WTF: The Winter Sonata Boom / The Kanryu Wave

[Mark Nornes]

OK. Somebody's gotta do it.

Winter Sonata's been out there for a couple years now, and it has yet 
to be taken up by the KineJapan community. Here we go.

Winter Sonata is a 2002 KBS drama from South Korea.  It was broadcast 
in a dubbed version on NHK BS in 2003 and was a surprise hit. The real 
story here is the Kanryu Wave, the incredible popularity of Korean 
television and cinema. But this post is going to be rather long, so 
I'll stick to Winter Sonata for now.

Last April, just after I got here, NHK showed it in an 11-12 pm slot 
which they usually reserve for high-profile US television programs like 
ER and West Wing. Knowing it was something of a phenom, I tried 
watching it but it didn't take.

But over the subsequent months I saw too much not to catch all 20 hours 
of the kanzenban just shown on NHK on the lead-up to New Years. What 
have I seen?

My first shock was in the bookstore, looking to see what was recently 
published on Japanese cinema. That section had shrunk to make way for 
scads of books, catalogs, shashinshu, and magazines devoted to Korean 
cinema and television----mostly star stuff.

On my trips to Korean and Thai grocers in Okubo, I saw crowds of 
middle-aged women at tiny shops selling photos, photo magazines, photo 
magnets, photo keyrings, photo-everything of Korean tv stars.

And I saw the star, Bae Young-jun, every day. Just about everywhere. 
It's quite extraordinary.

He's on television constantly. He's referred to on tv even more. His 
face is plastered on posters and magazines wherever you go.

At the Ginza Sony building, middle aged women were patiently listening 
to a sales pitch for a new digicam just so they could
have their pictures taken next to a life-sized photograph of the Winter 
Sonata star Bae Young-Jun.

I've been contemplating a new look, and every time I go in a glasses 
shop they try to get me by buy the frames Bae has made famous. 
(Actually, you can buy just about every kind of glasses he's ever worn: 
http://www.haruta.com/yonjun.htm). You see these everywhere, 
particularly on the husbands of middle-aged women. They appear ready to 
lunge off a person's face to do god-knows-what.

Over the past year, it's become quite a phenomenon. And some of the 
antics are pretty crazy.

Tsutaya is being sued for 10 million yen for selling a necklace similar 
to a major prop in the film. A department store in Yamaguchi got into 
trouble selling legit versions of the jewelry (for 140,700 yen), but 
only because the autographed photos of Yon-sama they used to entice 
women into the sales were forged. It became a problem when someone 
tried to auction one of the photos on Yahoo!; the highest bid before 
they pulled it was 56,000 yen.

When Bae came to Japan in late November to promote a big fat 
shashinshu, which costs something like 15,000 yen and quickly sold 
100,000 copies. Bae met such huge crowds at the airport, some women who 
travelled from as far away as Kyushu and Hokkaido---that he attempted 
to sneak out a side entrance to his hotel. It didn't work and he was 
literally mobbed by an estimated 1,000 oba-chan. Ten of them got 
crushed by fans or run over by his car and had to be rushed to the 
hospital.

The Winter Sonata soundtrack sold over a million copies. A novelization 
sold nearly a million copies. and hundreds of thousands of program 
guides and DVDs.

This year, NHK's sales of the textbooks that go with their TV English 
lessons dropped, and sales of the Korean textbooks grew 
correspondingly.

You can now go on tours that take you to the locations for the show 
(http://www.his-j.com/tyo/tour/4kor/kor_op_sona.htm). The hotel that 
owns the iconic lane of trees just unveiled life-size statues of the 
two lovers in an embrace. Last week TV nets showed Japanese tourists 
clumsily imitating the pose before the statues.  Dai-Ichi Life Research 
Institute estimates the show brought 69 billion yen to the South Korean 
economy through a boom in Japanese tourism.

It's said to have generated 122.5 billion yen in sales of DVDs and 
products connected to the show. I read an interesting article in the 
Asahi that said every product Yon-sama has endorsed enjoyed a immediate 
and huge spike in sales. Apparently, he gets about a cool million 
(bucks) for every television commercial. There are estimates, granted 
in sports shinbun, that he made 40 million dollars from work in Japan 
last year.

NHK began showing the "kanzenban" late enough in December that it ended 
on December 30th. I assumed they were going to pull him out at Kohaku 
to pump up the ratings, and sure enough they extended an invitation. He 
turned them down, which must have been quite a slap in the face for 
NHK. He basically owes his fortune to the network. And now that the 
show is over, they must be really smarting because their ratings failed 
to top 50% for the first time in history (people kept tuning into the 
competition---especially Bob Sap and Akebono flailing away in K-1).

So like a good film and television scholar I watched all 20 hours of 
the kanzenban, "complete" it seems by virtue of having been subtitled 
so you can hear Bae's (surprisingly deep and charming) voice. Actually, 
I have nothing against a good tv melodrama, and like the sprawling 
long-form structure of Japanese television (and HBO). So what was 
Winter Sonata like?  Well, this is already long and I'm sleepy. Maybe 
tomorrow.  Unless someone else wants to jump in....

Markus


A. M. Nornes
Program in Film and Video Studies &
Department of Asian Languages and Cultures
University of Michigan
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