CONSUMER DESIRES, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND CULTURAL CIRCULATION IN MILLENNIAL BHUTAN

KOREAN FANCY:
CONSUMER DESIRES, NATIONAL IDENTITY, AND CULTURAL CIRCULATION IN MILLENNIAL BHUTAN

Draft—not for circulation, duplication, or citation

I. INTRODUCTION

Bhutan is a small country located on the southern slopes of the Himalayan mountain range between the very large countries of China (more specifically, its Tibet Autonomous Region) and India. It enjoys a certain amount of celebrity in the world's press as a polity based on "Gross National Happiness" (GNH), as an exclusive travel destination, and as a constitutional monarchy lately transitioning to democracy. Although geographic isolation continues to affect the lives of Bhutan's people, as well as the image that the country presents to outsiders, connections with other parts of the globe have multiplied over recent decades, especially since the introduction of TV broadcasting and internet service in 1999. Mass-mediated forms of cultural exchange influence the lifestyles of ordinary Bhutanese people in increasingly visible ways, even as the preservation of cultural tradition remains one of the pillars of GNH policy.

This essay explores a specific aspect of cultural change in contemporary Bhutan, namely, the marked interest that young Bhutanese consumers have shown toward South Korean popular culture in the new millennium. In 2006, for example, the Bhutanese film industry became the first of many around the world to remake or re-imagine one of the signature movies of the Korean Wave, My Sassy Girl (Yǒpkijǒgin kǔnyǒ, 2001). Ask a Bhutanese teenager about his preferred hairstyle, and he (or she) may very tell you that he likes to wear it "Korean." And in Thimphu, the nation's capital, one of the most successful fashion boutiques of recent years seduced customers by advertising on its shop sign that it "deals in all [manner of] Korean fancy [goods]." Taking a cue from the curious verbiage on the sign, we will periodically refer to the distinctive local pattern of Koreaphilic consumption in Bhutan as a "Korean fancy," in part to distinguish it from the more generic phenomenon familiar to people around the world as the Korean Wave.

To understand the significance of Bhutan's "Korean fancy," this essay proposes, it is necessary to consider its emergence within three interlocking contexts. The first is the micro-history of Bhutan's integration into the global media system, which entered into a new phase in the year 1999. The second is the broader evolution of the international phenomenon called in Korean Hallyu or, in English, the Korean Wave, which has witnessed the demand for South Korean cultural products rise impressively throughout Asia and in other parts of the world since the end of the twentieth century. The Korean Wave has also generated a substantial scholarly literature, opening up possibilities for cross-cultural comparison. The third framework of analysis is the ongoing public debate within Bhutan over issues of cultural identity and personal appearance, which in turn relates to the politics of GNH. These three contexts interact to make Bhutan's "Korean fancy," on the one hand, a striking, if still largely unexplored, case of the Korean Wave's success in penetrating diverse markets, and, on the other hand, and utterly without contradiction, a rather loose set of communally negotiated symbols that bears a somewhat tenuous relationship to Korea as a geographic entity.

If scholars of the Korean Wave have thus far paid little attention to Bhutan, that neglect is not altogether surprising. With a population of about 700,000, Bhutan occupies a minuscule share of the global marketplace for pop-culture commodities. In addition to Bhutan's geographic remoteness, the disciplinary gap that conventionally separates East Asian studies and Himalayan studies has also worked to prevent a broader awareness. Since the two academic communities do not for the most part overlap, the recent explosion of interest in South Korean "soft power" among East Asianists may easily escape the attention of a researcher specializing in the Himalayas, especially if she or he is a resident of that region. Conversely, the cultural ethnography of Bhutan remains unfamiliar terrain for most experts on East Asia, who routinely relegate that nation—though not, in contemporary usage, its neighbor and close cultural relative, Tibet—to the realm of "South Asia," a convention arising from the historical configurations of British and Chinese imperialism. What our research suggests is that Bhutan's liminal status—in other words, its ambiguous position between such well-entrenched categories as East and South Asia, isolation and globalization, tradition and transformation—makes the distant Himalayan nation a uniquely productive site for exploring the circulation of culture in our highly mass-mediated contemporary world.

To put the question in more evocative terms: What sound does the Korean Wave make when it laps on some of the world's highest and most remote shores?

II. A QUESTION OF TIMING: TRANSNATIONAL CAPITAL, MEDIA REGULATION, YOUTH CULTURE

1999, which heralded the end of a millennium, was a year of celebration as well as of anxiety in many places. So too in Bhutan, if for locally specific reasons. Although for decades foreign writers had characterized the Himalayan kingdom as a sort of Shangri La—a land happily cut off from mainstream civilization—June 1999 saw the launch of two highly globalized forms of mass media to commemorate the Silver Jubilee of the fourth king, Jigme Singye Wangchuck (b. 1955): namely, television and the internet. Mass media have emerged and diversified only gradually in Bhutan, which a government-commissioned report described as recently as 2003 as a "predominantly rural society where the oral tradition is still very strong."[1] The monarchic state—a constitutional monarchy since 2008—has typically taken the initiative in introducing new media and has subsequently encouraged their privatization under neoliberal economic principles. For example, the newspaper Kuensel (news for all) got its start as an internal government bulletin in 1967 and became a nationally distributed periodical in 1986; the royal government made its management independent of the civil service in 1992, while retaining a majority financial stake in the public enterprise. The paper now competes with several privately financed newspapers as well as a growing number of print journals. Likewise, public radio, which began in 1973 as an initiative of the National Youth Association of Bhutan and was consolidated into the Bhutan Broadcasting Service (BBS) in 1986, has since 2006 been supplemented by a handful of private radio stations. Radio remains the most widely consumed electronic medium in the country, in part because radio broadcasting can accommodate Bhutan's dispersed population, treacherous landscape, and uneven electrification conditions better than its rival technologies, including television.

Both public planning and private capital played key roles in the 1999 introduction of television and the internet. In a royal decree (kasho) of 1992, the government for the first time articulated a comprehensive media policy, pledging to "facilitate and encourage the professional growth of the Bhutanese media."[2] A roundtable policy summit in 2000 further recognized the role of media as a tool to "leapfrog into the 21st century and to help form a society enriched by information, knowledge and skills."[3] To manage the telecommunications infrastructure, the public-sector corporation Bhutan Telecom (BT) came into being in 1999; BT in turn administers Druknet, the country sole internet-service provider. In the same year, public television broadcasting commenced under the auspices of BBS, which had until that time focused solely on radio, although local TV programming, for the most part news, was initially limited to one hour per evening; it expanded to two hours in 2001 and to five hours in 2008.[4] Private enterprise also had a hand in the television industry nearly from the start, owing to the poverty of the communications infrastructure, especially outside the capital, as well as the paucity of domestically produced content. Private cable operators sprang up as early as August 1999 to deliver ready-to-air programming from abroad, purchased in blocks from distributors based in nearby Indian regional centers like Siliguri (West Bengal) and Guwahati (Assam), or else in Kolkata.[5] Licensed cable operators were also responsible for the delivery of delayed videotaped BBS-TV broadcasts to outlying areas in Bhutan before BBS-TV began beaming over satellite in 2006. Direct-to-home satellite broadcasting remains technically illegal in Bhutan even today, although a considerable number of households do in fact install satellite dishes, especially in rural locales without cable access.[6]

Although TV and the internet appeared simultaneously in Bhutan, and both have impacted the nation's culture in significant ways, the pace of the internet's spread has been somewhat slower than that of television, and its effects more gradual in manifesting themselves. Accordingly, the present essay directs its attention first to the TV medium and its relation to other forms of cultural consumption, and reserves discussion of the internet for a later point in the analysis.

TELEVISION AND FILM

Among the Bhutanese population circa 1999, responses to television's arrival varied from enthusiasm to apprehension, and the two not infrequently commingled.[7] In a public address on 2 June 1999, the fourth king described the ambivalent potential of the television medium in the following terms: "I would like to remind our youth that the television and the Internet provide a whole range of possibilities which can be both beneficial as well as negative for the individual and the society. I trust that you will exercise your good sense and judgment in using [them]."[8] A Kuensel editorial several days later echoed this view of television as a double-edge sword, as well as the perception that young people were particularly vulnerable to its negative effects.[9] Just around the same time, the powerful attraction of global media for the young, even in the remotest of places, emerged as a central theme of the feature film The Cup (Tibetan: Phörpa; 1999), which was set in a Tibetan monastery in India but written and directed by the Bhutanese filmmaker Khyentse Norbu (b. 1961). The first and only Bhutanese movie to be submitted officially for Academy Award consideration, The Cup tells the story of two young Buddhist novices who scheme to bring television to their monastery in order to watch the 1998 World Cup finals.[10] In real life as in Khyentse Norbu's movie, the 1998 World Cup proved a significant catalyst for the introduction of TV in Bhutan. Even before the royal government fully legalized TV broadcasting in 1999, it granted special dispensation to install satellite dishes on the nation's college campuses so that their students could follow the 1998 World Cup as beamed from India. It also allowed the Bhutan Olympic Committee to set up a giant viewing screen at Thimphu's Changlimithang Stadium, the same place where the king would formally announce local TV's launch just one year later.[11]

1999 was a significant year also in the context of Korean cultural entrepreneurship. Around the summer of that year, journalists in China noted an emerging trend in the marketplace for entertainment: local consumers were turning with growing enthusiasm to the products of South Korea's culture industry. The Chinese media dubbed the phenomenon Hanliu­ or "Korean Wave"—in Korean, Hallyu—a coinage that, by some accounts, first appeared in a Beijing newspaper in 1998 or 1999, possibly in connection with the Korean pop-music group H.O.T. (1996–2001).[12] A Japanized form of the word—Kanryû—subsequently caught on in the Japanese media, particularly after the KBS-produced serial drama Gyeoul yeonga (Winter sonata; 2002) won a huge television following, most noticeably among middle-aged female viewers, when it aired in Japan in 2003. In the half-decade or so after 1999, which some scholars describe as the era of the "First Korean Wave," TV dramas, pop music (K-pop), and films from South Korea made inroads in other entertainment markets throughout East and Southeast Asia, including Burma, Cambodia, Hong Kong, Macau, Malaysia, Mongolia, the Philippines, Singapore, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.[13] More than anywhere, though, the rising profile of Korean pop-culture goods caused a sensation in their place of origin, South Korea, where Hallyu became a mark of national pride as well as a stimulus for both corporate investment and government policymaking.

The millennial upswing in Korea's overseas visibility developed out of a convergence of multiple factors, and not simply the inherent appeal of Korean culture or the qualitative superiority of South Korean culture industries and their products, as a naive nationalism might claim.[14] Scholars of the Korean Wave have cited such contributing factors as the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, which severely impacted South Korean businesses, and the subsequently perceived need for investment diversification; the Crisis-induced fall in the value of the South Korean currency and the comparatively high cost of media content from rival industries in the United States, Japan, and Hong Kong; and the trend toward deregulation that prevailed in many Asian broadcasting markets beginning in the 1990s.[15] Another ingredient that has consistently formed part of the mix is the collaboration of the South Korean public and private sectors in facilitating the export of cultural goods, not only in pursuit of profits, but also in order to enhance the nation's prestige—what Joseph Nye in 1990 dubbed "soft power"—within the larger (after the Cold War, hegemonically capitalist) world.[16] One embodiment of this public-private cooperation is the Korea International Broadcasting Foundation, a consortium of public and commercial broadcasters that was established in 1996 in affiliation with South Korea's Ministry of Culture and Sports (now the Ministry of Culture, Sports, and Tourism). The Foundation operates the English-language network Arirang TV, which broadcasts original programming together with a mix of shows from the existing domestic channels, subtitled in English and more recently in other languages as well. In August 1999 Arirang began broadcasting overseas, initially in the Asia-Pacific region. Arirang has subsequently played a key role in bringing the Korean Wave to other parts of the world, including a newly TV-watching Bhutan.

