“I feel like, there’s a certain atmosphere (fun’iki). Yeah, it’s about the atmosphere of Korea.” A fifteen-year-old high school freshman, Natsu answered my question, “What about them do you find stylish?” while scrolling through photos of “kankokuppo (Koreaish)” interiors she had saved on her Instagram.Footnote 1 Looking at my slightly puzzled face when I repeated “Atmosphere?,” she continued with a shy laugh, “It’s hard to explain…but it somehow feels sophisticated…and calming.”
When I began my fieldwork at a private high school in suburban Tokyo in 2020, I noticed that a particular aesthetic of fashion and lifestyle called kankokuppo, said to be a trend from South Korea, had been gaining massive popularity among Japanese women in their teens and early 20s, especially schoolgirls. The word -ppo is a youth vernacular abbreviation of the Japanese suffix -ppoi, used to form adjectives meaning “feeling like” or “having the characteristics of” the word to which they are attached, much like -ish or -like in English (e.g., kodomo ‘child’ with -ppo(i) produces kodomoppo(i) ‘childish’). Therefore, kankokuppo, a combination of the Japanese word kankoku (South Korea) and the abbreviated suffix -ppo, can be translated as “Koreaish.”Footnote 2 This aesthetic was particularly evident in makeup, hairstyling, café-hopping, interior decoration, selfie-taking, and photo-editing—things and activities typically linked to girlhood. Particularly characteristic was that its visual representations circulating on social media with the hashtag #kankokuppo (Koreaish) were almost entirely unified under a soft, muted, gray-to-beige color palette (Figure 1). More importantly, for women embracing this aesthetic, “Korea” seems to refer to an admired space to which they wish to belong and wherein they desire to immerse themselves. Visiting cafés and hotels reputed to make one “feel like they were in Korea,” or gathering at someone’s home and decorating it in a “Koreaish” style, have become popular weekend pastimes among female teenagers. Female students whom I interviewed repeatedly described Korea as “stylish,” “trendy,” and “sophisticated.” However, the phrase I came across more often than all others was “Korea has an atmosphere (fun’iki ga aru),” as heard in Natsu’s explanation. They say it is an indescribable, yet captivating and simultaneously comforting ambience. What is the “atmosphere (fun’iki),” they feel about Korea?
Figure 1. Instagram feed search results for #kankokuppo (screenshot taken on March 6, 2022).
The public image of South Korea in postwar Japan made through media and popular culture can broadly be categorized into four types: (1) a “monochrome” nation in a historico-political context (Chung Reference Chung[1995] 2010; Kimura Reference Kimura2020), (2) a “colorful” traditional Korea typified in food and clothing (Chung Reference Chung[1995] 2010), (3) a “nostalgic” Korea found in Korean TV drama series (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi, Huat and Iwabuchi2008), and (4) the vibrant, “colorful” Korea as seen in K-pop idol culture (Kwon Reference Kwon2010). Following its military defeat in 1945 and the ensuing loss of its former colonies, postwar Japan retained an attitude of general avoidance of Korean popular culture due to mixed feelings of disdain and remorse in the wake of its imperialist past. Until the 1980s, Korea was only perceived as a “dark,” fearsome state owing to news reports focusing on war, dictatorship, or assassination (Chung Reference Chung[1995] 2010; Kimura Reference Kimura2020). Around the time of the 1988 Seoul Olympics, however, amid popular discourse of kokusaika (internationalization) (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi1994) and Asia’s tourism boom accompanying Japan’s economic growth, an image of Korea as an exotic “foreign land” appeared and was commercially promoted (Chung Reference Chung[1995] 2010). Here, colorful representations of Korean “tradition” such as kimchi and hanbok were marketed to audiences. A new cultural interest in Korea was propelled by the so-called “Winter Sonata Footnote 3 boom,” the massive popularity of the eponymous Korean TV drama broadcast in 2003, which marked the arrival of the Korean Wave, or Hallyu Footnote 4, to Japan. Middle-aged and older Japanese women, the main carriers of this movement, reportedly found a “nostalgic” Korea in Korean TV dramas, projecting their desire for intimacy as something Japan had lost due to postwar high-speed economic growth (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi, Huat and Iwabuchi2008). After 2010, the focus of Hallyu shifted to K-pop idols, especially among younger generations, and together with colorful food and other products, Korea came to be seen as a vibrant, youthful, flourishing country (Kwon Reference Kwon2010; Kimura Reference Kimura2020).
