Center-periphery models of media, like television or cinema, broadcast a single, static cultural brand. What consumers receive is precisely what media firms hard-code into their productions, and what continues to sell is what remains on the airwaves.  This market-driven approach spread like wildfire in Japan in the latter half of the 20th century, fueled by entrepreneurs like Ibuka Masaru, founder of the Sony Corporation, who adamantly stuck to the core mission of “first for consumers,” and it soon spread to neighboring countries (Iwabuchi 2002:24).  In the case of center-periphery media, youth and all other viewers are merely the spectators of corporate-dictated communication, only able to take a somewhat more hands-on role by reimagining this communication through mediums like online fanfiction and fandom communities. This singularity does not preclude the communicative possibilities of these transnational flows, but it does designate this type of localized media as cultural communication for youth by capitalist elites who directly tailor culture to suit profit.

This center-periphery cultural communication is made more potent by the localization of television, the adaptation of a product to a target demographic that is typically outside of the country of origin.  Localization allows transnational flows of digital capital to be passed and absorbed more readily across borders.  Little is off-limits.  Production companies may alter language, images, and themes to “deodorize” products of any overwhelming “cultural scent,” thus making them more digestible for consumers in other countries or regions (Tobin 2004: 58).  By removing any overt cultural “distractions” from the experience, localized media enables audiences to fully embrace the fantasy of media without being thrown off course by overwhelming difference.  

Occasionally, social pressures and periods of economic transition can universalize static brands of center-periphery communication, making the narrative both appealing and relatable to audiences across countries once thought to be separated by seas of difference.  With the Korean Wave in the mid-2000s, Korean dramas began to take hold with young women in Hong Kong and Singapore.  While these same viewers tended to dismiss Japanese dramas as overly sexual and “too Western,” the Korean dramas were well-received because of their emphasis on family, romanticized love, and characters that embodied a blend of traditional values and modern ideals of working-class youth at a time when women across East Asia were becoming increasingly immersed in the urban workforce (Lin & Tong 2011: 8-9).  The Korean dramas’ prepackaged images of urban capitalism resonated with viewers in other countries because they hinged upon the borderless experiences of youth in cities across the region at a time of economic flux. 

In this sense, Korean media firms did not have to explicitly deodorize their products because capitalism had done the work for them, flattening out differences and allowing urban youth to connect with an imagined communal identity (Anderson 1983).  They commodified wide-reaching commonalities, thematically constructing a product, a myth of “East Asianness” that crossed borders as a sort of ideological capital and carved new spaces abroad.

When looking at television that flows beyond the limited sphere of a single region, however, cultural forces alone struggle to flatten the hills of difference enough to allow a truly global transit of media.   A more aggressive example of true corporate-driven localization on a global scale, also known as “glocalization,” is perhaps best embodied by Pokémon, the Japanese sensation that continues to sweep across the world more than 15 years after it became a global phenomenon.  When Pokémon first expanded to the United States, corporate localizers from Nintendo and 4Kids Entertainment were faced with the challenge of adapting what had already been a smash hit in Japan for an American audience that might reject the very aspects of Japanese culture that contributed to the brand’s initial success.  These localizers changed character names, reconfigured the dialogue and relationships between heroes and villains to definitively crystallize the line between good and evil, and removed any dynamics that were considered “too Japanese” for Western audiences (Tobin 2004: 58-9).  And, much to the displeasure of Pokémon’s most rabid American fanboys, two episodes of the anime were never aired in the United States because their content, including a beauty contest between an elderly transgender man and a highly sexualized minor, was considered downright impossible to translate and sanitize for audiences outside of Japan (Katsuno and Maret 2004).    

Perhaps most intriguing is that many American children recognized then and continue to recognize now that Pokémon is a distinctly Japanese commodity, yet this difference was not and is not a distraction from the fantasy (Tobin 2004, 64-5).  To these children, the “Japaneseness” of Pokémon appears just as fantastical as the fighting monsters themselves, and it is the universal themes of friendship, competition, and good versus evil in which they find common ground.  Essentially, the corporate localization of Pokémon maintained difference to captivate and intrigue American youth, but it subtracted enough of that difference so as to not designate the culture as Other.  It was not, however, a universalized or hybrid cultural product, but rather a scrubbed-down attempt to reach a new market. 

References

Iwabuchi, Koichi. Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002.

Tobin, Joseph. Pikachu’s Global Adventure: Making Sense of the Rise and Fall of Pokémon. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2004.

Lin, Angel and Tong, Avin. “East Asian Pop Culture: Analysing the Korean Wave.” Hong Kong Scholarship Online (September 2011), pp. 1-30.

Katsuno, Hirofumi and Maret, Jeffrey. “Localizing the Pokémon TV Series for the American Market” in Joseph Tobin, Pikachu’s Global Adventure: Making Sense of the Rise and Fall of Pokémon. Durham: Duke University Press, 2004, pp. 91-94.

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso Books, 2006.