regional tv: affective media geographies

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Regional tv: Affective Media Geographies

Thomas LamarreMcGill University

[email protected]

Abstract

The rise of what has been called ‘new television’ or ‘media regionalism’ in East Asia has occurred in a context in which the production of media networks ‒ both infra-structures (broadcast and relay stations, satellites, cable systems) and media devices or platforms (tv sets, vcr, vcd, and mobile phones) ‒ outstrips the production of contents. The essay considers the question: what is coming into common through this emerging sense of media regionalism? Looking at the highly popular series Hana yori dango or ‘Boys over Flowers’, which has been formatted across media forms (such as manga, animated tv series, animated films, television dramas, and theatrical release cinema) and across nations (Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China, and the Philippines), this essay finds that the feeling of media regionalism is related to both the gap between infrastructures (of distribution and production) and the gap within media distribution (between mobility and privatization).

Keywords

television – formats – transmedial – transnational – media geographies – regionalism – soft power – affect

To address the ‘where’ of ‘Digital Asia,’ I propose to look at the dynamics of regional tv in East Asia, using a widely cited example of media regionalism, the popular series Hana yori dango, or Hanadan for short, usually translated as ‘Boys over Flowers’. Hanadan has been serialized across media forms (such as manga, animated tv series, animated films, television dramas, and theatri-cal release cinema) and across nations (Japan, Taiwan, Korea, China, and the Philippines). Hanadan thus permits me to take up the digital question through

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an exploration of transmedial serialization, and to consider the regional ques-tion through an account of transnational serialization.

Regional television has emerged in a manner that exemplifies Raymond Williams’ conceptualization of television: ‘It is not only that the supply of broadcasting facilities preceded the demand; it is that the means of communi-cation preceded their content’ (1975: 18-19). Simply put, producing distribution (infrastructures and technologies) precedes and exceeds the production of contents or programmes. Distribution, however, is not simply driving produc-tion, in the manner of a supply driving demand. Instead, as Williams suggests, distribution is productive, is producing something. In this respect, Williams’ approach resonates with Deleuze and Guattari’s (1983) take on Marx, in which they underscore that production, distribution, and consumption should be considered productive in their own right.

Deleuze and Guattari use the phrase ‘production of distribution’ to under-score that distribution is not a neutral process, secondary to production proper (production of goods). Their turn of phrase, however cumbersome, invites us to consider both what produces distribution, and what distribution produces, as two sides of the same coin. For instance, in the general context of television, infrastructures (broadcast and relay stations, satellites, and cable systems) and media devices or platforms (tv sets, vcr, vcd, and mobile phones) may be said to produce distribution. At the same time, distribution produces some-thing in its own right. Just as the commodity for Marx is not simply a prod-uct but a complex form of social relations, so distribution produces a complex set of social functions. These functions are not simply added to the product, tacked onto television contents or programmes; they are meaningful and valu-able in themselves.

In the instance of Hanadan, I will look at how production of distribution holds together transmedial and transnational processes, and also at what it produces ‒ a feeling of something coming into common, of a region in com-mon. The resulting ‘Asia’ does not correspond with received territories and geographies but entails a sense of affective possession, emerging in conjunc-tion with the mapping of the transmedial onto a geopolitical domain. Its ‘where’ is between media and nations.

Transmedial Serialization

In its first decade, the 1990s, the serialization of Hana yori dango (or Hanadan for short) presented a fairly classic example of media mix, with film and anime adaptations of the source manga. Its creator, Kamio Yōko, published the