Yet images tagged with #kankokuppo (Koreaish)—rooms, products, and portraits of girls all in a beige palette—hardly align with what has been perceived as Korean to date, such as bright red kimchi dishes or flamboyant K-pop stage sets. What is perceived as “Koreaish” here? How is it configured and identifiably shared among Japanese young women in their teens and early 20s? What makes “Korea” a locus of admiration for these women, and why? By taking Koreaish as an emergent sensuous quality attributed to Korea in contemporary Japan, this study examines the cultural-semiotic rendering of the abstract quality of Koreaish into the “atmosphere (fun’iki) of Korea,” which is ascending as a point of admiration for Japanese young women. Primary data for the study were obtained through fieldwork at a private integrated junior high and high school in suburban Tokyo between 2020 and 2022 and interviews with six hairdressers and a makeup instructor, all in their 20s, who have commercially marketed Koreaish styles in urban TokyoFootnote 5 in 2022. During this period, social media posts with the #kankokuppo hashtag, advertisements, magazines, and related digital content were also collected. Employing the conceptual framework of qualia (Chumley and Harkness Reference Chumley and Harkness2013), I investigate the semiotic processes by which mediatized discourses and commercial practitioners verbalize, regiment, and communicate the quality of Koreaish via cross-modal embodied practices. First, I identify a congruence of dominant quality across discrete objects and bodily conducts across sensory modalities, and reveal the centrality of what I call “soft unity”—a feeling of softness arising from ambiguated boundaries and distinctions. Next, I examine how this emergent quality corresponds to, and is taken up for, the social regimes of value prominent around young, urban, upper-middle-class, educated women in contemporary Japan—namely, an idealized movement away from a divisive society with essential categorization toward a progressive society without boundaries, as well as the valorization of softness as a desirable feminine quality. I argue that the emergence of “soft unity” among Japanese young women is emblematic of the postfeminist reformulation of ideal femininity in neoliberal Japan, where young women are expected to “have it all”—to succeed in both the economic sphere and family life—by deeming themselves as liberated from gender-based inequality while voluntarily embodying normative feminine qualities.
Postfeminism, the evolving gender order, and softness
Over the past forty years, a growing body of feminist scholarship has examined a shifting gender order that more subtly and profoundly governs female bodies in contemporary sociocultural milieus, conceptualizing it as postfeminism (Gill Reference Gill2007; Tasker and Negra Reference Tasker and Negra2007, Reference Gill2008; McRobbie Reference McRobbie2009). Regarding it as deeply intermeshed with neoliberalism, Gill (Reference Gill2007, Reference Gill2008) and McRobbie (Reference McRobbie2009) formulate postfeminism as a cultural sensibility, or patterns and discourses suffusing today’s cultural life, which proclaims that women have already achieved empowerment and equality, and promotes their “self-choice” of normative feminine pursuits, thereby declaring that feminism is no longer needed.
Neoliberalism, or market fundamentalism, which champions free competition of capable individuals in the economic sphere (Harvey Reference Harvey2005), dismantles the categories of social difference that have historically restricted women’s economic participation. Gender-based distinctions are demolished, and women are encouraged to join the global economy as a competing labor force. Yet underneath this ostensible “liberation” from gendered inequality lies a regression to conservative femininity. Childbirth and caregiving, indispensable to replenishing the human capital of next generations, remain assigned to female bodies. Amid shrinking social welfare, women are expected to willingly undertake household caregiving due to their natural dispositions. Yet this time, the subjective reinforcement of long-normative feminine values such as youth, beauty, sexiness, or tenderness appears not as an oppressive norm but as a personal choice and inherent desire of the now-empowered women themselves. Hence, postfeminism manifests as two seemingly contradictory, yet interlocking vectors: the demanifestation of gendered boundaries, leaving entrenched inequalities invisibly intact, and the reactionary idealization of conservative femininity to safeguard childbirth and stabilize the nation (Kikuchi Reference Kikuchi2019). It thereby directs women to succeed in the economy while requiring the traditional family life to win it all by tireless investment in themselves.
This formulation of postfeminism, which initially was concerned with Western media cultures centered on white middle-class women, has been extended to non-Western societies since the 2010s, highlighting its transnational mobility. Dosekun (Reference Dosekun2015) shows that postfeminist culture has been accessible to class-privileged women in the Global South, arguing that postfeminism is centrally associated with class, rather than the state of overall economic development or the historical trajectory of feminism of a given society. Conceptualizing postfeminism as a transnationally traveling culture between educated, urban middle-class elites has invigorated the study of its circulation in non-Western societies, including Asia (e.g., Gwynne Reference Gwynne2013). At the same time, scholars examining postfeminism in East Asian contexts point to aspects distinct from its manifestation in the West. Kikuchi (Reference Kikuchi2019) points out that while Western media culture tends to portray women’s empowerment by focusing on the freedom of sexual(ized) self-expression, in Japan, women’s success is often associated with their ability to perform household chores and embody traditional feminine qualities such as modesty, considerateness, and softness. In the case of China, Iskra (Reference Iskra2023) observes the prominent discourse of glorifying feminine “softness” through holistic spirituality practices among career-oriented women in metropolitan Shenzhen, who face increasing pressure to succeed in both their careers and family life. She argues that this call for female “softening” represents a postfeminist sensibility that promotes national stability through regression to traditional femininity. Although self-sexualization and commodification of the female body can be seen in Japan and other Asian countries (e.g., Gwynne Reference Gwynne2013; Fedorenko Reference Fedorenko2015), in East Asian postfeminist contexts, a tendency to valorize “softness” as a typically feminine quality is particularly commonly observed. In this paper, I examine the admiration of young women toward “Koreaish”—a softness achieved by blurring boundaries, as discussed later—as a nexus of postfeminism, reinforcing the gender order while rendering differences invisible, as it appears in the sociocultural environment surrounding young women in contemporary Japan. Under a political project aiming to obscure social differences, the absence of boundaries is taken up as socially desirable, but is simultaneously linked to normative femininity. At the intersection of these two vectors, I argue, the embodied “Koreaish” culminates in the figure of a young woman who is a competitive career-minded member of the elite, embodying the feminine quality of softness, that is, the femininity most compatible with neoliberalism.
