’ is changing and being challenged by the process of recent globalisation, and the way in which political and cultural differences, negotiations and even contradictions are expressed in popular music. Yui-Wai Chu and Eve Leung describe how the transition of the Hong Kong music landscape from Cantonpop to Mandopop comes at the expense of the former's hybrid character, while Anthony Fung regards the success of Chris Li, the champion of the Supergirl, a Chinese version of the American Idol television show, as the arrival of the new Chinese pop and discovers the possibility of new politics in her music, lyrics, gestures and her fandoms. Wendy F. Hsu explores the performances of a Taiwanese American musician, Jack Hsu, who plays the erhu, a Chinese traditional instrument, with a ‘Taiwanese consciousness’ in a Western-style progressive rock band, and discusses a rather politically complicated question of identity formation for Taiwanese Americans in a cultural-cum-musical turn. These three papers address the issue of Chineseness or anti-Chineseness. The focus of these papers can be categorised respectively as the local sound that used to be huge, a newly rising big and national sound, and a tiny migrants' displaced sound.

The final paper, by Martin Roberts, tries to locate a Japanese subcultural music style of the 1990s, shibuya-kei, within the context of globalisation, challenging nationally bounded music genres. His detailed analysis reminds us that music scenes, in particular subcultural scenes, have been so globalised in terms of both production and consumption that we need a new framework that goes beyond national/local boundaries in order to understand the real situation of popular music today.

In this special issue we do not attempt to define what East Asian popular music is or might be. In fact, there are virtually all kinds of music genres of the world to be found in East Asia. The hybridisation of forms (though not a neutral process) may be a characteristic feature of East Asian popular music, and this is one of the primary forces shaping its various genres, evolving styles and attracting our interest. The editors hope that this special issue will make a contribution to the existing problematics in the study of popular music in the English language sphere, in that it provides not only information and knowledge of relatively unknown East Asian popular music to its outsiders, but also offers possible venues for discussing alternative theorisations in popular music studies.

That being said, it would be futile to raise the question of ‘what the East Asian “content” in East Asian popular music is’. Rather, we simply want to make one point: East Asia is becoming a new imagined space for popular culture in general, particularly for popular music. About 20 years ago, Simon Frith said he then identified with the Europop of the Pet Shop Boys rather than the Anglo-American sound of U2, when he talked about the mythical meaning of ‘America’ and ‘Europe’ in the context of the end of the Cold War (Frith Reference Frith1991, p. 269). Taking what he said seriously, should we say that ‘we’, East Asians, identify with East Asian pop idols rather than Western or Anglo-American rock heroes? But this is simplistic and dichotomous. As you read the essays in this issue, you will see that the concerns of the consumers and producers of East Asian pop are far more complicated.

Frith's article still has a relevant point. As he said, cultural forms of ‘Anglo-American’ pop-rock are available everywhere in the world. In East Asia, they are not only readily available for consumption but also easily adaptable to production, mainly thanks to the accelerated development of technology. There is little doubt that the Anglo-American hegemony in popular music still prevails and is even taken for granted, as can be seen in the off-hand usage of terms such as J-pop, K-pop and Chinese pop. If so, what matters is ‘content’, and that is why people in national and local governments in East Asia, especially in Japan and South Korea, are noisily talking about producing ‘content’ as well as promoting (a rather restricted notion of) ‘creativity’. However, whether the content is distinctively East Asian does not matter much to the artists, or their fans or the industry.

‘East Asia’ is a cultural construction that is ever changing by the processes of globalisation, digitalisation and consumerism, as well as the social crisis and cultural disjuncture brought about by these processes. East Asia used to be regarded as victim of the world (i.e. the West) throughout modern history, and the same goes for popular music. But the music industries in East Asia have begun to create ‘our’ content by utilising the universalised (or naturalised) idiom of pop music. They do not think it realistic to compete with the world (although some vainly try to do that), but rather want to produce ‘the best of Asia’.Footnote ² It is natural that there is both content and discontent with this recent transformation of East Asian popular music.

By means of disclaimer, what has just been said is a very crude sketch of what we believe to be the major parameters within which the music industry and relevant government policies in the region operate. Critical evaluations of these parameters and other related topics are obviously subject to debate. We hope that the wide range of themes and opinions voiced in the papers in this issue foster such a debate, without foreclosing it by either celebrating or condemning the current state of affairs. If there is anything in common among these papers, it is that the meaning of East Asia is still contested in the realm of pop culture and beyond, as there is no ‘single’ East Asia, let alone a single world.