Thanks to the tension between the two countries, Japanese and Korean pop has developed in isolation. But all that is changing
J-poppers! Turning Japanese is sorry for having treated you for so long as little more than young, dumb starlets who squeal soppy, high-pitched sentiments over painfully crass Casio demo track ditties, designed solely to suck money from the pockets of teens too young to know any better. Little did we know that you pretty, pretty folks (and you really are all so very, very pretty) are at the frontline of a flourishing cultural exchange with your Korean K-pop counterparts.
Not that it’s always been this way. Korean-Japanese relations have remained frayed since the second world war, as Japan has never officially apologized for its colonization of the Korean peninsula between 1909 and 1945. As a form of cultural revitalization after its liberation, Korea banned all cultural imports from Japan, and for decades the two countries’ pop markets developed largely in isolation from one another, which created the roaring black market pop trade of illegal CD-Rs. (This is not, however, the only instance of people committing crimes for J-pop).
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