Mizuki High School, where I observed the schoolgirls’ daily practice of the Koreaish style, is a private integrated junior high and high school (chūkōikkankō) located in a lush suburban area near Tokyo. With the mission of nurturing “global human resources (gurōbaru jinzai)Footnote 6 for the next generation,” the school strongly focuses on English language education and international student enrollment, as well as students’ admission to prestigious universities in English-speaking countries such as the US, the UK, and Australia after graduation. As a typical example of what de Mejía (Reference de Mejía2002) calls “elite bilingual schools,” the school is famous in the region for its high tuition fees and viewed as the place where “upwardly mobile, highly educated, higher socio-economic status” (p. x) families, wanting their children to develop bilingualism in high-status languages (especially English), send children to secure better education and employment opportunities, and thus desirable lifestyles and economic advantage. Students at this school are encouraged to develop English proficiency and cosmopolitan attitudes toward cultural differences in order to become future global talents, premised on transnational mobility and family financial resources. In short, female students at this school were urban, upper- to upper-middle-class future global elites. They were not distinguished from male students by grades or academic performance, nor directed to different career paths in their daily schooling. They themselves, as discussed later, regarded gendered boundaries or any other distinction between self and others as irrelevant, outdated, and to be avoided. By focusing on schoolgirls presumed to be among the ones most strongly subjected to the neoliberal gender order, this paper explores the correspondence between the social regime surrounding women in contemporary Japan and the valorization of emerging characteristics attributed to Korea.
Qualia
How can we approach sensuous qualities experienced individually, but shared socially? Charles Sanders Peirce’s semiotic concept of qualia (Peirce Reference Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss[1896] 1960) offers a useful framework for exploring the nexus of sensory perception and social realities. According to Peirce, who categorizes signs based on their “degree of reality” (Gal Reference Gal2017, 132), any quality such as heat, color, texture, or feeling is “a mere abstract potentiality” (Reference Peirce, Hartshorne and Weiss[1896] 1960, 230), that is, a non-instantiated property. Such qualities can only be experienced when embodied in material form or via bodily conduct. That is “qualia”—the embodied, experienceable, “actual instantiation of quality” (Harkness Reference Harkness2013, 14). How, then, can one experience different materials and activities, ranging from the atmosphere of a café to the texture of makeup or a hairstyle perceived in different sensory modalities, as manifestations of the same abstract quality of Koreaish? Harkness (Reference Harkness2013) argues that the socially shared experience of qualia is achieved through the “regimentation of qualic relations,” which renders and habituates each token of qualia as typified and legible as a manifestation of culturally recognizable qualities, or “qualisigns” of cultural value (Munn Reference Munn1986). This linguistic-semiotic regimentation of qualia-quality relationships includes describing or naming qualia, representation, and interaction to socialize the unfamiliar. This means that our experience of sensuous quality is always the result of the way persons, relying on conventional discourses embedded in institutions, take up objects and experiences (Gal Reference Gal2017). The anthropology of qualia takes qualia as “cultural emergents” (Harkness Reference Harkness2015, 579) rather than intrinsic in material objects or the subjective psychological experience of individuals, and explores their social configurations (Chumley and Harkness Reference Chumley and Harkness2013).
As Harkness (Reference Harkness2013) has discussed, once the relationship between multiple qualia and a singular, overarching quality is conventionalized, culturally meaningful qualisigns emerge as “points of cultural orientation” (15) in social actions, and materialize across disparate objects and practices of different sensory modalities. This is facilitated through “rhematization” (Gal Reference Gal2013), whereby formally different objects and events linked by contiguity and proximity are construed as sharing the same qualities and thus resembling each other. In his study of South Korea’s soju drinking ritual, Harkness (Reference Harkness2013) observed the ascendancy of “softness” across multiple sensory modalities, including gustation, audition, and kinaesthesis in alcohol consumption. The “softer” feeling expressed and represented in advertisements and people’s discourse aligned synaesthetically to point to an overarching quality of softness, from the lowered alcohol level of the substance itself to gustation in a form with milder sensation in the throat, or lighter sound emission after tasting. It was also linked to the social experience of drinking, signifying a brighter mood and a softer atmosphere of drinking in company. More importantly, conventionalized qualisigns do not only align across objects and practices, but are also often taken up and contrasted on “axes of differentiation” (Gal Reference Gal, Heller and Duchêne2012) in existing (or modifying) higher-order social concepts and cultural value regimes (Harkness Reference Harkness2013; Gal Reference Gal2017), such as “figures of personhood” (Agha Reference Agha2005), sociality, societal change, and so on. In the case of Harkness (Reference Harkness2013), the enhanced qualia of softness in soju consumption were further linked to and served as emblematic of gendered figures of the ideal consumers of soju. Softness, primarily found in the bodily action of drinking, came to be read as an attribute of the idealized consumer of softer (i.e., lower alcohol) soju, that is, the “soft and tender” young women of South Korea, where the contrasting quality of “roughness or harshness” is devalued in women while widespread among men. As such, the qualia in discursive and semiotic exchanges explain the higher-order shift of cultural value in a society (in this case, the reconceptualization of the ideal relationship between liquor and gender in South Korea) by “standing for, or even explaining, aspects of their social world and history” (Harkness Reference Harkness2015, 493). The socio-cultural realization of qualia is thus also a rich site to observe the transformation of society and its value regimes, centering on the experience of quality.
In light of the foregoing discussions, I posit Koreaish as an emergent “conventional qualisign” (Harkness Reference Harkness2013, 15) experienced (i.e., felt) as the “atmosphere (fun’iki)” of Korea via the attributive capacity of -ppo and the facilitated rhematization. By examining the distributed representations and discourses of practitioners, I first explore interactional processes that render particular qualia out of any given sensuous experiences of things and activities to be construed as Koreaish, thereby identifying the qualia configured as Koreaish. In doing so, I identify a congruence of qualia across discrete objects and domains of practice ranging from photographs to hairstyles, and their transition onto social concepts, including an idealized femininity and the conception of Korea by differentiation from contrasting qualia attributed to Japan. I then discuss ideologies of cultural value circulating among young, urban, global-elite-to-be women in contemporary Japan, which make the qualia of Koreaish legible as a sign of a desirable state of society and a type of femininity.
This study does not aim to identify how much of this style originates in Korea, or how authentically “Koreaish” it is. It has, to be sure, been influenced by the fashion of Korean celebrities or brand advertisements ever more visible in the ongoing Hallyu. What this study is interested in, however, is the phenomenon that when it arrives and begins to circulate in Japan, somehow particular qualia are extracted from the same material objects which could essentially hold any values and qualities, and come to live its own life as Koreaish through specific semiotic regimentation. In my analysis, I demonstrate how the marketing language Korean companies mobilize to promote their products does not necessarily align with how local practitioners describe the features of Koreaish style, and thereby refute the simplistic view that Koreaish is a ready-made, static product imported by global Korean enterprises. Rather, as illustrated, Koreaish has been embodied, communicated, and thus made visible through discursive and embodied practices in local contexts in a manner not reducible to the intentions of any single actor. In demonstrating this, this paper also offers an empirical case study that aligns with the literature on qualia and the ontology of materiality, which emphasizes how the materiality of a commodity and its values are not intrinsic, but are bound to semiotic interactions embedded in the local cultural value regime (Chumley Reference Chumley2017; Gal Reference Gal2017).
A feeling of unity: Koreaish in photographs
Let us begin from where the term Koreaish is most denotationally manifested: Instagram photograph feeds. What does the aesthetic texture embodied in pictures tagged with #kankokuppo tell us about the qualia of Koreaish? As scholarship on photographic images has long emphasized, photographs are never unmediated replicas qua icons of reality, but are semiotic events which produce a certain social reality (Nakassis Reference Nakassis2019; Reyes Reference Reyes2021). The same goes for pictures on Instagram. Besides the choice of objects, angles, or composition, another non-explicit technology that manipulates our perception of events is photo-editing. Various Japanese internet articles provide instructions on how to edit photographs in a “Korean style.” There is a common pattern in these instructions: by softening the contrast and dimming the sharpness of color and illumination, they guide us towards creating a sense of unity. For example, Figure 2 shows one of these how-to manuals retrieved from Isuta, a web magazine featuring trending information and targeting young women. The article states that one can recreate a Korean-style photo in three simple steps—by changing the “contrast,” “highlight,” and “shadow” settings, providing step-by-step instructions as shown below.
Figure 2. How-to instructions for Korean-style photo-editing (Momo 2019).
First, an unedited photograph of café dishes (pancakes and eggs sunny-side-up) is presented, with a description saying, “It looks delicious, but as the colors express too much contrast (merihari), you can’t really say this is a Korean style photo.” The Japanese musical term merihari (“modulation”), combining the words low-pitch (meri) and high-pitch (hari), means both sonic intonation and “contrast” in general. The article first instructs us to turn the contrast bar down to its minimum. Next, we are required to suppress highlights and shadows to create “a feeling of unity.” Here, we can see the attribution of particular qualia to Koreaish in the practice of photo-editing—a feeling of unity achieved by diminishing contrast. Next, we will examine how similar qualia are shared as aesthetic centers of two important corporeal practices in Koreaish: makeup and hairstyling.
Embodied softness: Koreaish in visual and tactile perception
The makeup style regarded as Koreaish among Japanese young women seems to be the most directly influenced by what Korean companies are marketing with certain ingenious “commodity registers” (Agha Reference Agha2011). The common feature of Koreaish makeup identified by the women interviewed was the use of light, milky pink, or coral colors, which align with makeup visuals promoted by Korean cosmetic brands rapidly expanding their market in Japan. One of the most popular brands, Rom&nd, coined the term #muteralnude (a combination of mute and neutral) to introduce their Fall 2022 skin-tone makeup collection (Figure 3). Within the “value projects” (Agha Reference Agha2011) of Korean companies to encode their products with desirable qualities, such as muted or refined, unsaturated light colors, were often framed in such elaborate corporate-made commodity registers, distributed globally. Such cover terms, however, were rarely used when young women themselves explained or instructed on how to apply Koreaish makeup during my fieldwork. In their practices, particular sensuous experiences are cultivated and made legible as the qualia of Koreaish not only linguistically, but also visually and corporeally.
During a private Koreaish makeup lesson in a beauty salon in urban Tokyo (Figure 4), an instructor in her 20s half-irritatedly corrected my eyebrow using light beige powder of a Korean brand, emphasizing the need to create undefined, “soft gradations (yawarakai guradēshon).” She said:
Kankoku no dono- mayuge mo sō desu shi, aishadō mo zenbu sō nan desu kedo, kakukaku shinaitte iu ka. Najimi- Jiwatto iro ga tsuiteru to iu ka. Gradēshon suru toki ni, funwari, yawarakai kanji ni surun desu.
The same goes for all [parts of] Korean [makeup], whether it be eyebrows or eye shadow, it’s not angular. It blends in seamlessly, and the color spreads out smoothly. When doing gradations, you should make them fluffy and soft.
Figure 4. The corner of the beauty salon where the private Koreaish makeup lesson was conducted (December 9, 2022).
Then, pointing to my left eyebrow, which I had drawn myself, she said, “First, touch your skin softer (Mazu, motto yasashiku hada ni furete ageru),” and continued, “This one has a defined outline, so it doesn’t seem soft (Kocchi mayu no rinkaku ga shikkari shiteru kara, mayuge funwari ppoku naku).” Then she pointed to my right eyebrow, which she had drawn, and said, “I think this one has a less defined boundary. It’s not like, ‘Here’s the eyebrow!’ but more like, ‘Where does it begin?’ Like it’s seeping out gently (De, kocchi no hou ga anmari kyoukai ga hakkiri shinai to omou n desu yo ne. Mayu nara ‘Mayu koko ni arimasu!’ mitai na no jya nakute, ‘Are, dokkara mayu?’ mitai na. Jyuwātto mayuge ni natterū mitai na).” This clarifies that achieving a Koreaish “look” is not simply a matter of using Korean brand cosmetics or certain color patterns. It requires tangible adjustments of brushstrokes and color presentation to embody the qualia of “softness” and “undefinedness” that the expert practitioner linguistically, visually, and tactilely regiments.
When I stood up at the end of the lesson, I noticed that the instructor was wearing a light beige knit dress, just like the ones in pictures of #kankokuppo. When I pointed this out, she laughed and said that she usually chooses her clothes and hairstyle to match her makeup, and the outfit of the day was intended to produce a “soft impression (yawarakai inshō).” I asked her if Korean makeup is soft too, and she said yes, and continued:
Iromi ga tōitsu saretetari toka, yawarakai irodattari toka shite, zentai ga tōitsu sareta kanji. Watashi dake ga sō ienai desu kedo, watashi ga kanjiteru kankoku meiku wa sonna kanji desu ka ne.
It’s unified in color, and the colors are soft, so the whole feels unified. This is just my opinion, but I feel like that’s Korean makeup.
Again, the unity (tōitsu sareta kanji) of softness produced by color is interpreted, or felt (kanjiteru), as Koreaish. It serves as an aesthetic point of orientation for the daily self-representation of the instructor as a woman in her early 20s, from makeup to clothing and hairstyling. It is worth noting that the softness of the Koreaish style manifested in makeup can also be read as the softness of the person wearing it. On the vehicle of rhematization, the now conventionalized and socially effective qualia of Koreaish serve as emblems of a state of being and as an identity of objects embodying them. Finally, through examining the practice of hairstyling, we observe the transitivity of Koreaish to gendered personhood, as well as to the conceptualization of Korea itself.