To summarize, Bhutan's first exposure to new forms of global media (specifically, TV and the internet) coincided with the cross-regional embrace of Korean content in the larger arena of broadcasting and popular culture, a timing virtually unique in the world, given Bhutan's exceptionally late form of media liberalization. Adding to the transnational character of the cultural flows involved, Arirang, and on its back the Korean Wave, arrived in Bhutan indirectly by way of India. As the media-impact survey commissioned by the Bhutanese government in 2003 noted, "The channels available to Bhutanese [TV] viewers are not by editorial choice but purchased as packages directly from Indian distributors."[17] Residents of Thimphu were able to tune in to Arirang from [date], after the capital's first cable provider, Sigma Cable Service, offered the English-language Korean channel as part of a 45-channel line-up for which it contracted with the India-based Star TV Network, owned by the Australian-American media mogul Rupert Murdoch (b. 1931). Pursuing a business model that other cable operators would emulate, Sigma received the signals via satellite from India and relayed them downstream to consumers over its cable system for a monthly fee of 200 ngultrums (roughly $5 US). Other popular options on Sigma's dial, besides the locally produced BBS, included networks based in the United States (e.g., ESPN, HBO, CNN, Cartoon Network, National Geographic, Discovery Channel), India (e.g., Star Sports, Star Movies, SET Asia), and the UK (BBC).[18] Soon after television's introduction, cable providers proliferated across the country, reaching a total of 33 in 2003, with users estimated at 12,000–15,000, mostly in the urban centers.[19] The number of television sets in the country also expanded rapidly, growing from approximately 35,000 in 2003 to 47,125 in 2008.[20] By 2xxx, XXX percent of Bhutanese households enjoyed television access.

Even as Arirang nestled its way into Bhutanese homes, other forms of international programming met with some resistance early after their introduction. Three examples will serve to elucidate the new boundaries of televisual respectability that emerged during the initial years of TV broadcasting in Bhutan, roughly between 1999 and 2005, in turn helping Arirang to secure a lasting and comfortable place in Bhutanese living rooms. The first is the case of professional wrestling, more specifically, the staged pseudo-sports spectacle of the US-based World Wrestling Federation (WWF), later called World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). From the time of its local debut in 1999, pro wrestling made for wildly popular viewing among Bhutanese boys, as well as a fair number of girls, although it also provoked concerns among their elders. With the proliferation of cultural genres whose conventions had arisen overseas, the young Bhutanese viewer was sometimes at a loss as to how to frame their meaning. "Sir," wrote one eleven-year-old boy to the editor of Kuensel, "I am in doubt whether the fights [of WWF] are real because I think human beings can't take such big blows, kicks, etc. Some people say the fights are real and some say that they are not. So, whom should I believe?"[21] It took the global-media literacy of a visiting Australian tourist to provide an authoritative answer for Kuensel readers—even if that answer may have disappointed some of pro wrestling's younger fans.[22] That television could mislead was a lesson quickly learned.

From the perspective of adults, even more worrisome than misunderstanding was misbehavior. Many Bhutanese boys who watched pro wrestling chose to imitate in real life the routines they had seen onscreen, trying out extreme wrestling moves in the course of play or school.[23] Injuries sometimes resulted, and more than one school advised parents to restrict their children's WWF/WWE viewing. Clearly, exposure to TV involved more than simply passive consumption: it was able to affect individual behavior and social interactions, and to breed new cultural practices. Nor was the impact on social life limited to child's play. In an online survey of Kuensel readers, 22.16% of respondents in 2000 and 31.58% in 2003 reported that TV and the internet had "completely" changed their daily lives.[24]

A second type of television-related controversy relates to such "lifestyle" channels as FashionTV, established in 1997. Focusing on a global fashion industry dominated primarily by European and American tastes, the French network offered a view into consumer trends in some of the world's most highly developed capitalist nations. In the context of a predominantly (though not exclusively) Buddhist culture, FashionTV appeared to some observers as an emblem of the sort of blatant materialism that stood to erode core spiritual values—just the sort of Buddhist values that GNH policy sought to sustain.[25] As the influential Bhutanese intellectual Karma Ura (b. 1961) put it, FashionTV provided "no suffering alleviation value."[26] Nor did the kinds of consumer desires that FashionTV promoted seem to everyone appropriate in a developing economy where, in 2000, GDP per capita stood at a little over 700 US dollars.[27] Perhaps the most common complaints had to do, however, with sexual propriety and its attendant visual codes. In a 2003 survey of 982 households across the nation, "Some of the adults pointed out that it was embarrassing to watch scantily clad women (which are common on Fashion TV, for example) when they are watching TV with younger people."[28] Even a spokesman for the Association of Private Cable Operators (founded in 2001) acknowledged that "Channels like FTV [FashionTV] show more skin than clothes."[29] The popular American network MTV, which featured slickly produced and often sexually suggestive music videos, sometimes met with similar criticism as quasi-pornographic.[30]

Such adult critiques notwithstanding, both FashionTV and MTV quickly attracted many fans among Bhutan's urban youth.[31] The channels' impact on young audiences manifested itself in new forms of everyday practice, most visible in the realm of attire and grooming. To instill the belief that sartorial self-presentation is a crucial aspect of modern living and of participation in global culture, thereby stimulating certain forms of consumer demand and brand recognition, was, of course, one of the chief raisons d'être of FashionTV as a commercial enterprise. Although FashionTV's spotlight on Euro-American haute couture placed limits on the ability of ordinary Bhutanese to emulate directly many of the images, or to buy many of the products, that appeared onscreen, it nevertheless encouraged the growth of a local fashion industry centered in Thimphu, the nation's densest hub of economic activity, population settlement, and television viewership. Albeit much smaller in scale than its metropolitan analogues, and often using handcrafted local textiles, thus building on Bhutan's centuries-old weaving tradition, the Bhutanese fashion industry adopted a number of the latter's contemporary conventions, including, as early as 2001, staged fashion shows and catwalking models, some of whom learned their steps by imitating their overseas counterparts on FashionTV.[32] No less importantly, FashionTV, according to one of its supporters, served as a "source of inspiration to aspiring [Bhutanese] designers."[33]

The American channel MTV, too, shaped emerging practices of clothing, grooming, and comportment, if in somewhat different ways. In Bhutan as elsewhere, MTV provided a powerful conduit not only for music, but also for American youth culture in a variety of forms. Among the most prominent musical and cultural styles it helped to disseminate was hip hop, originally a 1970s subculture associated with African-American and Hispanic-American inner-city youth, but which by the turn of the millennium had become greatly mainstreamed, commercialized, and globalized—in part through the mediation of institutions like MTV itself. Distinctive fashion practices are an integral part of the hip-hop mix. Thus in post-MTV Bhutan, an increasing number of young people, particularly teenage males in urban areas, took to sporting such hip-hop fashions as sagging jeans with underpants exposed, a style whose reputed origins lie in the no-belt policy of American detention facilities and the subcultural practices of their inmates.[34] For a cinematic evocation of the young Bhutanese male who is obsessed with American music and fashion, one need look no further than Khyentse Norbu's second feature film, Travellers and Magicians (2003), whose protagonist Dondup idolizes XXX and prefers his traditional robe, or gho, to be made from denim.

A third focus of TV-related debate involves programming from Bhutan's populous neighbor to the south. India has close ties with Bhutan economically, historically, and politically; it is also the home of a powerful culture industry. Not only does Bollywood compete in scale with Hollywood, but the Indian TV industry in particular has flourished since 1991's media liberalization and the subsequent development of that nation's cable- and satellite-broadcasting infrastructure. As noted previously, much of the TV content that airs in Bhutan arrives via Indian satellite broadcasters, even when it is produced outside the subcontinent (as is true of Arirang). Made-in-India programming has also found favor among Bhutanese TV audiences, and especially among adult females, who have flocked above all to Hindi soap operas. When a pricing dispute took the Sony cable package off the air temporarily in late 2001, Kuensel reported that "working women, housewives, students, [and] the urban female populace in general" were "furious." The alleged cause: their inability to watch Kkusum (2001–2005) and Kutumb (2001–2003), two serial dramas that ran daily on Mumbai-based Sony Entertainment Television (SET; launched in 1995). Men in Bhutan, the paper added, were "heaving a sigh of relief," since they didn't otherwise "get to watch anything when these soaps are playing."[35] Others complained that fixation on such shows led women to ignore housework.[36] Although some female viewers in Bhutan found the gender relations depicted in Hindi soaps to be dismayingly oppressive—"stereotypical," to use one woman's characterization—that fact alone did not diminish the genre's overall popularity.[37]

Debate over Indian television was not limited to the relative merits of Hindi soap operas. Bollywood-style music videos—as one Bhutanese father put it, "remixes of film songs accompanied by lewd dancing"—that played on Indian-market music channels like Channel [V] India (launched 1994), Zee Muzic (launched 1997/2000), and B4U Music (launched 1999) similarly met with frequent criticism.[38] Nor were household routines and standards of sexual modesty the only areas of Bhutanese social life to be affected. The ubiquity in Bhutan of Indian TV produced significant linguistic changes as well, with more and more Hindi words entering into daily conversation and familiarity with Hindi growing commoner even among elderly viewers.[39] Some of these influences appear to be class-inflected: in the above-mentioned 2003 media-impact survey, a Bhutanese local-government official opined that "Indian culture is dominant among the middle and lower classes," whereas the "upper class is taken up with western culture."[40] Over 73 percent of respondents in the same survey identified the "common culture that comes across from TV" as Indian culture—as opposed to Western culture or "global/world culture," which came in at around 10 and 9 percent respectively.[41]

The giant shadow that India casts over Bhutan's media landscape helps bring into focus the issue of "soft power," and in particular the intersection of television with geopolitics and regional relations. Over the past half-century, Bhutan has pursued a strategy of growing diplomatic autonomy from India, which inherited upon its 1947 independence from Britain the latter's role in overseeing Bhutan's foreign policy; not until the 2007 revision of the 1949 Indo-Bhutanese Treaty of Friendship would that advisory role be formally abrogated. Within the evolving bilateral context, matters of media policy hold the potential to create diplomatic waves. Indo-Bhutanese tensions rose a notch in the spring of 2005, when Bhutan's Association of Private Cable Operators, acting at government behest, slashed the standard number of channels available to its collective customers from 45 to 30.[42] Officials in New Delhi reportedly interpreted the move as a slap in the face, inasmuch as the overwhelming majority of dropped networks—eleven out of fifteen—were of Indian (or partly Indian) origin.[43] Banned for a variety of unstated reasons were the music-oriented Channel [V] India, Zee Muzic, and B4U Music; the Bollywood-focused ETC and Star Gold; the news stations Aaj Tak and Zee News; and the non-Hindi broadcasters Alpha Bangla (Bengali), Asianet (Malayalam), ETV Bangla (Bengali), and Sun TV (Tamil). Among non-Indian networks, only FashionTV, MTV, Ten Sports (the Dubai-based carrier of pro wrestling), and the German international broadcaster Deutsche Welle met the same fate, vanishing overnight from Bhutan's cable lineup. The timing of the 2005 shakeup especially galled officials in New Delhi, since Bhutan appeared to be closing its media gates even as India was encouraging nearby Nepal to open up its own broadcasting market.[44]

Indian officials also noted with displeasure that three East Asian broadcasters—Arirang from Korea, CCTV from China, and NHK from Japan—had managed to avoid the chopping block.[45] In effect, the 2005 reshuffling of the cable lineup served to magnify, at least relatively speaking, East Asia's presence on the Bhutanese TV dial, and consequently in the Bhutanese home, even as it scaled down the media profile of the nation's southern mega-neighbor (in the process also projecting a less culturally and linguistically diverse image of India).[46] Seen in this way, TV in millennial Bhutan both reflected and contributed to a larger renegotiation of "South" and "East" Asian political relations and cultural identities in the post–Cold War era. These "East-South" dynamics will receive further scrutiny in the following pages. It may be useful to note here briefly, though, that evidence of a similar reorientation eastward may be found along India's northeastern periphery—that is to say, in Bhutan's immediate vicinity—and that in the latter setting, too, television policy and media culture have played a pivotal role in turning the eyes and ears of local audiences in Korea's direction. To give an example, the Indian state of Manipur, along the Burmese border, has received a certain amount of media and scholarly attention in recent years as one of the more conspicuous beachheads of the Korean Wave on the subcontinent, or to quote the BBC, a "little corner of Korea in India."[47] Kshetrimayum and Chanu (2008) as well as Rathore (2011) attribute the Manipuri phenomenon not simply to the positive attractions of Korean pop culture as experienced by local viewers of Arirang, but just as importantly to the ban on Hindi-language films and TV broadcasting that separatists in the region have effectively enforced since 2000, creating a sort of cultural vacuum.[48] In both Bhutan and Manipur, in other words, local political forces have made a deliberate choice to restrict or roll back Bollywood's influence. Strikingly, while in Manipur the rejection extends to central Indian culture—and governance—more generally, in Bhutan the initial effect was to reinforce Hindi-centric biases at the expense of Indian regionalism (as seen in the 2005 culling of Bengali, Malayalam, and Tamil channels).[49]

The debates on televisual respectability that emerged in Bhutan early in the millennium help, at least in part, to explain Arirang's relative popularity among local viewers. Success in broadcasting is impossible without market access, as New Delhi leaders realized; in the long run, however, it depends just as critically on a broadcaster's ability to provide appropriate and attractive media content. Arirang has drawn a steady viewership in Bhutan by furnishing programming that fulfills (and in turn stimulates) consumer desires without seriously challenging the boundaries of respectability maintained through community consensus as well as state intervention. Although a comprehensive analysis of Arirang's broadcasting content lies beyond the scope of this essay, some comparisons and contrasts with more controversial forms of programming can help to account for Arirang's longevity in the Bhutanese market and to illuminate its significance for local audiences. While Arirang has never ranked as the number-one television channel in Bhutan—as it has reportedly done in Manipur's neighbor, the Indian state of Nagaland—Arirang has nevertheless managed to carve out a distinct identity for itself among Bhutanese viewers. Moreover, the Korean channel has consistently outperformed other East Asian broadcasters in Bhutan in terms of brand recognition and ability to inform consumer behaviors and subjectivities at the local level.[50]

Far more than the Chinese and Japanese broadcasters CCTV and NHK, Arirang represents for many members of its Bhutanese audience a portal onto a larger world of consumer choices, cultural (and in particular youth-cultural) styles, templates of bodily practice, and models of social interaction. In that sense it may be likened to such earlier-televised "lifestyle" vehicles as FashionTV and MTV, which were blocked in 2005, and which also made a remarked-upon impact on the behavior and self-presentation of their viewers, especially the young. By and large, however, Bhutanese state and media authorities have branded the lifestyles that the South Korean broadcaster promotes as posing less harm to social mores—or more specifically to Bhutan's "Gross National Happiness"—than those circulating on the French FashionTV or the American MTV, much less the violent shenanigans of pro wrestling.[51] And while popular Korean programming has, no less than the French and American channels, inspired new practices in the realm of dress and personal appearance, its codes of visual respectability have blended more comfortably with local standards than the latter; when compared to Bollywood music videos, Arirang shows seem positively tame. That is not to say that Korean popular culture and its influences have altogether escaped controversy, or resistance, in Bhutan. Indeed, it is the dynamic process by which the Korean Wave has been negotiated through a complex interplay among various social actors and different forms of authority in Bhutan to produce a distinctive local array of practices and associations—a "Korean fancy"—that occupies much of the remainder of the analysis.

The popularity of Hindi serial dramas (soap operas) since the earliest days of television in Bhutan points to a high level of local demand for narrative drama as a form of entertainment, especially among female viewers. Arirang, too, has built up its global reputation on the strength, primarily, of what one Bhutanese journalist calls its "engaging serials."[52] Korean TV dramas are typically single-season productions with a continuous narrative, drawing their themes from the contemporary life of young middle-class city-dwellers, or, somewhat less frequently, from Korean history. As elsewhere across Asia, such Korean teledramas have found devoted fans in Bhutan for more than a decade, ranging from such pioneering hits of the global Korean Wave as Winter Sonata, to more recent favorites such as Boys over Flowers (Kkot poda namja; KBS, 2009).[53] By all accounts, young females have provided the core local audience, a trend that resonates with a broader gendering of TV-drama viewership in the Bhutanese market. Indeed, Korean dramas share many basic features with their Bollywood counterparts, including a common focus on heterosexual love ("We love their [Korean] love stories," swooned one 19-year-old female in a newspaper interview) and a predominantly urban middle-class social setting.[54] At the same time, when compared to Hindi soaps, Korean dramas tend to place the spotlight on the experiences of a younger set of fictional characters pursuing a less traditional, less "stereotypical"—or to put it a different way, more trendy—set of life paths. This bias toward the young not only characterizes the lifestyles and actors shown onscreen but also the ages of the Bhutanese viewers who appear most attracted by such content.[55] In this connection, it may be worth noting that more than half of Bhutan's current population is under the age of twenty.[56]

The positive reception of Korean dramas in Bhutan may seem at first glance to fit a familiar pattern. After all, across Asia, the on-air success of one or another TV serial from Korea (in the case of Japan, to give one much-cited example, Winter Sonata) has played a central role in opening the floodgates of Hallyu and of raising public and journalistic awareness of expanding local demand for Korean cultural products. Due to certain peculiarities of Bhutan's media culture, however, the tide of the Korean Wave has risen rather more gradually in Bhutan than in some of the larger TV markets, and its tempo there has been less clearly correlated with the nationwide airing of a particular hit drama. In part, the difference has to do with the smaller scale of the Bhutanese TV market and the absence of a ratings system to track viewer response. More importantly, the consumption of Korean dramas in Bhutan takes place in a large number of cases through the medium of rented or bought DVDs, which can be watched anytime, rather than through the simultaneous viewing of a televised broadcast by a mass audience across the nation. Although synchronous spectatorship occurs to some extent in Bhutan as well, the popularity of DVDs, which can be consumed long after they or their content have been produced, cautions us not to equate reception history simply with broadcasting history, even in the case of "television" content. Here lies just one example of how consumption patterns in a small-scale local context like Bhutan's sometimes depart from, and in that sense can help to reframe, global assumptions and generalizations about the Korean Wave that scholars have tended to make on the basis of large and well-developed consumer markets such as those of China and Japan.

Historically, the institution of the video (and later, DVD) library in Bhutan predates the introduction of TV broadcasting; originally it centered on the commercial rental of predominantly Hindi films for in-home viewing. By 1999, an estimated 160 such libraries existed across the country, nearly half of them located in Thimphu.[57] Entrepreneurs subsequently adapted their business strategies to accommodate the new forms of demand generated by an evolving media culture. While a small number of libraries still rent out their inventories to registered patrons, the proliferation of low-price (generally bootleg) DVDs has made retail sales more common over time. In addition, a wider range of commercial emporia now incorporate DVD sales as one component of their businesses, among them gift shops, general stores, and consumer-electronics dealers. Since television's introduction, consumer demand has led both rental and retail businesses to include among their DVD offerings not only movies but also TV series, prominent among them Korean dramas; Korean films are also widely available on disk. In June 2010, a walk around the main square of Wangdue Phodrang (pop. 6714 [2005]), a dusty provincial town about two-and-a-half hours drive east of the capital, yielded at least three establishments where DVDs of Korean movies and TV dramas could be purchased. In one case, the proprietor displayed the colorful jackets prominently in storefront vitrines, alongside features from Bollywood and Hollywood, so as to attract potential customers. Inside homegrown shops like these, DVDs are sorted in shoeboxes or translucent plastic storage containers according to the national origin of their content, following a conventionally tripartite taxonomy of Bollywood, Hollywood, and Korea.[58] Although the third category tends to be the smallest numerically, its consistent presence suggests that Bhutanese entrepreneurs regard Korean dramas and films as the products of a distinct culture industry, as well as the objects of an identifiable and presumably profitable form of consumer demand. The resulting trade in DVDs means that the Bhutanese consumer need not stay glued to Arirang to satisfy his or her craving for Korean serials and other "Hallyuwood" content; for that matter, he or she need not even have a TV or cable connection in the first place.

The Korean Wave in Bhutan must be contextualized within not only changing practices of distribution, but also new patterns of creation. The film industry provides a case in point. Over the same decade that Korean dramas became a staple of television viewership in Bhutan, movies from South Korea also became more familiar to Bhutanese audiences—not on cinema marquees, but again via the small screen, whether on Arirang or (just as likely) on DVD.[59] Reflecting the growing diversity of movie choices, the newspaper Kuensel in 200x began to list new DVD releases under the same triadic division of Bollywood, Hollywood, and Korea that DVD sellers were also coming to recognize as the dominant industry formation.[60] But another, contemporaneous development has proven just as important in the long run: the advent of television pushed local cinemagoers toward a newfound appreciation for films and in particular film dramas in Dzongkha, the nation's standardized vernacular language, which constituted a previously unavailable form of media content.[61] Whereas Bollywood, Hollywood, and Korean dramas could be easily accessed on TV or DVD, the only Dzongkha content available during television's infancy in Bhutan was the few hours of mostly news and educational programming that aired daily on BBS-TV.[62] These local programs, though avidly consumed, did little to feed the appetite for narrative drama that existed among TV viewers, who lavished it instead on Hindi soaps, Korean serials, and Hollywood fare. By the same token, imported content lacked native Bhutanese characters, locales, and social situations with which audiences could identify, and thus it sometimes failed to satisfy completely. One unanticipated consequence of TV's introduction in Bhutan, therefore, was the rise of vibrant local film industry producing feature-length dramatic films using Bhutanese casts and Dzongkha language in a DV format.[63] Since the establishment of the Motion Picture Association of Bhutan in 1999, the industry has grown at a rapid pace, producing 116 films as of 2008, and since 2005 exclusively occupying the screen at the capital's oldest movie house—the Lugar Cinema, in 1972—almost exclusively.[64]

Although the liberalization of media markets under global capitalism sometimes leads to a decline in the viability of local culture industries, the case of Bhutanese cinema suggests that the reverse scenario can occur as well, at least under the right circumstances. The years since 1999 have seen the Bhutanese film industry positively flourish, developing a clearly recognizable visual and musical style, a standard thematic repertory, and an integrated organizational infrastructure. The pervasiveness of song-and-dance numbers betrays the new Dzongkha cinema's historical indebtedness to Bollywood, which once nearly monopolized exhibition circuits in the nation.[65] Yet, although at least one pair of scholars has characterized Bhutan's film industry as a "small Bollywood," Dzongkha cinema is much more than just a knock-off of an Indian original.[66] It must be seen instead as a hybrid product of a system of cultural exchange that interacts rather porously across borders of nation and medium. Even Bollywood film songs, it might be pointed out, betray the stylistic imprint of American music videos that circulated during the 1990s on MTV. Since the turn of the millennium, South Korea has come to form another influential node in global media circulation, exerting an impact on cultural consumption and creation across a similarly far-flung geographic space. Testifying to its powerful reach, the following paragraphs will consider the case of one Korean movie, My Sassy Girl, that was made and remade in no less than seven different entertainment markets, including Bhutan's. The exercise offers an opportunity not only to situate the Dzongkha film industry within a larger media geography, but also to tease out some of its generic conventions and other local characteristics.

2001's My Sassy Girl is one of South Korea's highest-grossing movies, as well as its most profitable film comedy, to date. Depicting a free-spirited young woman who drops into, and complicates, the life of a more conventional young man, the story deals in an affectingly seriocomic way with such themes as romantic love, social decorum, gender roles, male-female friendship, alcohol abuse, and intergenerational conflict. In addition to reaching audiences in many countries, including Bhutan, in its original Korean form, My Sassy Girl has inspired a number of cultural translations, which is to say, retellings of the story with non-Korean characters and according to the idiom of a different entertainment industry. At least six such adaptations appeared within the first decade of its debut, four in the year 2008 alone.[67] In Japan, where the original film played to great acclaim in 2003, audiences regained the acquaintance of My Sassy Girl in 2008 in a TBS television drama of the same name (Ryôkiteki na kanojo), while mainland Chinese went to theaters in 2010 to view a self-proclaimed sequel (Wo de yeman nuyou 2). South Asian moviegoers in 2008 saw My Sassy Girl's plot recycled in both the Nepalese Sano sansar (Small world) and the Indian Ugly aur pagli (Ugly and crazy). And in the same year, Hollywood produced its own version of My Sassy Girl, and then closed the circle by releasing it to South Korean theaters as a reverse import.

Certain aspects of the first My Sassy Girl film remained unchanged in nearly all these transplanted contexts, such as the youth of the two main characters, their glamorous vocations (scriptwriter, marine biologist, XXX, and so forth), and the narrative focus on heterosexual romance, spiced with unconventional gender performance on the part of the female lead. At the same time, the film's adapters deliberately chose to play up those elements that they judged likely to appeal to local audiences, or sometimes introduced new elements entirely, thereby revealing something about the peculiarities of consumer demand in their respective target markets. Thus, for example, the main characters of the Hindi and Nepali versions of My Sassy Girl sang and danced at regular intervals, following "masala" conventions derived from Bollywood, whereas the Korean original had featured little more than background music. Similarly, while most adaptations erased any mention of Korea from the plot so as to naturalize the story within a local context, the producers of the Japanese serial went out of their way to insert an explicitly Korea-related storyline and employed a handful of Korean actors from across the straits in order to capitalize on the contemporaneous popularity of actual Korean-made dramas on Japanese TV. American viewers probably found little in 2008's My Sassy Girl to distinguish it from other run-of-the-mill Hollywood romantic comedies, with its emphasis on clever dialogue and slick production values, complete with a trendy New York setting. To Chinese audiences, on the other hand, XXX.

[DAWA: EARLIEST REMAKE OF ALL WAS THE ROSE (2006) / KUENSEL REVIEW / CONTAINS MUSICAL NUMBERS IN RIGSAR STYLE]

MUSIC AND DANCE

The Rose, which intersperses dramatic narrative with musical numbers, helps to illustrate a mutual interdependence of film-and-TV culture and music-and-dance culture that is just as characteristic of the Bhutanese as it is of the Bollywood or Korean context. Neither realm of audiovisual production, of course, is purely auditory or purely visual, even if popular consciousness sometimes codes the two that way. (In addition, both involve bodily performance, which will receive attention shortly.) From the earliest days of the Korean Wave, pop music has constituted one of its mainstays; as mentioned earlier, the music scene may even have played a more immediate role than TV in the original coining of the phrase Hallyu. K-pop, as Korean popular music is now widely known, reached Bhutan around the same millennial moment as television and the internet, in part through those very media. Indeed, in Bhutan, unlike such larger markets as China, Japan, or India, K-pop is exclusively a mass-mediated phenomenon, since no Korean musical act, to the authors' knowledge, has ever performed inside the country; indeed, in principle, Bhutan's Ministry of Culture bans live performances by foreign artists, although it applies the policy less than consistently.[68] Instead, the main vehicles of K-pop's dissemination in Bhutan, besides cable TV (Arirang) and the internet (YouTube channels and MP3 downloads, for example), are radio (both domestic and international), film and TV soundtracks on DVD, and music-only audiocassettes and CDs (like DVDs, more often than not bootleg).

Of all the electronic media, radio reaches the greatest number of households in Bhutan. One might assume, therefore, that more Bhutanese have been exposed to K-pop than to any other Korean cultural product, or that K-pop has achieved the broadest geographic circulation. Certain features of the broadcasting landscape, however, suggest a more complicated picture. The most widely accessible radio broadcaster in Bhutan is BBS, now several decades old, which relies on shortwave and, more recently, FM, serving all areas of the country. As a rule, however, the public broadcaster's musical programming does not feature non-Bhutanese artists and genres, focusing rather on the preservation of traditional folk music (zhungdra and boedra) and the promotion of rigsar, a local form of pop. It is instead the recently arisen private broadcasting industry, which primarily targets the capital area, transmitting on the FM band as well as streaming on the internet, that has more fully embraced the Korean sound. Bhutan's first private radio station, Kuzoo FM, incorporated K-pop in its lineup already in 2006, its founding year. [SENTENCE ABOUT WHERE K-POP FITS INTO KUZOO PROGRAMMING] Radio Valley (founded 2007), the country's second private broadcaster XXX. [SENTENCE ABOUT RADIO VALLEY & K-POP] CENTENNIAL RADIO

As the above examples reflect, public and private radio in Bhutan differ in their mappings of musical culture and national identity. While both types of broadcaster acknowledge a responsibility to preserve and promote "Bhutanese" music, public radio maintains a stricter separation between inside and outside, acting as a gatekeeper of cultural authenticity and assigning foreignness to a place entirely outside the auditory pale. On the surface of things, K-pop and the Korean Wave have no place in this national soundscape. By contrast, the private radio industry incorporates music from Bhutan, in both traditional and contemporary genres, within a broader spectrum of acoustic production that has multiple national origins, among them American, British, Indian, South Korean, and so forth. The common denominator in this variegated commercial soundscape lies in the function of all the music featured as entertainment for a mass audience, and not in any assumptions of cultural purity. Hybridity is in fact rampant on the private airwaves, fostering a continual evolution of consumer tastes and opening up new perspectives on what "Bhutanese" music might entail. Commercial radio may be described as urban not just geographically but also in a sociological sense, since the cosmopolitanism of the sound mix resonates with the multiplicity of cultural negotiations that characterize contemporary life in Bhutan's cities, and especially the capital. Yet no community in present-day Bhutan is so small or so remote as to lie entirely outside the range of media-inflected cultural change. Indeed, the most popular genre of Bhutanese music among both urban and rural youth today, rigsar, enjoys just as much airplay on BBS as it does on the private radio stations, and it, too, has been shaped by transnational media flows since its historical genesis in the late 1960s. The 1968 hit "Zhendi Migo" (I Want No Others), which is frequently cited as genre's earliest example, was none other than a cover of "Sayonara," a song from the Indian film Love in Tokyo (1966). Even the supposedly pure and authentic national soundscape of public broadcasting, in other words, bears witness to the significant role of foreign inputs—including, most recently, Korean ones—in creating new forms of Bhutanese cultural identity.

In a 2001 essay, not long after the introduction of television and the internet, one Bhutanese scholar panned the domestically produced rigsar genre for too closely imitating "English pop songs and songs of Hindi films."[69] "English" in this context presumably refers to the linguistic medium of the non-Bhutanese songs in question rather than to their national origin, given that the enormous U.S. and U.K. music industries are relatively integrated and that English functions as a pop-music lingua franca even outside the Anglophone world proper. Despite the inadequacy of the taxonomy, this cultural mapping of the world is not at all uncommon in Bhutan, and may be interpreted as a product of the nation's peculiarly double-layered colonial legacy. In the above usage, "English," the language of Britain, Bhutan's and India's colonial patron until the late 1940s, signifies the Western world more generally, which lies outside Bhutan as well as beyond the Indian subcontinent, and is most easily accessed even today through English-language media.[70] But Bhutan, unlike India, also has another, more immediate "outside": India itself, which after 1949 assumed Britain's earlier position as quasi-colonial protector, and whose culture industry exercises tremendous regional influence. Accordingly, contemporary Bhutanese identity has come to define itself along at least two axes: vis-à-vis the West ("English") and vis-à-vis India ("Hindi"), both of which are conventionally perceived as posing a challenge to Bhutan's cultural autonomy.

Where and how, one might ask, does the Korean culture industry fit into this overarching schema? Certainly, few Bhutanese conceive of Korea and India as in any way related; indeed, in India's own northeast, consumers reportedly have turned to Korean cultural products as an alternative to, and in some cases an outright rejection of, mainstream Indian culture. But what of the relationship between the "Korea" of the Korean Wave and the West—the overseas "English" world—as it is popularly imagined in Bhutan? The question is significant, given that some scholars locate the source of the Korean Wave's appeal for Asian consumers precisely in its departure from Hollywood and Western norms, while seeing in the former's products an embodiment of "Asian values."[71] Any analysis of Bhutan tends to complicate this sort of formulation, because local consumers' "Korean fancy" challenges patterns of cultural circulation that center historically less on Hollywood than on Bollywood, which, though (arguably) non-Western, is no less apt to profit from the dynamics of cultural imperialism than its American equivalent. Moreover, the category of "Asian values" offers a singularly poor criterion for evaluating the products of two rival culture industries—Indian and South Korean—that are both based on the Asian continent and that both draw on local value systems.

It is important to remember, finally, that neither the West in a geopolitical sense nor English in a linguistic sense constitutes an undifferentiated entity. For example, although public and private radio in Bhutan both use English as a broadcasting language, disk jockeys on the private stations—the only ones to feature K-pop—typically affect American pronunciation and usage, whereas BBS announcers cling more strongly to the British-inflected English of neighboring India.[72] Ironically, within the context of Bhutanese radio, K-pop's place on the private airwaves, in the audible company of American English, may serve to reinforce rather than undermine the popular association of America with cutting-edge cultural production, conjuring up a cognitive geography that locates Korea and America on the opposite, more "progressive" side of the fence from two more historically entrenched sources of political and cultural authority in Bhutan, namely, England and India. A prominent local journalist and filmmaker, Dorji Wangchuk (born 19XX), made a similar equation when, in a 2008 op-ed piece in the independent weekly Bhutan Observer (founded 2006), he criticized adults' tendency to question the younger generation's "sensitivity and their Bhutanese-ness just because they are hip-hop and Korean music lovers."[73] In so stating his case, Wangchuk stressed not the qualitative differences between American and Korean pop music, but rather a commonality in mainstream Bhutanese perceptions of the two.

To the extent that the Korean Wave has helped remold Bhutan's musical culture in recent years, it has done so as much in concert with as in distinction from other foreign influences, including the powerful music industries of India, America, and Europe. Together, these industries, along with numerous regional counterparts, promote a style of musical entertainment—let us provisionally call it "global pop"—that shares core elements even as it appears in a variety of local forms. Among its global features are such characteristics as commercial recording, mass marketing, fan communities, a star system, vernacular language, electronic sound, a visual presence, a kinetic dimension, and ramification into other media. In recent decades, rigsar has developed in precisely such a direction. Although Indian and Nepalese pop have provided many of rigsar's melodies from the start, the growing accessibility of global media has broadened the range of rigsar's stylistic influences. These now include XXX.

The imprint of global pop on the contemporary Bhutanese music scene extends beyond matters of musical style in a narrow sense. Arguably, it is with respect to bodily performance and self-presentation, or what we might broadly call body culture, that these mass-mediated musical forms have most visibly retrained the everyday habits—to use Bourdieu's term, the habitus—of Bhutan's millennial generation.[74] Across the globe, popular-music cultures and body cultures exist in a dynamic relationship. Different musical subcultures encourage (or discourage) different types of physical appearance, as seen with hip hop and the saggy-jeans look, or body tattoos, whose prevalence among American youth is said to have increased dramatically with the rise of MTV in the 1980s—and which may be seen today even in Bhutan, a society that traditionally has stigmatized such forms of body modification.[75] Body culture also has a kinetic dimension: in the case of hip hop, one could cite, for instance, break-dancing or, in the realm of everyday conduct, certain forms of masculine swagger. When it comes to rigsar, the physical appearances associated with the genre contrast starkly on first glance with those prevalent in hip hop, K-pop, and filmi (Bollywood music). For example, male and female rigsar performers, whether on film or in a nightclub (drayang), typically wear the national costume of gho and kira respectively. This sartorial convention signals to the viewing audience that the genre is "Bhutanese," rather than, say, "English" or "Hindi." Law mandates the wearing or gho and kira in nearly all formal settings in Bhutan, so that rigsar's embrace of these garments, even in the context of entertainment, conveys not simply "Bhutaneseness," but a Bhutaneseness of an officially approved kind. Likewise, the use of Dzongkha in rigsar lyrics announces the genre's Bhutanese (again, not "Hindi" or "English") identity by vocal means, and at same time aligns it with the standard vernacular of the local film industry, with which rigsar production enjoys a commercial symbiosis.[76] Indeed, it is chiefly the role of rigsar in promoting the national language—for a majority of Bhutan's population, not their primary household tongue—that has garnered the genre a certain amount of support from state authorities, allowing it to flourish simultaneously on the public and private airwaves.

Even as the rigsar genre employs sartorial and linguistic means to enact its national identity as "Bhutanese," the genre's assimilation to the norms of global pop has necessitated the construction of new codes of bodily comportment to represent "Bhutaneseness" within an increasingly mass-mediated and commercialized cultural context. The various sites where rigsar are performed today—recording studios, open-air concerts, nightclubs, school auditoriums, films, music videos, televised song contests, and so forth—share a more public character on the whole than the more intimate settings traditionally associated with zhungdra and boedra (although mass mediation has affected the two older genres as well). Rigsar thus functions, in effect, as a public performance of Bhutanese identity, a cultural role whose official endorsement is implicit in the nearly de rigueur inclusion of rigsar numbers in school talent shows across the country. Called "variety concerts" or "cultural programmes," these events train not only their participants' musical and dance skills, but also their sense of decorum, or to put it another way, their ability to present their physical beings appropriately in public space. The fact that video recordings of these shows routinely fill up empty time on cable television (whether BBS or the private channels of local service providers) tends to assimilate the shows to the practices of mass-media culture even as it enhances their importance as civic rituals. Along with cultural production, social decorum is an overt target of state policy in Bhutan, its standards articulated through such legal constructs as driglam namzha (literally, "system of orderly conduct") , whose historical origins allegedly lie with Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, a seventeenth-century nation-builder, and his followers.[77] It is driglam namzha that dictates that Bhutanese citizens must, for example, wear gho and kira in public, at least during business hours. A seventeenth-century monk-ruler, however, can hardly provide much useful guidance on such contemporary questions as how to wear one's gho properly while performing a vigorous break dance.

There is in fact a "correct" answer to the above question. The acceptable solution is to roll the gho down to the waist so as to free the upper body's range of motion. That is how a troupe of amateur break-dancers might appear, for instance, on a televised talent competition like Druk Star (BBS, 2009–2010) or Druk Superstar (BBS, 2011–20XX).[78] But how exactly have such twenty-first-century cultural norms come into being? As the growing mass-mediation of cultural spectacle creates new needs for presenting oneself in public space while embodying Bhutanese identity, new codes of physical conduct and appearance have emerged through a process of negotiation between, on the one hand, the expressive desires of a younger generation steeped in global media and, on the other, the nation-building agendas of official institutions (driglam namzha, schools, media authorities, and so forth). Without necessarily being aware of it, the gho-clad b-boy dances to both capitalist and nationalist beats. On the one hand, the gyrations of his body reproduce the coded cultural forms that profit-motivated multinational corporations pump daily through the circuits of the global media system. On the other hand, the cut of his outfit channels the performance in directions that visibly affirm rather than deny the state's role in regulating national culture. Just as subtly, it equates that culture with the historical traditions of the politically dominant Ngalop population of western and central Bhutan, the source not only of Dzongkha, the nation's official vernacular language, but also of the government-mandated gho and kira dress forms.[79]

Body culture also helps to choreograph gender relations, both literally and figuratively. When male and female rigsar performers take the stage together, they tread new cultural ground. How men and women should behave toward one another in public is an issue that driglam namzha does not explicitly address; by remaining silent on the subject, it in effect relegates heterosocial interaction to a private realm. Rigsar, on the other hand, in line with global pop more generally, takes as one of its favorite themes heterosexual romance, placing male-female relations very much in the public spotlight. How much public intimacy between the genders is permissible within the "Bhutanese" (as marked by costume and language) context of rigsar, or in Dzongkha cinema, and in what physical forms it can appropriately be expressed, are questions currently in the midst of cultural negotiation.[80] To draw an example from the early years of television broadcasting, the sense of impropriety or embarrassment that some Bhutanese adults reported feeling when faced with "lewd dancing" in "Hindi" and "English" music videos—an apparent factor behind the 2005 banning of several cable-TV channels—suggests that, with respect to body culture, Bollywood and Hollywood standards do not mesh seamlessly with Bhutanese sensibilities. From a local perspective, the relatively G-rated body culture of K-pop, which seldom exposes audiences to extensive nudity or explicit physical intimacy, may be said to clear a higher threshold of social respectability. If rigsar continues to develop as a state-endorsed genre of popular music, it remains to be seen whether its styles and stage manners will evolve more in a filmi, hip-hop, or K-pop direction, or along other paths entirely. What is certain is that the outcome will be determined not by corporate fiat from Bollywood, Hollywood, or Seoul, but rather will emerge from a complex interplay of artistic agendas, consumer desires, official policies, community norms, and commercial strategies at the local Bhutanese level.

HAIRSTYLE AND FASHION

There is already one element of the K-pop "look" that has inscribed itself quite visibly on the bodies of Bhutanese youth—and not just onstage. Over the past decade or so, the adjective "Korean" has come to attach itself most commonly in Bhutanese everyday parlance (both English and Dzongkha) to such nouns as "hair" and "hairstyle." As images of South Korean actors, models, and musicians circulate through the mass media, their bodies become not just objects of consumption but also templates for emulation. Most noticeably, "Korean" hairstyles have become a favorite choice of young Bhutanese males and females at their local barbershops and hairdressers. A 2012 Kuensel article on Bhutanese men's changing beauty practices explains: "With access to internet and television, [global trends have] become even more influential, and grooming in a certain style is a direct impact. The young, especially those in urban areas, follow Korean [i.e., K-pop] and emo-punk. So, if their idols sport very blonde hair, it's all right for them to wear it too, not during school days though."[81] No less striking than the article's conflation of grooming practices with musical fandom—emo-punk is a style of punk rock that arose in the U.S. in the 1980s and has since expanded globally—is its association of "blonde hair" with two geographically removed and racially dissimilar entertainment cultures, one based in Asia and one in North America. Although few Koreans—and for that matter few Bhutanese—possess naturally blonde hair, it is not at all uncommon for South Korean entertainers to appear onstage with hair bleached or dyed blonde, not to mention various other shades besides their natural black.

A "Korean" hairdo, as understood in Bhutan does not always involve blondeness, however. Although a Bhutanese walking down the street with hair streaked or dyed blonde might very well receive that label from compatriots, so too would a variety of other hairstyles, indeed the vast majority of "Korean" cuts typically encountered.

[DAWA: WHAT 'KOREAN' HAIR ACTUALLY LOOKS LIKE]

The widespread adoption of "Korean" hairstyles in Bhutan signals more than merely the substitution of one appearance for another. Rather, it forms part of a broader, simultaneously cultural and economic process whereby body practices of various kinds are undergoing routinization, commodification, and professionalization across Bhutanese society. The effects of the process are as much institutional as they are corporeal. Traditionally, haircutting in Bhutan was not organized as a commercial occupation; it occurred more typically in domestic settings in ways that shored up kinship and/or religious hierarchies. In many communities, a child's first haircut customarily took place at the hands of his or her maternal uncle or a local lama. Concurrently, Buddhist monasteries, which housed a sizeable portion of the male population, implemented their own systems of hair regulation, grounded in the Buddhist equation of clerical status with the shearing of the scalp (as embodied in the English expression "the tonsure"). From the 1950s onward, as secular public schools came to supplant the educational role of monasteries, they, too, began to enforce institution-specific tonsorial standards, including, in many cases, a maximum hair length for male students (as distinct from the monastic practice of closely shaving the scalp); if a student exceeded that measure, he might face a school director or teacher, scissors in hand, who was ready to trim the offending locks.[82] Even today, Bhutanese school authorities value uniformity over diversity in student appearance—which is why even the imaginary K-pop fan of the Kuensel article knows not to indulge his blonde-haired fancy "during school days," and instead reserves it for the winter holidays or some other break in the school year.

Whereas the cutting of hair in Bhutan has always constituted a social act, implicated in various forms of institutional life, it was not until the 19XXs or so that the social "work" it performed came to occupy a distinct niche in the cash economy, which itself only gradually evolved from a barter system beginning in the 1970s.[83] Commercial barbershops and beauty salons, mostly unisex, started to appear in Thimphu and other urban centers from XXXX, and can now be found in XXXX. The spread of "Korean hair" in Bhutan is thus predicated on the availability, and has no doubt contributed to the growth, of commercial barbering and hairstyling services, requiring a knowledge of specialized cutting and styling techniques that untrained individuals cannot easily perform, not to mention access to industrially manufactured (which is to say, imported) grooming products for proper maintenance. Tellingly, Korean involvement in this commercial nexus is not limited to the creation of distinctive hairstyles for emulation, or of their visual reproduction and dissemination to consumers through the mass media.

[CHARLES?: HAIRDRESSING APPRENTICESHIPS IN KOREA; KOREA-BHUTAN FRIENDSHIP ASSOCIATION]

Steady exposure to the spectacle of trendily dressed Korean celebrities on television, film, and the internet has impacted the style consciousness of young Bhutanese consumers as much below the neckline as above. This fact should not come as a surprise, since already in 2003, 28 percent of respondents to a government-commissioned survey identified television as their chief source of "fashion ideas."[84] The banning of Paris-based FashionTV in 2005 would not appear to have stripped television of its role as a conduit for globally circulating fashion trends, although it may have helped to reconfigure some of its earlier geographic biases. American popular culture continues to exercise a powerful influence on the style choices of many Bhutanese young people, but over the past decade or so it has faced increasing competition from the Korean fashion industry as a perceived source of sartorial "coolness." Comments like the following crowd a 2009 Kuensel feature on "Korean Kool," all purportedly from the mouths of Bhutanese nineteen-year-olds (both male and female): "We find their dressing style cool." "We...think they're very fashion forward." "[Korean fashion is] cool and attractive and that's what draws us to it."[85] The independent daily Bhutan Today (founded 2008) gushed similarly in a 2010 headline that, "Korean Fashion Is the 'In' Thing," while venturing the observation—surely a bit exaggerated—that "trendy Korean clothes have wiped out the hip-hop look from the market. Gone are the baggy jeans days."[86] Often implicit in such remarks is an esthetic contrast between, on the one hand, a set of none-too-tidy "looks," like hip hop or emo-punk, that arose historically from within an American urban working-class or underground environment, and on the other hand, a more corporate-engineered and sociologically mainstream "Korean look" that is grounded, not in the experience of an underclass, but rather in the consumerist lifeways of an upwardly mobile urban professional elite. These class associations may help explain why one of the earlier-quoted nineteen-year-olds, a male, reported that "dressing in their [Korean] style…makes us feel good, even smart."[87]

As a commercial industry on a national scale, "Korean fashion" is by its nature diverse and continuously changing, making it difficult to define in purely formal terms. Nevertheless, over the past decade or so, Bhutanese consumers have come to associate certain trends in particular with a "Korean" sartorial look or style.[88] To give an example, in the eyes of the Bhutanese beholder, it is not the "baggy jeans" of hip-hop masculinity but instead a pair of "skinny pants," denim or otherwise, that are most likely to adorn the hips of a young male who "dresses up like a Korean." In the case of females, "short pretty skirts" and "sundresses" provide stylish but casual "Korean" alternatives to the kira, the ankle-length dress that driglam namzha designates as the Bhutanese national costume, or the half-kira, a recent adaptation extending only from the waist downward.[89] When the weather turns cooler, "Korean syle jackets" and "short stylish coats" complement the wardrobe of the female "Korean fashion fanatic," rather than the hoodie of hip hop or the kira's conventional over-layer, the toego jacket. Differences not just of cut, but also of cloth and color are key. Whereas the kira and gho bear traditional patterns and are often (but not always) made from hand-woven textiles, "Korean" garments invariably consist of industrially manufactured fabrics and are available in a broad spectrum of hues. In the words of one 18-year old Bhutanese female, "I like the way the Koreans dress up, the clothes are bright and comes [sic] in different shades of colors."[90]

Some colors in Bhutan, such as pink, read as particularly "Korean." "I never liked pink shirts and I always thought the colour was for the girls to wear," recalled a male high-school student in a 2010 newspaper report. "But now pink is a fashionable colour for boys and the girls also find it cute." The journalist who recorded these words was quick to note that the young man's "favorite Korean band," Big Bang (2006–present), "wears pink in a music video [possibly XXX] which makes pink all the more cooler [sic]."[91] According to the article's schema of gendered identity and desire, media content from Korea structures the sartorial self-presentation of young Bhutanese males in at least two ways. On the one hand, it provides visual and material cues through which the male subject can signal his identification with certain emblematic performers of male gender in the arena of popular culture. Self-fashioning doubles in this case with male fandom, and the iconic celebrities cited as the object of emulation hail not only from the music world but also from the media of television and cinema.[92] A related and complementary motivation for appearing "Korean" involves female fandom, insofar as the male subject imagined in the article fancies that his stylistic choices will win him the approving gaze of young women, who constitute the larger part of the local fan base for Korean serial dramas, romance films, and boy bands.

Newspaper reportage in Bhutan routinely cites Korean pop culture as a source of inspiration not only for clothing styles but also for consumer trends in related fashion items such as footwear and accessories ("acacia checked mufflers," bags, and so forth), as well as, of course, coiffure.[93] In 2012, for example, Kuensel identified "Korean flicks" as responsible for launching the recent fad among young Bhutanese males and females of wearing colorful plastic eyeglasses with thick rectangular frames, purportedly all the rage on the streets of Phuentsholing, a commercial hub situated along the southern border with India. Calling them "nerd glass[es]," Bhutanese youngsters allegedly regard such spectacles as imparting a more "intellectual look" than Hollywood- or Bollywood-inspired sunglasses, and see no contradiction in sporting a pair even if they have perfect vision.[94] A more obvious case of emulative consumption—strikingly stripped of its original functionality—can scarcely be imagined. Still, while most Bhutanese would probably agree that Korean media content exerts a significant impact on fashion trends in the nation, not everyone is willing to accept the attribution of "Korean" influence when it comes to the specific instance. A 2010 Kuensel article found pockets of resistance, for example, to the "general perception that the way a majority of the youth in the capital city wear their hair copying women's favourite Korean actors." It quoted the words of a 23-year-old Bhutanese male who insisted, "My hairstyle is a creation of my own….I'm not a big fan of Korean hairstyle anyway, and it annoys me when people think I copied one."[95] Significantly, even as the speaker disavows a "Korean" stylistic inspiration, the emphasis he places on the value of individual creativity and uniqueness of appearance confirms the degree to which, like many of his contemporaries, he has internalized a globally hegemonic late-capitalist logic that frames the exercise of consumer choice as an act of individual self-expression. One of the constitutive paradoxes of the global "fashion system" (to use Barthes's term) lies in the fact that, for all of the style industry's rhetorical idealization of personal choice, its structural reliance on the techniques of mass production and mass marketing works at the same time to make finite the potential forms of self-expression that consumers have at their disposal in the marketplace, or at the least to channel consumer desires in more predictable and industrially manageable ways.[96] Thus, whereas the sartorial codes of driglam namzha uphold uniformity of appearance as a positive social good, in the case of "Korean fashion," the oft-heard perception that "Every kid is dressed exactly the same: the jeans, the sneakers and the hairstyle" functions as a form of critique—albeit a critique that is endemic to the operations of the fashion system itself and is thus unlikely to disappear anytime soon.[97]
Ironically, one of the cognitive effects that Bhutan's fashion system works most assiduously to create is the idea or feeling—sometimes quite divorced from literal fact—that something genuinely "Korean" inheres in the objects, services, and styles that locals market and consume under that label. After all, the "jeans" and "sneakers" that the above critique references do not hail historically from the Korean peninsula: rather, both articles of fashion originated in late nineteenth-century America, within the work and athletic arenas respectively, becoming standard casual wear for teenagers only from around the 1950s as their popularity expanded domestically and internationally under the glare of the mass media (cf. James Dean in Rebel without a Cause [1955]). The cultural hybridity that lurks beneath the "Korean" label grows more conspicuous if we consider one Australian-German journalist's description of the "South Korean look" that she witnessed among Thimphu youth in 2011 as being exemplified by "faux hawks [i.e., false "Mohawk" hairstyles], skinny-legged pants and Converse All Stars"—a get-up that tellingly features the names of a Native American tribe and of a Massachusetts footwear manufacturer founded in 1908.[98] As the above stereotype suggests, what passes as "Korean fashion" in Bhutan, far from rejecting American pop culture, in fact incorporates various components of that tradition, even if it combines and tweaks them in distinctive ways. It is also perfectly possible to create a "fusion" of "Korean" and "American" esthetic elements by deliberately mixing the two, as some young Bhutanese reportedly seek to do when they blend K-pop and emo-punk sartorial styles.[99] When a former Chief Justice observes that contemporary Bhutanese youth are "dressed up stereotypical to the Korean punks," he would likewise seem to nod in both cultural directions.[100]

A more fundamental structuring element in the Bhutanese sense of fashion than the contrast between "Korean" and "American" looks is the much larger and more consequential distinction between "Western" and "Bhutanese" garb. What ordinary Bhutanese understand as "Korean" and "American" attire falls broadly into the category of "Western" clothing: industrially manufactured garments whose forms, while deriving historically from the male-trousers / female-dress model of modern European culture, today follow the style dictates of a globalized fashion industry. Ironically, this definition necessarily excludes the traditional garments known in South Korea as hanbok ("Korean clothing").[101] According to the same schema, "Bhutanese" clothing, by contrast, is hand-woven (at least ideally), takes the gho and kira as its two basic forms, and conforms to the policy guidelines of driglam namzha. Although "Bhutanese" and "Western" apparel alike can be purchased on the open market, the former is a fairly durable and all-purpose form of dress that might be handed down as an heirloom, while the latter is an almost exclusively store-bought item whose shelf life is subject to the vagaries of the fashion cycle and whose use in public the contemporary interpretation of driglam namzha limits to a non-work, non-school—which is to say a casual—context. So thoroughly embedded is "Korean" clothing in a commercial matrix that, from the perceptive of the Bhutanese consumer, one of the most practical ways of defining the category is by citing its retail price, which approximates that of other moderate luxury goods. "In terms of cost, the minimum is Nu 450 [=$9.55 US], which may go up to Nu 1500 [=$31.83 US]," responded one high-school student when Kuensel asked him in 2009 how "easy and affordable" it was to get "Korean clothes" in the capital.[102] By the same token, as part of the consumerist milieu of "Western" fashion, "Korean" clothing is capable of provoking some of the same anxieties concerning Bhutanese cultural autonomy that have attached themselves over the decades to the larger "Bhutan"/"West" binary. The same issue of Kuensel thus quotes a "parent of three" to the effect that "Korean fashion is an adoption of the west and, if [Bhutanese] go so much into it, we'll definitely lose our culture."[103]

If some Bhutanese fear that "Korean fashion" will corrode the nation's cultural identity through its inculcation of spiritually empty consumerist ("Western") values, few associate it with explicitly transgressive social behavior. A contrast may be drawn here with milieu of hip hop, which receives perennial criticism in the United States and elsewhere for, among other things, its glorification of gang violence. Curiously, it is not Korean but another brand of East Asian popular culture, with its own distinctive sartorial/tonsorial style, that Bhutanese have come to identify routinely with juvenile delinquency and youth crime: the so-called Genji look, from Japan, which takes its name from the protagonist, Takiya Genji, of the 2007 movie Crows Zero (Kurôzu zero), directed by Miike Takashi (b. 1960). The film, said to be a "cult favorite among youth in Bhutan," is based loosely on a 1990s action-manga series by Takahashi Hiroshi (b. 1965), and takes for its setting a Japanese all-boys high school riven by gang rivalries.[104] Far from the bright pinks and yellows of the K-pop palette, the signature tone of Crows Zero is black, which is the color of the birds referenced in the title as well as of the mandatory uniforms worn by most Japanese schoolboys.

Although Crows Zero never played onscreen in any of Bhutan's handful of cinemas, its emergence as a "cult favorite" on DVD in the late 2000s coincided with what Bhutanese law-enforcement authorities as well as the news media perceived as a surge in "gang" activities among the nation's male student population.[105] By the time that The Times of India reported on the topic in 2011, the notion that the two phenomena were directly connected had become axiomatic: "Teen violence shot up in Thimphu two years back as the youth went crazy over Japanese action film Crows Zero. As many as 13 groups of teenage, Genji[-]hairstyled 'gangsters' mushroomed in in [sic] the capital city overnight, giving cops sleepless nights."[106] To hear an official of the Royal Bhutan Police relate the standard narrative, by 2011 the film had "become something like the bible" to participants in Thimphu's largest and "most notorious" gang, the MB Boys, whose members, to a man (or boy), were "found carrying a CD [sic] of the movie."[107] Although it would be difficult to demonstrate a causal link between exposure to the film and the actual incidence of teen violence, there can be little doubt that Crows Zero's evocation of youthful alienation struck a responsive chord among some younger Bhutanese viewers. In the years since the movie's release, more than one Bhutanese schoolboy, for instance, has picked "Genji" or "Taniya" for his web nickname. Even more likely, he or one of his classmates has declared his allegiance to the film's dark hero visually by adopting a "Genji hairstyle" (as referenced in the Times of India report) or by sporting some items of "Genji style clothing." The former consists of hair cut short on the sides with a lofty and unevenly cut spike in the middle, while the latter category includes "short blazer-type jackets and over jackets with large collars," typically black, which are sometimes worn, in an affectation of yakuza flair, with white-leather shoes and belts.[108]

Such identifications conceal more than a few layers of irony. The first is from the perspective of Japanese cultural history. Although for many centuries Japanese have used the name Genji to evoke an ideal of fashionable masculinity, the classical eponym of that tradition is the elegant "Shining Prince" of the female-authored court romance Genji monogatari (Tale of Genji; early 11th c.), a quintessentially refined aristocrat who spends his life in pursuit of heterosexual affairs, and not the hyper-masculine, violent protagonist of Crows Zero, son of a yakuza, who operates in a dark, dystopic, and largely male-populated world. For Japanese cultural purists, in other words, the choice of this particular Genji may seem unrepresentative, if not a travesty of the longer tradition. In addition, the fact of Crows Zero's overwhelmingly male fan base raises questions of gendered incentive: does the desire to impress females provide the same kind of motivating factor for young Bhutanese males who adopt a "Genji"-like appearance as it does for those who cultivate "Korean" style, at least in the popular imagination? Or is the "Genji" look more about impressing—or intimidating—one's fellow men? In any event, it is striking that the "Genji" look is exclusively and aggressively masculine, whereas "Korean fashion" in Bhutan comes in both male and female guises.

The "Genji" example points to some of the pitfalls of national identification in the global arena of consumer culture. In Bhutan, "Brand Korea" is notably stronger than "Brand Japan," due in no small measure to the deliberate, coordinated efforts of the South Korean public and private sectors to promote it through Arirang and other transnational media. Although Japan's national broadcaster, NHK, has been present in Bhutan for just as long a time as Arirang, it has focused its efforts more on educational programming than on popular entertainment, and has exerted considerably less influence in shaping the consumer choices of local viewers. It is not NHK, significantly, that was responsible for introducing the violent subcultural glamour of Crows Zero to Bhutan, nor, for that matter, does the Japanese national economy or image benefit much from the association of Japan with "gang" lifestyles. In the absence of a clear branding strategy, however, any construction of Japan that emerges in media culture is equally plausible, even one that paints the archipelago as an unruly landscape of violence-prone teenagers. Ironically, rates of violent crime are in fact far lower in Japan, statistically speaking, than in most other places: in 2008, intentional homicide, for example, was nearly five times more common in South Korea than in Japan; even in Bhutan it doubled the Japanese figure.[109] Since the overwhelming majority of the Bhutanese population has never set foot in either country, however, mass-mediated images, no matter how selective, inevitably substitute for direct experience, resulting in some rather dubious stereotypes.

