Nostalgia is a notoriously slippery concept, and this, of course, is why people try so hard to theorise it in ways that hold fast. For Dai Jinhua, it is the ascendant fashion of the fin-de-siècle (1997: 8); whereas for Hao Zaijin it is a ‘movement that dare not speak its name’ (1996: 23). Svetlana Boym's seminal study makes the sentiment Janus-faced, sometimes ‘restorative’ and sometimes ‘reflective’ (2001), while in Fredric Jameson's rather more indignant schema, it is just corrupted memory (1991: 20-1). Alternately good, bad, modern, postmodern, an amnesiac, or an aide-mémoire, nostalgia is malleable in different hands; but in recent years, its most common fate has been a kind of exasperated censure. Nostalgia irritates its critics because it seems to harbour so much potential for an affective reckoning with the past – but more often than not elects to squander that promise in an excess of retro schmaltz. In a sense, then, it is the chimera of authenticity which fuels the critical fascination with the nostalgic mode, however the latter is defined. Is there a ‘real’ nostalgia? If so, what might it look like? And why, until recently, has there been so little of it around in contemporary East Asia?

The present chapter looks at these questions by attempting to theorise the nostalgia ‘movement’ which, for at least a couple of decades now, has bathed the East Asian cultural realm in the rosy glow of yesteryear. From the ‘native place’ parcel post catalogues that allow Japanese consumers to cherry-pick different flavours of ‘home’ to the Taiwanese ‘golden oldie’ radio station ‘Taiwan Nostalgia’ (台湾乡愁电台), the taste, sound, and look of the past has become paradoxically contemporary. As Hanchao Lu puts it of China, the very prefix ‘old’ now carries real capital: