Occupied Territories

Image also plays a critical role in separating the two countries’ pop music. A crass way of summing it up is this: K-Pop stars out-sex their J-Pop counterparts. The members of Girls’ Generation show a fair amount of skin in their music videos, while many fans were drawn to KARA by a chunk of choreography Wikipedia dubs “the butt dance.” Beyond straight-up sex appeal, K-Pop groups look and act like real adults, whereas J-Pop outfits often emphasize adolescent cuteness. K-Pop unit T-ara’s 2009 video for the song “Bo Peep Bo Peep” centered around a member of the girl group going to a club and hooking up with a guy in the bathroom, an elevator, and his apartment. The Japanese clip, in advance of T-ara’s official Japanese debut later this month, finds the members wearing cat ears and playing un-erotically with one another: the sexuality of the original replaced with Hello-Kitty-approved cuteness. The most popular Japanese act of the moment, AKB48, is a collection of 48 singers usually wearing high-school uniforms while behaving like 15-year-old girls. It’s been a tried-and-true path to pop success; Japanese singers have been donning their staple sailor suits since the ’70s-a fashion shtick that’s far from progressive. Girls’ Generation and KARA aren’t glimmering examples of feminism, but at least they look and act like grown women.

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Patrick St. Michel, “How Korean Pop Conquered Japan” The Atlantic (September 13, 2011)

Aside from that gratuitous, self-satisfied final sentence, this paragraph is quite interesting. I wish I knew more about both cultures to extrapolate anything from this with any certainty—and let me add that the obvious interpretations are most likely incorrect—but it sure does suggest a whole lot. We’ll have to leave the question of pop music feminism for a later date.