Finally, there is a purely material sense in which "Korean fashion" in Bhutan can be seen as a culturally constructed and rhetorically manipulated—in a word, a thoroughly fanciful—label. For it would be a mistake to assume that the "Korean" clothing worn in Bhutan is necessarily made in the geographical place called Korea. In fact, rarely does it have a Korean origin in a physical sense. Instead, several other Asian fashion industries besides Korea's are primarily responsible for producing the bulk of goods perceived or marketed in Bhutan as "Korean." Otherwise, one would be hard-pressed to understand the following remark, made by a Thimphu shopowner in 2010, as anything but a non sequitur: "I usually bring winter clothing from Bangkok and Hong Kong because most of my customers look for Korean or Genji style clothing."[110] Air links between Bhutan and Thailand commenced in 1989, and Thailand has since grown into Bhutan's fifth largest source of overall imports, fourth when it comes to clothing and accessories (2011 figures).[111] In Thai fashion circles as in Bhutanese, "Korea" carries considerable cachet, so that Bangkok emporia abound in modish apparel that local consumers, as well as Bhutanese buyers, might easily perceive as "Korean-style clothing," despite its local manufacture. Korean-inspired fashion trends so permeate the Thai marketplace, in fact, that government officials have gone so far as to issue health warnings against their putative ill effects—such as a 2010 advisory associating the wearing of trendy dark-colored leggings with an elevated risk of dengue fever.[112]

Other major sources of nominally "Korean" fashion in Bhutan include Hong Kong and, above all, China. In China, Koreaphilic consumer tastes have been conspicuous since at least the late 1990s, as the early Chinese coinage of the term Hanliu attests. Not only has such demand shaped Chinese domestic consumption, but, as the Korean Wave has expanded across Asia, it has opened up profit opportunities in foreign markets for Chinese export industries. One of the forms this commercial exploitation takes is the manufacture and distribution of unlicensed (pirated) versions of Korean media content. For example, most of the DVDs of Korean movies and TV series that Bhutanese so commonly buy, rent, or borrow are in fact bootlegs of Chinese or Hong Kong origin, with covers often featuring Chinese characters or unlikely brand names such as "Adidas." A related strategy for profiting from the Korean Wave is the incorporation of elements likely to be read as "Korean" into consumer goods of Chinese manufacture. The latter practice is especially germane to the fashion industry, the national origin of whose products is not always readily legible from linguistic cues. Like their Thai counterparts, Chinese clothing manufacturers and marketers have eagerly embraced the "Korean" label, supplying the domestic and overseas markets with "Korean-style" garments as well as outright knockoffs of brand goods at a lower cost (and quality) than their Korean-made and/or Korean-licensed equivalents. Given the subjective nature of the category, it is difficult to document exactly what portion of the "Korean-style" clothing seen in Bhutan was actually produced in China. It is suggestive, however, that, according to official Bhutanese trade statistics, while imports of new clothing and accessories (excluding footwear) from China totalled roughly US $450,000 in 2011, the corresponding figure for items sourced directly from Korea stood at less than $5000.[113] Used-clothing imports from Korea were in fact substantially greater than new ones, reaching $260,000, second only to those entering from Nepal, and followed by used-clothing imports from Japan.[114]

[DAWA: STORY OF DR. FISH]

INTERNET AND GAMING

INTERNET / GAMES / HIDDEN CONSUMPTION?

OTHER FORMS OF CONSUMPTION KOREAN FOOD / LIMITATIONS OF KOREA'S APPEAL / DOES MEDIA EXPOSURE AFFECT APPEAL OF KOREAN NON-MEDIA PRODUCTS? / CARS / ARCHERY GOODS / TAEKWONDO / TRAVEL

CONCLUSIONS

*1* "KOREA" AS FLOATING SIGNIFIER (1): REPRESENTATIVE OF MODERN URBAN CONSUMER LIFESTYLES / TIMING OF TV'S INTRODUCTION, WITH ITS ATTENDANT TELESCOPING EFFECT, MEANS THAT "KOREAN" STYLES AS PERCEIVED IN BHUTAN INCORPORATE MULTIPLE INFLUENCES FROM ELSEWHERE (JAPANESE TV DRAMAS & HAIRSTYLES OF THE 1980S-1990S; THAILAND AS A BRIDGE) / IN SOME CASES, "KOREA" CAN STAND FOR OTHER EAST ASIAN PLACES (EXAMPLE OF YOKOSO RESTAURANT) / IRONY THAT CHINA IS BHUTAN'S NEAREST EAST ASIAN NEIGHBOR BUT IS RARELY SPOKEN ABOUT

*2* "KOREA" AS FLOATING SIGNIFIER (2): "KOREA" AS A SURREPTITIOUS WAY OF SELLING CHINESE GOODS / TRADE CIRCUITS THROUGH INDIA, NEPAL, & THAILAND / THE BOOTLEG ECONOMY

*3* CULTURAL RENEGOTIATION OF "SOUTH ASIA" AND "EAST ASIA" / EVOLVING IMPERIAL FORMATIONS / QUESTIONS OF RACE / NAGALAND & HORNBILL FESTIVAL

*4* LOCAL CONTEXTS ARE IMPORTANT: CENTRALITY OF CLOTHING POLICY WITHIN THE LARGER REALM OF BHUTANESE STATE POLICY, AND THE TENSIONS OF THAT POLICY WITH GLOBAL-MEDIA INPUTS, HAS MADE FASHION, AND ESPECIALLY HAIRSTYLE, A PARTICULARLY PROMINENT FOCUS OF THE KOREAN WAVE IN BHUTAN.

[WHAT, IN THE END, DOES "KOREA" MEAN TO YOUNG PEOPLE? / QUESTIONNAIRE]