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first episode of the manga in one of the most successful serial publications dedicated to shōjo manga or ‘manga for girls’, the biweekly magazine Māgaretto or Margaret, owned by the powerful Japanese publishing house, Shūeisha. An instant hit among readers in Japan, the Hanadan manga eventually extended its serialization across 36 volumes, and by the time the serialization reached its conclusion in 2004, it had spawned an impressive media franchise within Japan, including a live action film (released in 1995), an animated television series (produced by Tōei Animation and broadcast by Asahi, 1996-97), and an anime film (also produced by Tōei and released in 1997). In addition, 1993 saw the release of a cd featuring a boys’ group consisting of four male sing-ers who were supposed to represent the four young men featured in Hanadan as the ‘Flower 4’ or ‘F4’. As such, the Hanadan media mix constructed links between two very powerful cultural industries in Japan, the ‘idol’ music indus-try and the publishing industry. Needless to say, because the 1990s witnessed a global boom in Japanese pop culture, especially J-pop music, anime, and manga, these media forms also circulated widely outside Japan, either in licensed or pirate versions.

It was in its second decade, the 2000s, however, that the Hanadan franchise became a regional sensation. In 2001, a live-action television drama based on Hana yori dango, produced by the newly formed Taiwanese production com-pany Comic Ritz, was broadcast in Taiwan on the free-to-air Chinese Television Station, with the title Liuxing Huayuan or Meteor Garden. Its popularity was such that a mini-series quickly followed, and then a sequel, Meteor Garden ii (2002). This series also launched a boy band, also called ‘F4’, whose four mem-bers enjoyed such popularity that they continued to perform and to produce studio albums after the completion of the series. A Japanese satellite broad-cast station, known as bs-Nittere or bs4, an offshoot of ntv established in 1998, aired the Taiwanese drama adaptation under the title, Ryūsei kaen: Hana yori dango or ‘Meteor Garden: Boys over Flowers’ in 2003. Both the drama and boys’ band created such a sensation in Japan that two live-action television dramas were produced for Japanese tv: Hana yori dango was broadcast on tbs in 2005, and a sequel, Hana yori dango Returns, aired in 2007. The release of a live-action film in 2008, Hana yori dango Final, capped this Japanese tv trilogy. But the transnational serialization was far from over. A Korean ver-sion of Hanadan (Kkotboda Namja) aired on the kbs2 channel of the Korean Broadcasting System in 2009, and soon thereafter in the same year, showed on Japanese tv through a channel devoted to Korean drama, Mnet, accom-panied by fanfare and promotion featuring the Korean F4. Also in 2009-2010, Hunan tv, a satellite station whose channel is currently second in popular-ity in China, broadcast Liuxing Yu or Meteor Shower, a series not licensed by

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the Japanese publisher Shūeisha yet reputedly inspired by the Taiwanese version of Hanadan. In 2011, the Philippines became the fifth Asian country that adapted this series into a tv drama via abs-cbn (Hong 2014: 16).

Significantly, the transnational serialization of Hanadan in its second decade has received a great deal of attention, both scholarly and popular, while its transmedial serialization or ‘media mix’ in 1990s Japan has attracted relatively little attention. This is surely because multimedia formations have become such an ordinary part of daily activity (in the form of working and communicating across platforms) and of consumption (every product now seems to entail multiple media versions) that they tend to escape notice. Anyone who has followed Japanese pop culture, even fairly casually, knows that there is always a manga to the anime, and maybe a television drama from the manga, and often an animated film for the anime tv series, and always a popular voice actress, or a soundtrack with heavily promoted singers, and so forth. As such, transmedial serialization is probably assumed to be operative in the context of transnational serialization without any need to call attention to it. Still, these conventions of transmedial serialization merit some attention.

