The Winter Sonata Boom / The Kanryu Wave

Peter Grilli grilli at us-japan.org
Wed Jan 5 11:11:55 EST 2005


Markus,

I was also waiting to see how long before the Kine-Japan community started
in on the Winter Sonata phenomenon.
I'm particularly interested in the reaction generally in Japan (and among
KJ-people) to Bae's "boycotting" the Kohaku Utagassen on NHK.
A leading role on that show is the ultimate accolade for a Japanese
pop-entertainer, and for Japan's first genuine Korean star to be offered
that honor -- and to decline it -- seems to speak volumes about the current
Japan-Korea political and social climate!  What's the aftermath?  What are
folks saying about Bae on the street in Japan??

Peter

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Peter M. Grilli
President, Japan Society of Boston
One Milk Street,  Boston, MA 02109
Tel:  617-451-0726
Fax:  617-451-1191
E-mail:  grilli at us-japan.org

  -----Original Message-----
  From: owner-KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu
[mailto:owner-KineJapan at lists.acs.ohio-state.edu]On Behalf Of Mark Nornes
  Sent: Wednesday, January 05, 2005 4:56 AM
  To: KineJapan
  Subject: WTF: The Winter Sonata Boom / The Kanryu Wave


  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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