Semiotic stratification of qualia and personhood
“The characteristics of Koreaish hair are softness. And lightness. And femininity (Kankokuppo hea no tokuchō wa, yawarakai. Ato karui. Ato onnarashii),” articulated a stylist confidently while quickly cutting my hair in a Koreaish style. Despite being a completely independent material entity, hair that is seen to possess the quality of softness is interpreted as Koreaish. Not only that, here we see qualia clearly linked to cultural concepts of femininity. Descriptions of Koreaish by practitioners often establish an axis of differentiation by assigning contrasting qualia to that which is “Japanese.” Imbuing hair with a personality of its own, another stylist said:
Nanka nihon no aidoru [no kamigata] tokatte, “Ushiro no kami! Maegami!” mitai na no ga ne, hakkiri shitemasen? Dokuritsu shita sutairu wo totteru. Dakedo [kankoku no kamigata wa] dokkara ga sō iu kami dette iu sakaime ga aimai, aimaitte iu ka, soko wo neratte tsukutte iru n desu kedo. Aimai na kanji ga suru.
You know, [hairstyles of] Japanese idols are like, “Here’s the back of the head!” and “Bangs!” They are distinct, and each section has an independent style. But [in Korean style] the boundary is ambiguous, or I mean, that’s what we’re aiming to produce. It somehow feels ambiguous.
Here, contrasting qualia of “divisiveness” and “ambiguity” of boundaries (sakaime) are attributed to the hairstyles of “Japan” and “Korea” respectively. What is happening here is, of course, “erasure” (Irvine and Gal Reference Irvine, Gal and Kroskrity2000) to underscore the difference between Japanese and Korean styles, given that K-pop idol hairstyles also often feature bangs and intense colors or shapes. Yet this differentiation simultaneously entails the stratification of qualia relations. Lastly, we examine the semiotic rendering of the qualia of Koreaish as a point of aspiration.
Atsuto Onoda, a hairdresser at the Nagoya branch of a major Japanese hair salon chain, has been gaining popularity for his patterned posts on Instagram (Figure 5). On the cover picture, “Kankoku mae/Kankoku go,” literally meaning “Before Korea/After Korea,” is placed on two nearly identical photographs of the same model in the same posture. This staged parallelism accentuates the difference between the two photographs—slightly tighter and revealing clothes, earrings, a subtle smile on the model’s face, and above all, her rippling, wavy hairstyle in the “after” photo. A straight line is drawn over the hair on the “before” photo and a curved one on the “after” photo, further specifying how to read these two hairstyles. This juxtaposition of two pictures in a single frame reminds us of our familiar photographic genre, “before-and-after,” which is an “image sequence” (Reyes Reference Reyes2021) that orients our reading of the image as a narrative of the temporal uplift of the figures portrayed. Joined into this genre, the images create a hierarchy among the qualia assigned to each hairstyle: softness and curvilinearity associated with Korea serve as desirable counterpoints to the straight lines and divisiveness assigned to Japan. Simultaneously, these representations define ideal femininity as contrasting qualia are cast onto the nature of the woman in the pictures—the softer, the better. Here, “Korea” does not signify a country with a geographical location at all, but an aesthetic treatment carried out to change the state of objects and persons by bestowing the qualia of Koreaish to them. These circulating advertisements tell us that, by going through “Korea,” our hair, and thus ourselves, will transform into a desirable state of being, from linear division to curvilinear ambiguity.
Figure 5. Screenshot of the post “Before Korea/After Korea” (Onoda Reference Onoda2021).
The analysis of the qualia-quality regiment so far has revealed the prominent components of Koreaish, namely “softness,” “ambiguity,” and overall “unifiedness.” I call this qualic amalgam a “soft unity”—a feeling of overall softness arising from blurred boundaries. It is sought and felt in discrete entities by different groups of people across sensory modalities, as a culturally valorized point of orientation. Furthermore, qualia transferred to conceptualizations of “Korea” and femininity are mutually defined and legible along an axis of differentiation, assigning contrasting qualities such as “rigidness,” “sharpness,” and “divisiveness” to “Japan.” The semiotics that hierarchize these contrasted qualia lead us to perceive objects and feminine figures deemed to possess Koreaish as ideals. Given that softness has traditionally been associated with femininity and differentiated from masculinity in Japanese society (Ochs Reference Ochs, Duranti and Goodwin1992), what we see here is the recurrence of the familiar normative “soft” femininity. Why, then, is it perceived as so “sophisticated” and “calming” by young women today? A local value regime observed through ethnographic investigation illuminates the discursive conditions that facilitate the valuation of soft unity in comparison to the bounded divisions associated with “Japan.”