Media Mix and Digital EquivalencyMedia mix brings us onto the terrain of the digital, or at least, terrain associated with the digital. If Japanese media mix is often considered analogous to North American media convergence, it is because franchising or serializing across different media forms (such as novels, comics or manga, animations, video-games, films, toys, and other commodities) creates an impression of different kinds of media coming together. The franchise seems to pull them together, precisely because it flattens the hierarchy between them: impossible to say, for instance, that anime bears greater authority than videogames, or that novels have greater prestige than comics. Indeed, it is characteristic of media mix or media convergence that subsequent media iterations or variations, including fan-produced entries, are not automatically deemed lesser than the source mate-rial. Different media become equivalent. What is more, rather than the logic of an original product followed by imitations or adaptations, there is an expan-sion of a world constrained by the source material, which functions as an inter-nal limit on its variations. The affinity with the logic of the digital is evident: the digital has often been described in terms of its ability to digitalize any prior media form, flattening differences between media, producing equivalency that allows for mixing or remixing. Formerly distinct media seem to converge due their digitalization, due to their medial equivalency.

If commentators like Lev Manovich (2001) soon abandoned the term digital media, however, and replaced it with ‘new media’, it was because a



paradox arose. It was common in the late 1990s and early 2000s for studies of the digital to stress the omnivorous flattening tendencies of digitalization. Indeed, Friedrich Kittler (1999) and Mark Hansen (2004), for instance, worried that the digital was turning even human beings into one (insignificant) medium among others. In such accounts, the digital seems to transform everything yet remains invisible, intangible, nothing at all ‒ an all-mediating force. And yet, a paradox arises, because the very flattening of differences may become visible, tangible, or audible. Digital media may imply a look, a feel, or sound, which artists may highlight in various ways ‒ hence Manovich’s shift to speak-ing of new media. Instead of completely levelling differences between media forms, new media may emphasize residual differences between media, or cre-ate new differences. In other words, media mix, like the digital, is never only a matter of convergence or unity. There are new kinds of divergence and multi-plicity. Put another way, as ‘media equivalency’ becomes sensuously and con-sciously experienced, it takes on a quality or qualities of its own. It comes to generate a sense of something non-equivalent, which is not localized in any one medium but in the relation between media.

What, then, is specific about the transmedial serialization of Hanadan? In keeping with Williams and the emphasis on distribution, I wish to avoid the pitfalls of content-based analysis; that is, formal analysis or narrative analysis. Such analysis often proves misleading because it gives the impression that the source material or product possesses a stable set of properties, which are then distributed as such. With this problem in mind, let me nonetheless present something of the manga.

Virtual Unity and SingularityHana yori dango centres on a girl of modest means, Makino Tsukushi, who enters into a private high school full of rich and pampered students. While her only wish is to escape notice, her very character makes her stand out. Four boys have formed a gang at the school, called F4 or ‘Flower 4’, because these four boys are as beautiful and as pampered as flowers; attractive, wealthy, and spoiled. The F4 sustain their dominance over the other students by bullying the weak: when they post a red flag on a student’s locker, the rest of the students are expected to bully him or her on behalf of the F4. The heroine Tsukushi, however, stands up for one of the bullied students, and even kicks the leader of F4, Dōmyōji Tsukasa, in the face. She later declares war on the F4 and becomes something of a hero in the school, and (naturally) Dōmyōji falls for her. Indeed, she also falls for him, and the overarching logic of the series is that the two are in love and will eventually end up together, 36 volumes later. What defines Hanadan, then, is the nature of the obstacles that keep the two lovers apart,

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and the event that ultimately brings them together, as well as the milieu and overall ambiance of these happenings.

This is where interpretation becomes trickier, for like other relatively long manga series, Hanadan covers a lot of ground, introduces a large number of characters, situations, and topical references, and develops something of its own style in the process. In addition, in keeping with the reader-author-editor protocols of large manga magazines, the magazine editors solicit and act on reader feedback, and creator Kamio directly addresses readers, posing ques-tions about and making comments on her manga. As such, the message may be said to be multivocal from the outset, and its multivocality is reciprocated in the openness of the style ‒ a tendency to omit page numbers, a wealth of broad slightly framed or unframed panels, and a sense of non-closure or suspense at the end of chapters. It is this openness of style that invites the incorporation not only of multiple perspectives but also of localized or topical features, such as local street cultures, contemporary fashions, and various lifestyles.

