This chapter explores the transnational television drama flows between South Korea and Japan in the 2000s, a new phenomenon which diversified media flows in the region. It uses one of the first Japanese remakes of a Korean drama, The Devil, to explore the ways in which Japan negotiates the topic of the drama—revenge—to highlight its local traditions of representations, views, and values. This process of negotiation in a transnational remake highlights how Japan sees itself vis-à-vis its not-so-proximate neighbor.

Introduction: Transnational television drama flows between Japan and South Korea

The last three decades have seen the rise of transnational cultural flows within the East Asian region. Popular culture, in the forms of animation, film, fashion and music, primarily from Japan, were at the forefront of that flow, fostering a process of “regionalization,” the creation of shared regional references and likings among those who consume Japanese content in other Asian countries (Iwabuchi 2002; Otmazgin 2014). Japanese popular culture had won attention and audiences with anime and manga since the 1960s, but in the 1980s and 1990s another medium came to the fore: Japanese television dramas. “Trendy dramas,” as they were called, which present the lives, strives and loves of Japanese youth in the stylish setting of urban Japan (mainly Tokyo), won the hearts of Asian audiences, particularly in Taiwan and South Korea. Japanese trendy dramas tapped into the growing affluence of the region and presented a pan-Asian youth culture. This youth culture was supported by Japanese fashion magazines and other Japanese products such as electronics that made it to the East and West at the same time (Iwabuchi 2002).

However, not everyone welcomed Japanese popular culture with open arms. South Korea, whose culture was heavily oppressed during the Japanese occupation (Caprio 2011), had banned Japanese culture since its liberation from Japanese rule in 1945, thus prohibiting the broadcasting of Japanese dramas on Korean television. This is not to say that Japanese trendy dramas did not find their way into South Korea. With the democratization of South Korea at the end of the 1980s and the rapid opening of South Korea to the world, many products and innovations entered the country, including Japanese dramas and music, mostly due to the advancement of technology and the use of VCRs for recording and copying televisual texts.