East Asia's soft power and counter cultural imperialism practices on TikTok: A study of Japan and South Korea

Abstract

The aim of this research study is to examine Japan's and South Korea’s cultural dissemination through the short video app TikTok. The main hypothesis of the study is that cultural dissemination via TikTok has a positive influence on the countries’ cultural recognition on a global level and that it also benefits the soft power practices that the two countries follow. In order to find evidence that supports the hypothesis an inductive content analysis of 1007 TikTok videos was employed. An extensive literature review and historical analysis was carried out. Firstly, theoretical approaches about dominance and culture were discussed. Starting from discourses about post-colonial theories on how to achieve cultural recognition, and discussions about imperialist effects, moving on to examining various theories of globalization, this research builds on the applicability of the most recent theses of soft power and counter-cultural imperialism. Based on these aforementioned theories, a historical analysis of South Korea and Japan is presented, with an aim to describe the formation of the contemporary cultural identities of those two countries. A combination of the primary and secondary data, will provide the necessary information, regarding the means of cultural dissemination through TikTok. The content analysis results identified 22 individual cultural sectors of Japanese and Korean popular content and 34 TikTok content categories within the app. Those TikTok categories can be interpreted as the forms in which the defined cultural sectors can be transmitted through the app. The findings support the counter-cultural imperialism thesis for both examined countries. Japanese cultural trends seem to be less popular than Korean cultural trends. The research evidence sheds light on the fundamental reasons behind this difference. Moreover, the data support that both cultures are promoted primarily by individual fans, that create a proliferative cultural dissemination effect, characterized by a multidirectional unofficial cultural flow. It is also noteworthy that Korean cultural sectors are purposely and strategically promoted by the private Korean entertainment sector, something that does not apply in the case of Japan. Finally, the cultural proximity and exoticism hypotheses are examined, by calculating the cultural distance between the examined videos’ countries of origin, and Japan and South Korea.