In addition, Ōtsuka Eiji has persuasively argued that manga are akin to the storyboards used for film or animation: manga have historically incorporated aspects of cinema animation that make them already cinematic or animetic, filmable or animatable (Ōtsuka 2013). The long history of adapting manga into anime, cinema, and television drama has encouraged practices of reading and creating manga as somehow filmable or animatable. Hanadan in this respect is already open to serialization across media. Serialization across media also opens possibilities for serialization across media-related cultures.

To give an example, the 1995 film adaptation of Hanadan featured idol singer and actress Uchida Taki; to build on her popular appeal, the soundtrack included her title song (‘Baby’s Growing Up’), while Uchida toured to promote the movie, particularly to her male fans. As such, the film adaptation of a manga ostensibly for girls or young women tacked on a new mode of address, to male fans of young female idol singers. This makes sense in light of the goals of media mix, which implies a tension between enlarging the consumer base (mass audiences) and building (and building upon) fan loyalty (niche or target markets). The subsequent anime, produced by Tōei and broadcast by Asashi in 1996, presents yet another expansion of the potential audience, particularly because television anime tends not only to have a greater number of viewers but also to address a more general domestic or family audience that includes children and parents. While the animated television series largely remains true to the source material, its practices of distribution bring new modes of address in play. In contrast, the 1997 animated film raises questions about the limits to serialization. It offers an alternative telling of Hanadan in which Makino Tsukushi is now a dancer in a New York performance group, and Dōmyōji



Tsukasa and another member of the F4 are helping her achieve her ambition to become the star of the show. Because this alternative timeline Hanadan was the last entry, until the Taiwan television drama version effectively rebooted the franchise, it is tempting to conclude that the serialization had reached its limits with the anime film. But what are the limits to media mix? What makes Hanadan Hanadan? Is it a matter of story, of characters and their relations with the world? Where did the anime film go too far: setting the action not in a school but in a dance world, paring down the F4, or ending with the heroine as a dance diva?

Whether the anime Hanadan film is deemed a failure or not, there is no doubt that transmedial serialization has limits, precisely because the franchise or the mix has to have its singularity, and its singularity is not readily reducible to any one feature. Its singularity is, in a sense, within the source material, but virtually. As Ōtsuka suggests, manga has potential for transmedial serializa-tion. Any adaptation may be said to realize something of that potential, and yet, if the series is to continue across multiple adaptations, it must also actual-ize a sort of virtual unity. It is only retroactively that we can say that there is unity. And that sense of unity may be lost ‒ as with the anime Hanadan film, for instance. Virtual unity implies intensity and thus remains unpredictable. Transmedial serialization, then, implies a paradoxical temporality like a ritual or festival. ‘This is the apparent paradox of festivals: they repeat an “unrepeat-able.” They do not add a second or third time to the first, but carry the first time to the “nth” power’ (Deleuze 1994: 1).

With the caveat that I am looking at the Hanadan manga retrospectively, knowing how its transnational serialization has thus far played out, let me consider the virtual unity of the manga ‒ which its serialization intensified, carried to the nth power.

The radical autonomy of Makino Tsukushi first captures attention: she has no interest in wealth, in fashion, or in popularity. She thus acts contrary to what everyone around her seems to expect of her ‒ and so much so that she does not fear losing status or opposing the majority, which gives her a sense of moral authority. Although the manga stages scenes reminiscent of rape in which students attack her, Tsukushi nonetheless retains her independence and invulnerability despite violent attacks on her person. In political terms, this girl of modest means appears to have personhood in the classical liberal sense: autonomy, independence, and self-reliance. In contrast, the ‘flower boys’, for all their cruel domination over the student body, are hollow men. They appear entirely dependent on admiration, status, and other kinds of external sup-port to sustain their position. Their aura of power stems not from an internal sense of self but from displays of wealth and privilege. Put another way, they

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do not demonstrate personhood but personality. The contrast between the two would-be lovers is clear: where Makino Tsukushi defies her parents’ wishes for her, Dōmyōji plans on succeeding his father as ceo of a multinational corpora-tion, as expected of him.

While Hanadan plays on familiar tropes of ‘opposites attract’ and ‘angry love’, its singular intensity comes of how it stages its romantic conflict in terms of highly specific ‘practices of self ’. Like many stock popular characters, both Tsukushi and Dōmyōji present an internal conflict or antinomy. Tsukushi ini-tially seems to embody the idea of rock-solid self-reliance and invulnerable autonomy, to the point of defying the social contract. Hobbes’ stance comes to mind: individuals enter into social contracts because they are not invulner-able, and forming groups allows them to enjoy increased security. Standing up for the weak at school, Tsukushi gains allies and admirers. Ultimately, however, she does not form a social contract and a Hobbesian security state with them. Instead, her sociality will be based on a series of inadvertent quasi-romances or unintentional dalliances with other flower boys and other men. She appears radically autonomous yet prone to swerving, as if romantically clumsy. Dōmyōji, then, would appear to be the ideal other half to Tsukushi: entirely vulnerable, dependent on opinion, somewhat damaged, and yet curi-ously single-minded and ever on track, coordinated.

True to the genre, the two characters appear perfectly suited, even des-tined, due to their complementary antimonies. At the same time, precisely what keeps the resolution in suspense keeps the scenario eternally open: his vulnerability does not mesh especially well with her invulnerability, any more than her swerving agrees with his linear movement. The resolution, say, mar-riage, would actually amount to cancellation of these dispositions and forms of movement. This is why it only happens in the last instance, as a last instance. In fact, the manga did not end until 2004, which suggests that the film version, the anime version, the anime film, and the Taiwan television drama did not really need a full statement of the last instance. The end of Hanadan recalls Althusser’s take on the social, in which economic determination arrives in the last instance, that is, never. In this way, the Hanadan manga offers a charged field of promiscuous possibilities in which romantic determination only arrives in the last instance ‒ and before it arrives, multiple serializations have already undermined its ability to determine the social conclusively.

Internal Polarization of TendenciesNow, the antinomies of the two ‘fated’ characters unfold in a manner that recalls Foucault’s practices of self: ‘practices of self are practices allowing indi-viduals to carry out, by themselves or with help from others, a certain number



of operations on their body and soul, their thoughts, their conducts, their mode of existence; to transform themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality’ (2001: 1604). Tsukushi and Dōmyōji do not linger on questions of identity, typical of the subject, such as ‘who am I?’ They strive instead to transform their conduct, body, soul, their way of being in the world, their way of thinking ‒ in order to achieve a sort of lifestyle perfection. Significantly, their practices of self are easily to read in terms of a political economic allegory. Tsukushi is the very model of liberal personhood, grounded in a family aspiring to attain and transcend middle class status, while Dōmyōji is the very portrait of a neoliberal elite, holding sway by force of cash, flash, and fear, rather than reality-based actions. It is thus easy to see in Hanadan a parable of the decline of middle-class liberalism (the Japanese kaisha system or Japan Inc, with cradle-to-grave employment and its myths of ubiquitous and homogeneous middle class prosperity), and the rise of neoliberal elitism and regimes of excellence.

The Hanadan manga began serialization in 1992, openly addressing the economic crisis that burst the Japanese bubble economy and established the post-bubble glacial economy. By coincidence, its first phase of transme-dial serialization ended in 1997, the year of the Asian financial crisis. This coincidence provides a nice reminder of the status of media mix or transna-tional serialization in 1990s Japan: when Douglas McGray (2002) character-ized manga-anime-game franchises in terms of ‘Japanese national cool’, he noted that, in the context of a stagnant economy, such products appeared to be recession-proof, selling and accruing value despite recession. 1990s Japan discovered that apparently niche markets (especially so-called otaku markets) were in fact big business. As it turned out, these small markets with big impact due to reach and staying power hinged on media mix, with its combination of promotion across media-related cultures and encouragement of consumption across media forms. It was in the 2000s that the Japanese government began in earnest to promote and regulate this ‘contents industry’, as a site of post- or quasi-industrial development and cultural diplomacy.

In sum, media mix, or transmedial serialization, implies a sort of ‘internal’ polarization of tendencies. I have thus far addressed this polarization at three levels: (1) media mix distribution strategies; (2) formal aspects of the source manga; and (3) virtual unity across media adaptations (where practices of self come to the fore). Let me recap and extend the discussion of these three aspects of transmedial serialization.

First, at the level of its distribution and circulation, transmedial serializa-tion entails, on the one hand, a broad, open reach, multiple perspectives, and audience participation; and on the other hand, virtual unity, singularity, and

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ownership or licensing. I might now add that, because of the prospective sin-gularity of any specific franchise as well as the retroactive nature of its sense of unity, it is difficult for companies to know what exactly to license, own, or otherwise regulate, and as a result, media mix will encourage creative new strategies of licensing and ownership, as Marc Steinberg (2012) and Ōtsuka Eiji (2014) have indicated in their accounts of Kadokawa. Transmedial serialization makes for ‘creative industries’.

Second, in the specific instance of the source manga Hana yori dango, we also find polarized tendencies. On the one hand, in formal terms, the manga strives for an openness, simplicity or frankness of style, omitting page num-bers, using unframed or scarcely framed panels, and ending chapters on a note of expectation or suspense. It thus allows for the inclusion of different per-spective as well as a broad variety of topical material. Even in formal terms, however, the manga must also impart some sense of its unity or autonomy. On the other hand, then, we might also call attention to: (1) generic expecta-tions, even if suspended or defied (romance ends in marriage, or at least, a stable couple); (2) author function (an authorial personality and an editorial professionalism); (3) story arcs within the overarching structure (the story can move into new locations and themes without losing itself ); (4) central or focal-ized characters (which allows side characters to enter and exit, or to remain, without losing the overarching thread); and (5) layout of pages and chapters (the clean and open layout is precisely clean, not messy, and open-ended pan-els and pages push forward but never destroy conventions, even as the manga reinvents conventions).

Yet, it is primarily when the manga is adapted and serialized across media that the question of its virtual unity becomes more urgent. To build on Ōtsuka’s insights, when manga are constantly adapted into films, tv shows, animations, and games, the manga starts to feel as if it was always already cinematic, or anime-like, or maybe game-like. A new kind of potential unity is realized. Then, as that potentiality is extended or reworked in other media adaptations, a vague sense of virtual unity begins to hover over the series, an unconscious sense of its singularity. As the 1990s adaptations of Hanadan indicate, through serialization across media the potential for girls’ manga to attract male idol fans and then family audiences is realized. Thus, serialization begins to imply some sort of unity across different media cultures, associated with gender or some other factor. In sum, the realization of a transmedial potential intensifies the feeling of virtual unity, and a desire for intensification of that feeling. Virtual unity thus becomes a matter of affect. This is where the affective dimension of Hanadan comes to play a crucial role in establishing its singularity, and the intensification of its virtual unity across adaptations.



Affective InfidelityNow, affect is not the same thing as emotion; that is, personalized or individual-ized feeling. It is impersonal and unconscious. Indeed, as Brian Massumi (2011) points out, affect may be considered non-conscious and non-sensuous. It is experience that is not consciously experienced or perceptually recognized ‒ affect is akin to what William James calls ‘pure experience’ (2003: 2-3). It does not belong to anyone, but anyone may experience it. Because it is non- localized (even if experienced locally), affect implies a sort of contagious rela-tion between individuals ‒ like a smile provoking a smile, or a yawn inducing a yawn, without you consciously perceiving or recognizing the other’s smile or yawn. Merleau-Ponty refers to such an experience as ‘indistinction’, because, in such experiences, an individual’s body is not fully distinct, distant, or sepa-rable from others’ (see Whitney 2012). While your smile is not distinct from the other’s smile, it is also enabling a kind of distinction. Bodies are not clearly distinct from one another, but such indistinction is not the opposite or nega-tion of distinction.

We might think of this relation in terms of an affective loop: you smile, I smile, we are smiling, at once distinct selves and yet not distinct, in a mirror- like relation. For Merleau-Ponty, the outcome is ‘lived distance’. We are at once separate and distinct from others (perceptually), and yet others are also close and not distinct from us (affectively), and so we have to negotiate in our lives, in our living, degrees of proximity and distance. Affect, then, affords a perspective that runs counter to individualism and liberal notions of person-hood, because vulnerability and dependency are not rejected for their poten-tial to undermine autonomy and independency. On the contrary, relationships involving vulnerability and dependency, care and nurture, are not only those we tend most to prize in our lives, but they are also the very key to how we live ethically and politically.

In such terms, the Hanadan heroine seems wholly intent on avoiding lived distance: she simply wants distance, without affective contagion or negotia-tion; she wants to be left alone, wishes to avoid contact with the rich kids, and does not find their behaviour infectious. Quite the opposite, she displays nei-ther vulnerability, nor dependency. The attraction of such a position is that it fully immerses her and us in a world of wealth and privilege, yet we remain immune to it, much as war films typically allow us to experience the horrors of war as if realistically, in all their chaos and horror, yet at a safe distance. Privilege and wealth cannot hurt us. Makino Tsukushi proves the point by kicking Dōmyōji in the head. Ultimately, in keeping with the manga’s generic concerns, it is because she is immune to wealth that Tsukushi is the ideal mate for Dōmyōji. Makino Tsukushi resists the paradigms of dependency and

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vulnerability ‒ caring for others, indefinitely, without expectation of equal return. Part of her attraction, then, is that she also resists paradigms of nurture that do not usually work out well for girls, given how such paradigms have come to imply becoming a good wife and mother.

Kukhee Choo emphasizes this point in her reading of the Hanadan manga. Noting that the romance between Makino Tsukushi and Dōmyōji finally blos-soms when she enters his household as a maid, Choo concludes: ‘The female subject has to work hard, often by enacting traditional feminine nurturing roles, to match not only the male protagonist’s superior social position, but also his femininity. This is why the females may take on a role in which the males could not position themselves without threatening their masculinity: that of the domestic realm’ (Choo 2008: 293). Simply put, the Cinderella romance between the strong-willed pauper Tsukushi and the feminized prince Dōmyōji ultimately transforms into a marriage between a care-giving wife-mother and a demanding man-king. Rather than remain a heroic defender of the weak, Tsukushi apparently turns into someone in need of defence ‒ in the end. But to what extent does this ending determine the impact of Hanadan?

Multiple adaptations of Hanadan appeared between 1995 and 2001, before the manga had concluded in 2004. Evidently, the manga ending was not nec-essary for its serialization. This is why I have characterized it as ‘determin-ing in the last instance’. (Indeed, the serialization of Hanadan may not have concluded, and so there is still not a definitive end.) Although ending with Tsukushi as the star of a New York show may not feel like Hanadan at all, adap-tations may opt for other endings and remain Hanadan. Consequently, while I agree with Choo that we need to be wary of embracing scenarios of vulnerabil-ity and dependency in the context of girls’ culture, I would add that the affec-tive value of Hanadan may not lie in its ending, in an endorsement of received domestic positions for young women, as domestic caregivers. The singularity of Hanadan comes from its serialization. And serialization depends on somehow working against the perceptual distance, physical aloofness, and demonstrated invulnerability of Makino Tsukushi. She enters the scene, fully formed, fully realized, autonomous, and invulnerable, and as such, as unreal and exotic and delirious as the liberal values of personhood may well appear at an elite private school. Yet, such a position is both unsustainable, perceptually and in narrative terms, for there is nothing to experience or negotiate. Significantly, Tsukushi’s autonomy is soon mitigated by feelings of fidelity to Dōmyōji. She (and we) know, or at least strongly expect, that they will end up together. But this expec-tation comes early in the manga, when the bulk of the series lies ahead. Desire then is not for marriage. Nor is it exactly a desire for serialization. Desire happens through and with serialization. What then enables serialization?



