Transfers between Eastern and Western content on streaming platforms are becoming more and more common. streaming, always seeking to conquer a global audience. After its global success, The Money Heist It had a Korean version on Netflix. AND The squid game It became an American contest that recreated the series’ tests. The cultural industry is increasingly committed to creating a single hybrid content, often inspired by literature, with which to seduce both markets. They have done it with series like Shogunfrom this Tuesday in full in the Disney+ catalog, The sympathizer, Tokyo Vice (both on HBO Max) and Pachinko (Apple TV+).
“A good culture clash is always juicy for screenwriters, because it generates conflict and enriches the plots,” Lorenzo Mejino, expert in international series and co-author, along with Paula Hergar, of the book, highlighted last Monday by phone. Around the world in 80 series (Lynx).
The advertising agency Dentsu, a Japanese company, conducted a survey in July 2022 analyzing the popularity of the anime and the characteristics of its consumption in the United States, asking inhabitants between 18 and 54 years old, the population sector most valued by advertisers. The results show that it is a product that has especially conquered Generation Z (those under 25). 44% of them, the equivalent of 19 million viewers, not counting those who are older, watch the most viral titles of this genre.
The number of Americans who watch Korean dramas, called k-dramas, is similar: 18 million, most of them young people, according to the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA). Therefore, in addition to converting titles such as One Piece and Cowboy Bebop, almost every on-demand content service has its own original series that combines both cultures. They especially try to attract young people, who no longer know cultural barriers like generations before the Internet did. They are the ones who jump over those two centimeter high barriers that are the subtitles without any problem, as the director of ParasitesBong Joon-ho, when collecting unprecedented Golden Globe and Oscar awards for Korean cinema in 2020.
In many cases, the source material is adapted for Western audiences. Chinese star Liu Cixin, successful science fiction author, sold the rights to his novel twice The three body problem, remembers Mejino. With one of them, an extensive and baroque Chinese version was created like the original text, with more than 30 chapters of more than 40 minutes each. Netflix paid to work on the English adaptation and commissioned it to the creators of Game of Thrones. At the moment, it has an eight-episode season that condenses characters and moves the plot from Asia to the very British Oxford. Even British television, specifically the ITV channel, has turned to a Japanese best-seller like Hideo Yokoyama to convert one of his mystery novels, Six fourabout the kidnapping of a girl in the north of Tokyo, in a series that changes its location on screen and takes the case to the United Kingdom.
Many other projects reach the screens in a more organic way, due to a simple demographic phenomenon: more and more Americans of Asian descent occupy creative and executive positions in Hollywood and other cultural industries. It is Soo Hugh, the showrunner of Pachinko, which is awaiting a second season. It is a South Korean and Canadian television series that traces four generations of a Korean family in Japan and the United States, based on the 2017 novel of the same name by South Korean-American author Min Jin Lee.
Despite the great increase in content in the United States — in the last 15 years they have gone from 3% of their characters on screen to 16%, according to the University of Southern California — and abroad with characters and stories connected to Asia and the Pacific Islands, more than 70% of viewers from these countries are dissatisfied with the authenticity of their representation on television and film, according to calculations by the non-profit organization Gold House and the consulting firm McKinsey & Co.
Sonia Dueñas, researcher at the Carlos III University of Madrid and expert in the Korean audiovisual industry, remembers that the country’s new cinema has been having a lot of impact for years and Hollywood is always aware of these phenomena. “But this transfer also occurs in the opposite direction: after the United States made a remake from his oldboy, Park Chan-wook adapted the Welsh novel Fake identity in The maid”, he points out this Tuesday by phone. In that film, he swapped the Victorian England of the text for the Japanese occupation of Korea. It is the sign of globalization, of which platforms are powerful ambassadors.
Park Chan-wook himself is part of the The sympathizer (HBO Max), based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Vietnamese-American writer Viet Thanh Nguyen. It’s about a thriller starring a Franco-Vietnamese communist spy, during the last days of the Vietnam War and his subsequent exile to the United States, with Hoa Xuande as the protagonist and Sandra Oh and Robert Downey Jr. in the cast. The Warner platform has also already launched the second season of Tokyo Vice. The story of an American persecuted by the Japanese mafia in the Japanese capital is based on the book of the same name by Jake Adelstein, the first Western journalist who managed to join the editorial staff of the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun. The production describes many problems of Japanese society trying to avoid clichés.
In the world of academic research, the term westernize has a derogatory component that marks Western countries “as the first world compared to those in the East considered almost the third world,” explains Sonia Dueñas.
In this regard, the Belgian Frederik Cryns, a professor of History at the Kyoto International Research Center for Japanese Studies who has been based in Japan for decades, has advised Disney+ on Shogun, which is behind Rachel Kondo, of Japanese descent. This Adaptation of the novel by James Clavell, which already had a first version in the eighties with Richard Chamberlain, is set in the years of the arrival of the first Europeans to feudal Japan. “For us it was important that, unlike the first series, this time the Japanese point of view had the same weight as the Western one,” he explained to this newspaper at the beginning of March, coinciding with the premiere of the remake.
You can follow EL PAÍS Television on x or sign up here to receive our weekly newsletter.
