Interest in anime, gaming and K-pop is fuelling a boom in Korean and Japanese university degrees that is helping to revive modern languages departments struggling with falling enrollments.
Acceptances to study Korean more than trebled from 50 to 175 between 2012 and 2018, while Japanese places grew by 71 percent in the same period, according to a report published this year by the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML). More students now study Korean than Russian, and more take Japanese than Italian, the report shows.
Experts who spoke to the Guardian said this was due to the popularity of east Asian culture — in particular K-pop and J-pop, Japanese video games, anime and popular films such as Parasite, and series such as the violent survival drama Squid Game — which has been boosted by their accessibility on platforms such as Netflix and Spotify.
Photo: AP
According to Netflix data, the South Korean series Squid Game is comfortably its most viewed show of all time, with 1.65 billion hours of the series streamed in the first four weeks after its release date.
The rising popularity of Korean culture in particular, a phenomenon referred to as the Korean wave or K-wave, or hallyu, is influencing trends in a number of sectors, from cosmetics and fashion to food and household appliances.
SHIFT IN INTEREST
Photo: EPA-EFE
At the heart of the K-wave is K-pop, which in 2017 was already estimated to be a nearly US$5 billion industry. The South Korean K-pop group BTS set a new record and made headlines for achieving the most YouTube views for a music video debut — more than 101.1 billion within 24 hours for last year’s song Dynamite.
Emma Cayley, UCML’s chief executive, said: “It is clear that there has been a shift away from more traditionally taught European languages to non-European.”
She said this included Arabic and Chinese, which combined with Japanese and Korean are driving the recovery of the study of languages and culture in universities.
Photo: AFP
A recent UCML study based on universities self-reporting their language provision suggested the proportion of universities offering Japanese rose from 19 percent in 2018 to 39 percent this school year, while a small increase was observed in departments offering Korean.
Lecturers say students often start studying Korean and Japanese as a hobby while at school on language-learning platforms such as Duolingo, with recent figures in the UK showing Japanese was the fastest-growing language and Korean the fourth fastest.
CULTURAL INTEREST
Photo: AFP
“They started learning Japanese just casually, for fun, and then they thought ‘this is fun’ so they want to study more seriously either as a degree or as an optional subject,” said Kazuki Morimoto, a Japanese lecturer at the University of Leeds.
Morimoto said he had noticed a shift away from students opting to combine Japanese with business or economics 10 to 20 years ago to improve their job prospects, towards students studying the language and culture by itself for the love of it, although many do still find jobs connected to Japan as graduates.
He thinks young people have been influenced by the spread of the culture on social media as well as by a strategic program of cultural diplomacy initiated by the Japanese government in the run-up to the rugby World Cup and Tokyo Olympics. Many students were also drawn to the prospect of a year in Japan, he added.
Jaeuk Park, a Korean lecturer at Leeds, said his students typically studied Korean as a result of their love for K-pop and K-dramas, although some were also interested in understanding more about North Korea, a notoriously secretive nation.
Sarah Keith, who researches Korean popular culture at Macquarie University in Australia, said its appeal to westerners was a result of “how global culture is now,” with many Korean creators having grown up consuming Hollywood films and European culture.
As a result, their cultural outputs are a “balance of familiarity and novelty” that westerners find compelling. “For example in Squid Game, the dramatic pacing and arc of the show are intelligible to viewers worldwide, but at the same time it engages with specifically Korean themes which are totally new to foreign audiences,” she said.
That US assistance was a model for Taiwan’s spectacular development success was early recognized by policymakers and analysts. In a report to the US Congress for the fiscal year 1962, former President John F. Kennedy noted Taiwan’s “rapid economic growth,” was “producing a substantial net gain in living.” Kennedy had a stake in Taiwan’s achievements and the US’ official development assistance (ODA) in general: In September 1961, his entreaty to make the 1960s a “decade of development,” and an accompanying proposal for dedicated legislation to this end, had been formalized by congressional passage of the Foreign Assistance Act. Two
Despite the intense sunshine, we were hardly breaking a sweat as we cruised along the flat, dedicated bike lane, well protected from the heat by a canopy of trees. The electric assist on the bikes likely made a difference, too. Far removed from the bustle and noise of the Taichung traffic, we admired the serene rural scenery, making our way over rivers, alongside rice paddies and through pear orchards. Our route for the day covered two bike paths that connect in Fengyuan District (豐原) and are best done together. The Hou-Feng Bike Path (后豐鐵馬道) runs southward from Houli District (后里) while the
March 31 to April 6 On May 13, 1950, National Taiwan University Hospital otolaryngologist Su You-peng (蘇友鵬) was summoned to the director’s office. He thought someone had complained about him practicing the violin at night, but when he entered the room, he knew something was terribly wrong. He saw several burly men who appeared to be government secret agents, and three other resident doctors: internist Hsu Chiang (許強), dermatologist Hu Pao-chen (胡寶珍) and ophthalmologist Hu Hsin-lin (胡鑫麟). They were handcuffed, herded onto two jeeps and taken to the Secrecy Bureau (保密局) for questioning. Su was still in his doctor’s robes at
Mirror mirror on the wall, what’s the fairest Disney live-action remake of them all? Wait, mirror. Hold on a second. Maybe choosing from the likes of Alice in Wonderland (2010), Mulan (2020) and The Lion King (2019) isn’t such a good idea. Mirror, on second thought, what’s on Netflix? Even the most devoted fans would have to acknowledge that these have not been the most illustrious illustrations of Disney magic. At their best (Pete’s Dragon? Cinderella?) they breathe life into old classics that could use a little updating. At their worst, well, blue Will Smith. Given the rapacious rate of remakes in modern
RSS