---------------------------------
[ 1 ]. The report, commissioned by the Bhutanese Ministry of Information and Communications, was prepared by Thimphu-based MediaCom Consultants, based on information collected August–November 2003. See Siok Sian Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A14.
[ 2 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A7.
[ 3 ]. Ibid.
[ 4 ]. "BBS; The Rough Road Ahead," Kuensel, 9 June 2001; 2008; BBS1 & BBS2
[ 5 ]. It is typical of Bhutan's media history that cable-TV providers began operating even before the government officially legalized them in October 1999. See "Cable TV Legalised," Kuensel, 9 Oct. 1999; "Media Momentum," Kuensel, 14 Aug. 1999. In the border town of Phuentsholing, some households had been receiving cable service from neighboring Jaigaon, India, even before television itself became legal. See "TV Sales Soar," Kuensel, 21 Aug. 1999.
[ 6 ]. "Dish TV: To See or Not to See," Bhutan Observer, 4 July 2008; "Why Ban Dish TV?," Bhutan Observer, 19 Jan. 2008.
[ 7 ]. A sampling of reactions may be found in "Bhutan: The Last Place," a news story initially televised on PBS's Frontline/World on xxx May 2001. For an interactive website, see http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bhutan/.
[ 8 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A19.
[ 9 ]. "Change in Perspective," Kuensel, 5 June 1999.
[ 10 ]. Made by a partly Australian crew at a cost of $80,000, The Cup enjoyed the backing of the British producer Jeremy Thomas, who had earlier sponsored Bernardo Bertolucci's Little Buddha (1994), which was partially set in Bhutan. The Cup played at the 1999 Cannes Film Festival as part of the prestigious Directors' Fortnight series, and won awards the same year at international film festivals in Busan, Munich, and Toronto (where it became runner-up for the People's Choice Award). For an analysis of Khyentse Norbu's work in a local context, see Sue Clayton, "Film-making in Bhutan: The View from Shangri-La," New Cinemas 5 (2007): 79–80. In 2002, the World Cup again inspired a Bhutan-related film production: The Other Final (2003), by the Dutch documentarian Johan Kramer, who chronicled the tournament's last-place match between Bhutan and Montserrat.
[ 11 ]. "Bhutan Gives in to World Cup Fever," BBC, 27 June 1998; "Bhutan to Enter TV Age," BBC, 26 Apr. 1999; "Fast Forward into Trouble," The Guardian, 13 June 2003. Although TV was officially banned before 1999, it should be noted that a number of Bhutanese households, particularly along the Indian border and among the more affluent around the country, had already been using unauthorized satellite dishes or antennas to receive television signals for some time previously. In that respect, the decision to legalize television may be seen as a strategy to impose government regulation over an autonomously emerging social reality. See "Change in Perspective"; Kinley Wangdi, Television in the Himalayan Kingdom of Bhutan: Problems, Arguments, and Possible Solutions (Thimphu: LST Consultancy, 2005), 21–23; "TV Sales Soar." It bears mentioning that the royal palace had also installed a satellite dish, and subscribed to the Indian Star TV programming package, in time for the 1998 World Cup. See "Fast Forward into Trouble." Even before the advent of satellite broadcasting, many urban households in Bhutan owned TV sets, primarily for the purpose of watching videocassette tapes, which could be rented in Thimphu from around 1979 or 1980, and in Phuentsholing even earlier. See "Bhutan TV Follows Cyber Launch," BBC, 2 June 1999; Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A25; Phuntsho Rapten, "Mass Media: Its Consumption and Impact on Residents of Thimphu and Rural Areas," Journal of Bhutan Studies 3 (2001): 172–198. According to a 1998 survey, 6.9% of BBS radio listeners lived in a TV-equipped household (Phuntsho Rapten, "Mass Media," 172).
[ 12 ]. There are conflicting accounts of the term's first use, although 1999 is the date most commonly cited. See, for example, Cho Hae-Joang, "Reading the 'Korean Wave' As a Sign of Global Shift," Korea Journal 45, no. 4 (2005): 174. Another point of scholarly disagreement lies in whether the coinage derives from mainland Chinese or Taiwanese media and, relatedly, which of the two inspired the Japanese analogue Kanryû.
[ 13 ]. For overviews of the Korean Wave in various Asian settings, see XXX.
[ 14 ]. On "cultural nationalist" interpretations, see Cho, "Reading the 'Korean Wave' As a Sign of Global Shift," 153–159.
[ 15 ]. For causal analyses of the Korean Wave, see XXX.
[ 16 ]. Nye, a Harvard political scientist, introduced the term "soft power" in 1990 (Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power [New York: Basic Books]). Nye subsequently expanded on the concept in Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, Public Affairs, 2004).
[ 17 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A20. For a newspaper editorial highlighting the issue of choice (or lack thereof) in programming, see "Media: A Combined Effort," Kuensel 7 Sep. 2001.
[ 18 ]. The channels listed are those cited as the ten most popular by one of Sigma Cable's initial co-owners, Rinzi Dorji. See "Bhutan: The Last Place" as well as the associated website (http://www.pbs.org/frontlineworld/stories/bhutan/). For more on Sigma Cable, see also "BBS Wins Copyright Battle," Kuensel, 31 May 2003; "Bhutan Gives TV Cautious Embrace," BBC, 19 June 2004; "Fast Forward into Trouble"; "Has TV Changed Bhutan?," BBC, 17 June 2004; Orville Schell, "Gross National Happiness," Red Herring, 15 Jan. 2002, page #.
[ 19 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A20.
[ 20 ]. Department of Information and Media, "Bhutan Media Impact Study 2008," 39.
[ 21 ]. "XXX," Kuensel, 6 May 2000.
[ 22 ]. Australian response letter
[ 23 ]. On the social impact of WWF/WWE, see Department of Information and Media, "Bhutan Media Impact Study 2008," page #; "Fast Forward into Trouble"; "Five Years of Cable Television," Kuensel, 19 Oct. 2004; "Has TV Changed Bhutan?"; Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A52; "Remote Control," Kuensel, 18 Sep. 2001; Schell, "Gross National Happiness," page #.
[ 24 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Survey 2003," A47–48. Among the effects of TV viewing cited by communications researcher Phuntsho Rapten ("Mass Media," 185–187) are changes in shopping choices, eating and sleep schedules, domestic seating arrangements, and time spent on schoolwork and conversation. 2003 Kuensel Online survey?
[ 25 ]. Although the monarchic state formally patronizes the Drukpa Kagyu lineage of Vajrayana ("Tibetan") Buddhism and routinely cites Buddhist principles in shaping the policies of Gross National Happiness, it is important to note that a significant Hindu minority, largely of Nepalese ethnic origin, exists in southern Bhutan, from whose perspective such policies can appear culturally chauvinistic. On ethnic issues in Bhutan, and in particular the Lhotshampa ("Southerner") minority, see Michael Hutt, Unbecoming Citizens: Culture, Nationhood, and the Flight of Refugees from Bhutan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[ 26 ]. "Bhutan Lets the World In (but Leaves Fashion TV Out)," New York Times, 7 May 2007. The New Zealand social psychologist Ross McDonald offers a similarly Buddhist-inflected argument in "Television, Materialism, and Culture: An Exploration of Imported Media and its Implications for GNH," Journal of Bhutan Studies 14 (2006): 68–89.
[ 27 ]. "Bhutan," Kuensel, 4 Mar. 2002.
[ 28 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," B34.
[ 29 ]. "Music, Fashion and Wrestling Out," Kuensel, 16 Mar. 2005. For a similar criticism, see "Control of Content," Kuensel, 10 May 2010.
[ 30 ]. "The Television Debate," Kuensel, 23 March 2005. {MTV criticism}
[ 31 ]. On the popularity of FashionTV and MTV, see "The Balance," Kuensel, 22 Feb. 2002; "BBS Wins Copyright Battle"; "Evolving to Survive," Kuensel; 2 Nov. 2003; "Night Life: New but Popular Culture," Kuensel, 4 Jan. 2002; "Remote Control"; Phuntsho Rapten, "Mass Media," 185, 187; Schell, "Gross National Happiness," page #. {FashionTV/MTV popularity}
[ 32 ]. "Evolving to Survive"; Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A58; 2001 fashion show; govt. involvement; weaving tradition
[ 33 ]. "Music, Fashion and Wrestling Out."
[ 34 ]. "Night Life: New but Popular Culture." For a criticism of "underpants showing and pants hanging," see Department of Information and Media, "Bhutan Media Impact Study 2008," 53.
[ 35 ]. "Women Upset, Men Glad over Serials off the Air," Kuensel, 15 Nov. 2002. See also "Control of Content."
[ 36 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study," A49
[ 37 ]. Ibid., A50.
[ 38 ]. "Music, Fashion and Wrestling Out."
[ 39 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study," A51, A54, A56, A58.
[ 40 ]. Ibid., A38–39.
[ 41 ]. Ibid., A56–57, B40, B44.
[ 42 ]. On the 2005 channel pruning, see "Bhutan Lets the World In (but Leaves Fashion TV Out)"; "Music, Fashion and Wrestling Out."; "The Television Debate."
[ 43 ]. "No Indian TV, Please, This Is Bhutan," Financial Express, 7 May 2005; "Television: Always an Issue," Kuensel, 28 Sep. 2005.
[ 44 ]. Regional politics continue to intersect with media policy in another way as well: it is striking that, despite the presence of a large ethnic-Nepalese ("Lhotshampa") community in Bhutan, TV from Nepal is absent from the Bhutanese cable dial. Bhutan's public radio network, BBS, has been airing Nepali-language programs from as early as XXX, yet Nepali, though widely understood even among non-Lhotshampas, is seldom heard on television, including BBS-TV. A controversial campaign for Lhotshampa cultural assimilation in the late 1980s / early 1990s and lingering tensions between Bhutan and Nepal over the resulting Lhotshampa exodus are no doubt partly responsible.
[ 45 ]. "No Indian TV, Please, This Is Bhutan."
[ 46 ]. India by no means disappeared from the cable dial in 2005: of the 30 channels that remained, fully XX hailed from the subcontinent.
[ 47 ]. On Manipur, see Akoijam Sunita, "Korea Comes to Manipur," The Caravan, Oct. 2010), XX–XX; Otojit Kshetrimayum and Ningombam Victoria Chanu, "Mapping Cultural Diffusion: The Case of 'Korean Wave' in North East India," in India and Korea: Bridging the Gaps, ed. Sushila Narsimhan and Kim Do Young (New Delhi: Manak Publications, 2008), XXX–XXX; Gayatri Jai Singh Rathore, "Korerang: The Success Story of Korean Drama in North East India," paper presented at the 4th Congress of the Asia & Pacific Network, Paris, 14–16 Sep. 2011 (http://www.reseau-asie.com/userfiles/file/D06_rathore_korerang_north_east_india.pdf).
[ 48 ]. The Revolutionary People's Front (est. 1989), which seeks an independent socialist state in Manipur, proclaimed a ban on Hindi-language films and TV in September 2000, calling such forms of entertainment a "primary means" for the "Indianization" of "minority communities" ("Revolutionary Salute to the Departed Soul of Captain Mangal," 15 Sep. 2000 [http://www.reocities.com/capitolhill/congress/4568/publications/20000915.html]).
[ 49 ]. Later reappearance of non-Hindi programming from India
[ 50 ]. Stella Paul, "Koreanization of Nagaland; A Report Truly Unheard," Merinews, 5 July 2010 (http://www.merinews.com/article/koreanisation-of-nagaland-a-report-truly-unheard/15825328.shtml). Bhutanese TV statistics
[ 51 ]. Foreign Minister's remark
[ 52 ]. "Trainees Complete the Korean Language Course," Kuensel, 22 Mar. 2003.
[ 53 ]. On the popularity of Boys over Flowers, see Aarti Betigeri, "Showtime in Bhutan," Sep. 2011, page #; "Bhutan 'Idol' Rocks Dragon Lutes, Buddhist Hymns," Associated Press, 4 Nov. 2011; "Styled to Impress."
[ 54 ]. "Korean Kool," Kuensel, 30 May 2009.
[ 55 ]. Ibid.
[ 56 ]. population statistics
[ 57 ]. Phuntsho Rapten, "Mass Media," 176, 183. Pico Iyer ("A Tale of Two Kingdoms," Time, 13 Feb. 2006, PAGE #) wrote of his 1990 visit to Bhutan: "The absence of television meant that there were more video-rental shops along Thimphu's single main street than I see in my hometown in California."
[ 58 ]. In some stores, Nepalese films constitute a fourth category of DVD, even though content from Nepal rarely appears on Bhutanese television or in cinemas. Of the 414 movies screened in four of Bhutan's most popular theaters in 1999, only 10 (2.4%) were Nepalese. See Phuntsho Rapten, "Mass Media," 183.
[ 59 ]. Phuntsho Rapten, "Mass Media," 176, 183.
[ 60 ]. Kuensel new-release listings
[ 61 ]. On the politics of Dzongkha, see XXX.
[ 62 ]. Dzongkha serials from when?
[ 63 ]. Dzongkha films before 1999
[ 64 ]. Dzongkha movie statistics
[ 65 ]. statistics on Bollywood/Hollywood films in Bhutanese cinemas before 1999
[ 66 ]. Kinley Dorji and Siok Sian Pek, "The Media in Bhutan: In the Service of the Public," paper presented at the 2nd International Congress on Gross National Happiness, Antogonish, Nova Scotia, XXX Apr. 2005 (http://www.gpiatlantic.org/conference/papers/pek-dorji.pdf).
[ 67 ]. My Sassy Girl developments after 2011
[ 68 ]. "No Show for Indian Idol," Bhutan Observer, 3 May 2008.
[ 69 ]. Sonam Kinga, "The Attributes and Values of Folk and Popular Songs," Journal of Bhutan Studies 4 (2001): 146. A letter to Kuensel quoted in the same article (132) similarly characterizes rigsar "tunes" as being "either English or Hindi." Elsewhere in the essay (XXX), Sonam Kinga appends a third category, writing that post-1995 recordings of rigsar "associate more with English, Hindi, and Nepali music."
[ 70 ]. Bhutan was not, strictly speaking, colonized
[ 71 ]. Asian values claim
[ 72 ]. India and English-language education
[ 73 ]. Dorji Wangchuk, "Make Way for the Young: A Commentary," Bhutan Observer, 25 Jan. 2008.
[ 74 ]. On the concept of habitus, see Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social and Cultural Anthropology 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977 [1972]).
[ 75 ]. On tattooing's recent appearance in Bhutan's youth culture, see "Bhutan Lets the World In (but Leaves Fashion TV Out)"; "Tattooing—Skin-deep Artistic Expression," Bhutan Observer, 19 Apr. 2008.
[ 76 ]. Sharchopkha rigsar
[ 77 ]. For a critical genealogy of driglam namzha, a concept that took on new political significance in the 1980s, see Karma Phuntsho, "Echoes of Ancient Ethos: Reflections on Some Popular Bhutanese Social Concepts," in The Spider and the Piglet: Proceedings of the First International Seminar on Bhutan Studies, ed. Karma Ura and Sonam Kinga (Thimphu: Centre for Bhutan Studies, 2004), 571–575.
[ 78 ]. Druk Star and Druk Super Star follow a "star search" format adapted from the British Pop Idol (ITV, 2001–2003) and its international spin-offs such as American Idol (Fox, 2002–present) and Indian Idol (SET, 2004–present). A rival franchise, Bhutan Star (BBS, 2008–present) also exists, but the latter restricts participants to the "Bhutanese" singing genres of boedra, rigsar, and zhungdra. Druk (thunder dragon) is a traditional way of referring to Bhutan.
[ 79 ]. Bhutanese subethnicities
[ 80 ]. King and Queen's kiss
[ 81 ]. "To Break the Beauty Barrier," Kuensel, 31 May 2012. For a similar mention of "blonde highlights," see "Bhutan 'Idol' Rocks Dragon Lutes, Buddhist Hymns."
[ 82 ]. Bad Hair Days
[ 83 ]. For an influential cross-cultural analysis of the social life of hair, see Hallpike. late rise of money economy
[ 84 ]. Pek, "Media Impact Study 2003," A57, A58.
[ 85 ]. "Korean Kool."
[ 86 ]. "Korean Fashion Is the 'In' Thing," Bhutan Today, 24 Sep. 2010.
[ 87 ]. "Korean Kool."
[ 88 ]. This paragraph draws on the following print sources: "Bhutan Star Talent Quest Keeps Traditional Music Alive," Deutsche Welle, 30 Nov. 2011; "Korean Fashion Is the 'In' Thing"; "Korean Kool"; XXX
[ 89 ]. On the emergence of the half-kira, see "The Full Story Behind the Half Kira," Kuensel, 2008-4-21.
[ 90 ]. "Korean Fashion Is the 'In' Thing."
[ 91 ]. Ibid. COLOR PINK
[ 92 ]. sports fandom
[ 93 ]. For mufflers and bags, see "Korean Fashion Is the 'In' Thing"; "Korean Kool."
[ 94 ]. "Fabulously Nerdy," Kuensel, 16 Feb. 2012.
[ 95 ]. "Styled to Impress," Kuensel, 26 Aug. 2010.
[ 96 ]. For Barthes's influential analysis, see Roland Barthes, The Fashion System, trans. Matthew Ward and Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990 [1967, 1983]).
[ 97 ]. "Then and Now," Kuensel, 5 Jan. 2012.
[ 98 ]. "Bhutan Star Talent Quest Keeps Traditional Music Alive."
[ 99 ]. "Korean Fashion Is the 'In' Thing."
[ 100 ]. "Then and Now."
[ 101 ]. In North Korea, hanbok is known as Chosŏn-ot, which likewise means "Korean clothing."
[ 102 ]. "Korean Kool."
[ 103 ]. Ibid.
[ 104 ]. "Media and Violent Masculinity in Bhutan," Bhutan Observer, 20 Aug. 2010.
[ 105 ]. "Gang" definition
[ 106 ]. "Lessons from Thimphu," Times of India, 23 Oct. 2011. For a similar claim in a Bhutanese newsmagazine, see "The Bhutanese Genji," The Journalist, 11 Dec. 2011, 14 ("The movie was released in 2007, and ever since then juvenile delinquency in the country has been on a rise.").
[ 107 ]. "The Bhutanese Genji."
[ 108 ]. Ibid.; "Genji and Emo Style in Vogue This Winter," Bhutan Observer, 27 Nov. 2010; "What Is in Vogue This Summer?," Bhutan Observer, 9 Aug. 2010.
[ 109 ]. United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, Global Study on Homicide: Trends/Contexts/Data (Vienna: United Nations, 2011), 108, 109.
[ 110 ]. "Genji and Emo Style in Vogue This Winter."
[ 111 ]. Royal Government of Bhutan, Ministry of Finance, Department of Revenue and Customs, Trade Information Service Section, Bhutan Trade Statistics for the Year 2011 (Thimphu: Royal Government of Bhutan, 2012), vii, 380–383.
[ 112 ]. "Warning: This Fad May Kill You," GlobalPost, 24 Aug. 2010 (http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/thailand/100823/korean-wave-fashion-thai-culture?page=0,1)
[ 113 ]. Royal Government of Bhutan, Bhutan Trade Statistics for the Year 2011, 209–213, 280.
[ 114 ]. Ibid., 534.