“Soft unity” as qualia of the neoliberal feminine ideal
One prominent value regime among female students actively performing the Koreaish style is a negative evaluation and general avoidance of essentialist categorizations, especially of gender. As mentioned earlier, these girls, who are not given different norms based on gender in most aspects of school life, strongly resisted teachers who foregrounded gender-based stereotypes like “boys/girls should/shouldn’t do something,” criticizing them as “wrong” and “outdated.” They even avoided labeling peer groups among their classmates when I asked them to do so in a group interview, as the students determinedly explained that “people can’t be divided into types” and “categorization creates discrimination and prejudice.” These evaluations demonstrate clear moral judgment among them, critical of any “division” based on social differences. Such daily divisiveness was perceived as emblematic of Japanese society, and evaluated as “immature,” “outdated,” and morally “incorrect.” Describing her experience of heteronormative gender distinction at a Japanese school after moving from the US, high school freshman Arisa said, “At the time I felt like, ‘Wow, I’m in Japan now.’” Conversely, this highlights their orientation toward a society with ambiguous boundaries as the “mature” and “desirable” sociality of the future.
This evasive attitude toward explicit manifestation of social difference parallels a broader narrative of social change in today’s Japan. Articulated in discourses calling the present “the age of diversity (tayōsei no jidai)” (Iwabuchi Reference Iwabuchi2021), this view frames a desire to transform the hierarchical Japanese society, with its strict seniority system and gender-binary dichotomy, into a flexible, inclusive one where individuals with diverse gradations of difference can fully realize their potential. This progressive view of social desirability—the shift from a rigid, divided, and thus immature society into a soft, borderless, mature society—is becoming prominent among the younger generation, particularly those attending higher education, where the rejection of essentialist social categories has become common sense (Dales & Burbeck Reference Dales, Bulbeck, Elliott, Katagiri and Sawai2013). I argue that within this very value regime of social transition, soft unity is taken up and valorized by serving as an emblem of an idealized societal state. Soft unity, or the perception of a lack of boundaries and divisions, is pursued not only in political and discursive spheres but also as an ideal to be materialized, performed, and consumed in everyday cultural life. This orientation is increasingly observable in mediatized representations and discourse focused on young women. For example, Lumine, a popular Japanese urban fashion mall whose advertisements have been noted to reflect and shape young women’s values (Yonezawa Reference Yonezawa2015), released the advertisement copy for Winter 2023: “Watashitachi no kyōkaisen wa aimai de ii (Our boundaries can be ambiguous)” (Lumine 2023; Figure 6). Displayed on gigantic billboards at the bustling train stations in metropolitan Tokyo, the advertisement, centering on a female figure standing on a mountain surrounded by a cold winter landscape, calls out to “watashitachi (us),” neither men nor women, contextualizing the presence of boundaries in each of the viewers’ here-and-now. By contrast, the ambiguity of boundaries is attributed to “somewhere ahead,” the direction in which the woman gazes up at.
Figure 6. Lumine’s campaign visual for Winter 2023 on a billboard in Shinjuku Station.
Koreaish, a culturally salient qualisign as a point of orientation among young women, arises within this broad aspiration toward an idealized social space of “somewhere ahead” where boundaries are ambiguous. Swept up in this value regime, “soft unity” is inferred from any possible qualities of commodities flowing in via Hallyu, and comes to be recognized as a sign of “sophistication,” “stylishness,” and “calm,” as in the interpretations of the “atmosphere of Korea.” Facilitated rhematization further transfers these qualia onto the linked feminized personhood to make it legible as a morally advanced, sophisticated persona, and serves as an emblem of identity for women embracing this aesthetic. This is not to say that there is no social boundary or hierarchy among them. By being seen as having non-dichotomous characteristics, these girls can position themselves as progressive, cosmopolitan, and sophisticated. Their growing interest in soft unity is not primarily directed towards conventional soft femininity, but towards an ideal sociality on an axis of social desirability, a call for a change-of-state from a society of divisive boundaries towards an advanced one of ambiguous unity.
However, if we recall that the postfeminist rearticulation of gender order appears as two seemingly contradicting vectors—liberation from categories and resurgence of conservative feminine quality—the indicator of social desirability may be just one part of this intersection. Social boundaries are ambiguated in order to proclaim women’s freedom of choice, but this simultaneously demands the self-cultivation of the feminine value of softness. Soft unity, a complex of softness and ambiguity, is thus legible in this value regime as a quality of sophisticated progressive society on the one hand, and as a highly prized feminine trait on the other. As seen in hair styling, engagement with the Koreaish aesthetic in fact means encoding the self in traditional soft femininity. This time, however, it appears as a consumable point of orientation in line with the vision of an egalitarian, progressive view of society, actively aspired to. Under the collusion of the two social regimes of liberation and gender norms with the axes of outdated/advanced and masculinity/femininity, when soft unity is connected to the latter respectively, there emerges a “liberated” modern female figure with highly normative femininity. This is crystallized in a metapragmatic stereotype (Agha Reference Agha2005, 45) brought up in interviews with female students, where they described girls embracing the Koreaish style as “pretty, kind, and smart,” “kirakira joshi.” Kirakira joshi (“glitter girl”) refers to the archetype of the young woman circulating in Japan who “has it all”—who is high-achieving in academic and professional pursuits, but also fashionable and sophisticated, enjoying a fulfilling private life encompassing personal hobbies, healthy routines, regular overseas travel, and a (heterosexual) romantic relationship. She is capable, beautiful, successful, and most importantly, the kind of woman other women can admire, as shown in the female students’ descriptions of girls seen as embodying the Koreaish aesthetic at school as “my ideal type” or “popular with both boys and girls.” She does not merely represent girlhood for males, but also the most up-to-date soft feminine ideal for women themselves to admire, who best personifies postfeminist sensibility. I argue that the ascending qualia of Koreaish among Japanese young women today are emblematic of the reformulation of ideal femininity in neoliberal Japan. Embodying Koreaish can signify belonging to a progressive society imbued with soft unity, rendered as pertaining to Korea, as opposed to the divided and outdated Japan, especially among urban women attending higher education. Yet, the aesthetic and discursive practices of Koreaish centering around soft unity also act as vehicles for socializing young women on idealized femininity in contemporary Japan. Cultural orientation toward the Koreaish soft unity through everyday aesthetics can be understood as a neoliberal “art of (self)government” (Inoue Reference Inoue2007, 85) where women are rather subjectively accommodating themselves to the postfeminist cultural logic.
