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| "Daemado is our territory" |
With a rapidly declining population - which has resulted in fewer people owning driving licenses - Japan’s anti-Korea campaign has had to switch from its use of traditional black vans - known as ‘gaisensha’ - which freely broadcast hate-speech on the streets of Japanese cities, to more modern and innovative methods. Key to this has been the launch of the ‘Hate Korea’ campaign on social network site Twitter. The Government hopes that by embracing technology, it will be able to reach out to a new audience, possibly even outside Japan.
As part of the plan, Japanese citizens are being encouraged to share their hatred of all things Korean under a so-called ‘hate_korea hashtag’. But people are being asked to add the ‘hashtag’ to all their Twitter messages – no matter what the subject, in the hope of making it a trending topic on Twitter during 2011 - raising awareness of the anti-Korean Wave which has already found success over the last few months, particularly in China and Taiwan. However, this has not been enough to stop the newly created ‘Korean Wave Index’ moving steadily higher on the Korean Stock Market, where it is traded.
Despite the animosity, as it’s closest neighbor Japan still leaves the keys to the country with Korea when it goes on holiday, but recently there has been growing disquiet in Tokyo political circles over what is increasingly seen as a cultural annexation of the country by Korean drama, popular music and makgeolli, a native-Korean rice wine that has incapacitated a significant number of Japan’s dwindling population. This three-pronged strategy has respectively neutralized Japanese housewives, young people, and older male office workers, leaving Japan with no effective cultural defense. Many believe it is already too late to resist the Korean cultural invasion, and the initial take-up of the ‘hate_korea’ hashtag has been slow – with neither of the country’s teenagers using it so far.
The ‘Korean Wave’ - or ‘hallyu’ as it is known, was inspired by a generation of Seoul bureaucrats who spent their spare time in university playing the PC computer game ‘Civilization’. As this ‘C-Generation’ took over from the earlier ‘386 Generation’ and began to direct foreign policy in Korea, they quickly realized that contrary to previous thinking Korea was unlikely to win a military victory against the rest of the world, and utilizing what they learned from Civilization, they began to focus Korean strategy on achieving a cultural victory instead. The new strategy appears to be achieving results in Japan, which until recently was trying to win an economic victory - a plan which initially showed promise but then stagnated several turns ago.
While Japan flounders in the face of Korea’s unique and superior culture, the progress of the Korean Wave has been slower in China, which appears to be successfully pursuing a military victory strategy.
Related Links
Twitter #hate_korea
Korean culture 'invades' Japan, a century after annexation
Hallyu faces turning point
Anti-Korean Wave Sweeps Taiwan
Uyoku dantai
Civilization
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