Introduction

In this special issue, we focus on youth culture in East Asia. Youth culture, which sometimes is an integral part of popular culture in general, has been studied widely in the fields of sociology, cultural studies, media studies, and so on. Young people in that area often enjoy the same culture like Japanese manga, anime, Korean pop music, and Chinese and Taiwanese idols. There is no doubt that it is an important topic for sociologists in East Asia as well as scholars worldwide including Western societies and the Global South. What made this topic further significant is the COVID-19 pandemic beginning in 2020, as it has led to various transformations in how young people organize their activities in the realm of their favorite culture. Some people shifted entirely their activities from real places to online platforms. While some ceased participation in cultural events altogether, others continued to join some events in person but adapted to some restrictions such as the limitations on the number of participants, bans on chanting, and so on. These transformations make us all the more curious about what the current state of youth culture in East Asia is like. To explore this issue, we have invited five papers. All of these papers are based on empirical research conducted from a comparative perspective and, in terms of methodology, encompass a variety of approaches, including quantitative analysis, fieldwork, interviews, and policy document analysis. Besides, the papers cover such diverse topics as music taste, idol fans, K-Pop/K-wave, cultural event space, transition process, and nation branding policies. Despite the wide range of topics and methodologies of these papers, they have one feature in common, that is that all of them cross boundaries in some important ways. Three key boundaries could be mentioned as particularly relevant here. The first one is, needless to say, the national boundary. Idols from Japan or South Korea, for instance, attract enthusiastic fans beyond their home countries. Fan activities and fan culture cross the national boundary, which sometimes, like in South Korea, is even promoted by their government as a part of the national branding policy (Kita, 2019). At the same time, however, it is crucial to pay attention to the fact that people in each country and region have developed their own way of enjoying and consuming popular culture. For example, fans of Japanese idols in Taiwan formed their own fan communities and fan culture, which are different from those of Japanese fans (Chen, 2014). Moreover, it is also important to note that this kind of boundary crossing is now sustained by digital communication technologies, as the COVID-19 pandemic has made it clearer. As Matsuda argues, the mobility of popular culture fans, even in the geographical sense, is embedded in digital communication infrastructures (Matsuda, 2022). The second is a boundary between culture and politics in a broad sense. In Japan, most of the time, fans tend to perceive their favorite culture as clearly separate from political or social issues. However, fans in other countries and regions often see those two connected in significant ways, as reported in Chen's paper in this issue. This also overlaps with the first boundary crossing. While fans wave hand lights at concerts of their favorite idols in the same way in Japan as well as in Taiwan, those hand lights, frequently, could be waved in social movement in Taiwan. Even in Japan, in the field of social movement studies, it is reported that young activists see the styles of movement as really important, and that they are sometimes inspired by popular culture (Tominaga, 2016). It matters a lot to them whether their chants and demonstrations are cool and stylish or traditional and old-fashioned. Cultural styles also play an important role in understanding the transition process of young people. As Chinen (2018) revealed, high school students form their identity through the symbolic competition of styles, which has an impact on their career path at the same time. The third one is the divide between Western and East Asian societies in terms of the range of application of theory and methodology. Pierre Bourdieu is the most influential figure in the field of cultural sociology, not just for his theory but also for his methodology such as Multiple Correspondence Analysis. A lot of studies have been conducted based on Bourdieu's model. Most of them, however, focused on Western societies, like the United Kingdom, the United States or Australia. Comparatively, there have been not so many studies of this nature in Asia, with some notable exceptions like Kitada and Kaitaiken (2017) and Kataoka (2019). Taking into consideration these “boundary-crossing”, we now take an introductory look at five papers invited in this special issue. In the first paper, “Cultural Omnivorousness of Young People in Japan, South Korea, and the United States - Using Latent Class Analysis -”, Yoshimasa Kijima focuses on the taste of music from a comparative perspective. ‘Omnivore’ has been a key concept in the sociological study of music, heavily influenced by Bourdieu, which has been studied predominantly in Western societies. Analyzing the data collected in three countries, Kijima investigates who are more likely to be omnivorous in enjoying music, and if or how it is differently determined by social and demographic factors, according to the countries. The result shows that there are some differences between those countries in terms of the impact of social class factors on omnivorousness. The second paper, “The Fan Culture of the Bluebird Movement: The Creativity of the Younger Generation in Taiwan's Political Activity”, explores how social movement in Taiwan formed its styles under the influence of fan culture. Ichen Chen, the author, examining posts on social media related to Bluebird Movement in 2024, uncovers the deep connection between fan activities and political participation in terms of ‘identity’ and ‘style’. Their identity as political participants is grounded on that as a fan of wide variety of popular cultures. The styles they chose in Bluebird Movement are shaped after their fan activities in an aesthetic sense, like hand lights or uchiwa. Everyday life as a fan prepares young people for political participation. In the third paper, “Who gathered in place for cultural activities during the COVID-19 pandemic? Studies from event space user survey in Tokyo”, authors (Masashi Kurihara, Wan Yin Kimberly Fung and Satomi Sugiyama) investigate patterns of participation in cultural activities under the influence of COVID-19 pandemic. Identifying four participation patterns, they examine what factors contribute to each of them. Those factors include risk awareness for infection, genre of culture, and values associated with in-person participation. The results of their analysis help us understand the meaning of the real places and interaction in person, which is made clearer due to the pandemic. The authors of the fourth paper, “Habitus and the Relationship between Youth Culture and Transition: A Bourdieusian Analysis of Musical Culture and Inequality in Japan”, try to analyze music taste in Japan with Bourdieusian framework, which consists of quantitative research and interview study. Naoki Iso, Kazuo Fujimoto, Takashi Hiraishi, and Kaoru Mori, based on data collected in Kanto region in Japan, conducted Multiple Correspondence Analysis, in a similar way as Bourdieu did, through which music space is drawn with a few supplementary variables like social economic factors. Some respondents, who are mapped on this space separate from each other, were picked up and interviewed. Narratives they told about their career paths are analyzed to examine the relationships between music taste and transition process. The fifth paper, “Youth Culture as a Nation Branding Resource: A case study about policy discourse of South Korea”, takes a different perspective from the other four papers in which people who consume and enjoy popular culture are the focus of the research. On the contrary, Marika Kita focuses on the governmental policy of South Korea, which is known as “nation branding”. Her detailed analysis of policy discourse makes it clear that there have been some complicated relationships between youth culture, particularly K-Pop and K-wave on the one hand, and nation-ness on the other hand. The nation's branding policy has been changing historically according to whether the government is conservative or liberal. Besides, K-Pop has not been directly connected to national branding policies for some reasons including adherence to the arms-length principle. As editors of this special issue, we believe that these papers offer valuable insights, and contribute to a deeper understanding of youth culture in East Asia, due to their “boundary-crossing” perspective and empirical approach. Also, we hope that this special issue will inspire a wider variety of research and broaden the scope of studies in this field. The authors declare no conflicts of interest. Data sharing is not applicable to this article as no new data were created or analyzed in this study

Archaeology · China · East Asia · Geography · Political science · Hong Kong and Taiwan Politics