Conclusion
This paper has explored the “atmosphere (fun’iki)” of Korea as an object of admiration among young women in Japan through the semiotic configuration of Koreaish. Koreaish is a conventional qualisign which is felt as the qualia of soft unity, a feeling of the absence of boundaries and divisions, appearing as points of cultural orientation for Japanese young women across multiple daily practice domains. Through the circulating representations and discourses around the aesthetics, Korea emerges as a desirable social space that manifests culturally valorized qualities taken up by the value regimes of sociality among Japanese young women, despite its association with highly normative femininity. The emergence of Koreaish is thus legible as a nexus of the reformulation of feminine ideal in postfeminist Japan, which manifests as an intersection of the demanifestation of differences and the reversion to conservative feminine values.
By presenting a shifting view of Korea among young women, this paper provides insight into the topical question of the sharp generational rupture arising in the perception of Korea in contemporary Japan. While most members of the old generation remain largely unaware of the Koreaish trend as it mainly spreads on Instagram, whose core users are women in their teens and twenties, gaps in what “Korea” signifies to youth and the older generation, who have understood Korea primarily in a politico-historical context, have recently become prominent in mass media and among intellectuals (Kimura Reference Kimura2020), and increasingly in broader society. Such changes in generational perceptions of Korea in Japan today can be better understood when we consider how the perception of Korea changes through everyday semiotic processes, particularly in the often-overlooked realm of the sensory experience. At the same time, the historically recurrent feminization of Korea in representations in Japan needs to be further examined.
This paper also highlights the relativity of commodity values and the significance of ethnographic attention to local discursive and semiotic interactions to understand their emergent meanings (Chumley Reference Chumley2017; Gal Reference Gal2017). Despite Hallyu’s simultaneous delivery of the same products and contents worldwide, their properties and values are formulated through semiotic processes embedded in local cultural regimes in ways not reducible to anyone’s intention. Insofar as the interpretation and valorization of a commodity is culturally emergent, this will never be a one-way flow or static soft power controlled by pinpointable agents such as media, marketers, or governments. In recent years, some Korean companies seem more aware of the emergence of Koreaish in Japan and are trying to align their marketing strategies accordingly. For example, in October 2022, ABLY, Korea’s largest fashion shopping website, changed its Japanese branch site’s name from “Pastel” to “amood”—which of course reminds us of “a mood” similar to “atmosphere,” with the slogan, “Akogare no mūdo wo, ichiban yasuku, kashikoku (Get the mood you admire, most cheaply and wisely)” (amood.jp 2022). Interestingly, however, certain online reviews presumably from young female users state that “some of their products are not Koreaish” (Ikeda Reference Ikeda2022). These comments evaluating Korean products as not properly Koreaish clarify that commodities from Korea or the words “mood” or “atmosphere” themselves cannot unconditionally make one feel the “atmosphere” of Korea. The qualia of Koreaish can only be experienced by participating in the specific aesthetic embodied practices and discourse of Japanese young women today, which has certainly been initiated by, and is now directing the forms of, Hallyu.
Acknowledgements
I am deeply grateful to our guest editors, Joyhanna Yoo and Mie Hiramoto, as well as Risako Ide, Yuichi Asai, Tomoko Tokunaga, Cade Bushnell, Kohki Watabe, Satoko Shao-Kobayashi, Kendra McDuffie, and the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful comments on earlier versions of this article. The article was also greatly improved by the careful feedback from Charlotte Eubanks, Tina Chen, Yuki Obayashi, and Adam DeCaulp during the Cultivating Early Career Networks Between Global Asias and Japan Studies hosted by the Global Asias Initiative at Pennsylvania State University. Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Nicholas Harkness and the participants of the 2021-22 Harvard-Yenching Institute Linguistic and Semiotic Anthropology Training Program for stimulating discussions that inspired me to examine the aesthetics of Koreaish through the framework of qualia.
Open access