As soon as her fidelity is established, flirtation begins. As soon as Dōmyōji falls for her, all of the F4 will fall for her, and a series of other men as well. A sense of fidelity (in the last instance) allows Tsukushi to flirt with, to enter-tain, seemingly endless possibilities for infidelity, apparently unlimited pros-pects not merely for romance with other men but for experimenting with other lifestyles. Hanadan is a serial experiment in lifestyles, but not just any lifestyles; these lifestyles must simultaneously offer personhood (autonomy and security) and opportunities for social contagion. The outcome is a prac-tice of self that is designed to open the subject beyond the confines of lib-eral personhood (be independent, be invulnerable, be safe) without turning into promiscuous consumerism and market exposure of neoliberal elites, who risk violent downturns. The goal is a lifestyle that is neither that of the liberal industrial state, nor that of neoliberal elites but with something of both ‒ safe and secure, yet full of creative divergence; supremely independent, yes, but attentive to the conduct of others. That is the fantasy, or the line of flight. Needless to say, such a fantasy can only be lived in relation to certain settings or worlds, such as the elite private high school, or prestigious university, or some analogous institution of self-formation. Milieus and interstices between the home and institutions of self-formation will prove equally crucial to serial-ization, bringing into play different lifestyles happening between institutions.

The singular intensity of Hanadan comes from infidelity. Infidelity may be a misnomer, however, if we think of it as the opposite of fidelity. In Hanadan, infidelity is the premise for and consequence of fidelity. It might also be dubbed pre-fidelity, or trans-fidelity, or plus-fidelity. In any case, infidelity is not the opposite of fidelity; in the same way that affective indistinction is not the opposite of perceptual distinction. Let me use the term ‘in-fidelity’ to indicate such valences. In addition, insofar as in-fidelity does not belong to Tsukushi but comes from her relation to Dōmyōji, it imparts a sense of virtual unity emerging from a set of relations, rather than from Tsukushi alone. It is a matter of affect. It is preindividual and transindividual. Tsukushi never con-sciously, sensuously, or experientially demonstrates infidelity, only affectively.

Such an affective experience of infidelity parallels the operations of trans-medial serialization. Each media adaptation permits, in effect, an experience of ‘media in-fidelity’. Interestingly enough, without any explicit thematiza-tion of media per se, Hanadan affords an experience consonant with media mix. It imparts a sense of what it might feel like to transform your body (your medium, so to speak) into a lifestyle, to resituate your body as one body among other bodies without losing its distinctiveness. Thus, in Hanadan, resonance emerges between transmedial practices (media mix) and social practices (practices of self ). A media technology and a social technology have been

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mixed together. Again, as the 1995 film adaptation attests, transmedial seri-alization implies a transcultural serialization, a movement across practices of self or lifestyles. Arguably, then, the transmedial and transnational success of Hanadan is due, at least in part, to how its affective practices of self seem to resonate with the logic of media mix.

It is surely not a coincidence that these patterns of media mix and practices of self feel consonant with the digital, too. Media mix began well before the boom of digital technologies in the 1990s, yet meshed so neatly with them that it now seems, in retrospect, as if media mix anticipated the digital, as if media mix was proto-digital or incipiently digital. In any event, the same basic ten-sion arises. On the one hand, difference is being flattened, and so everything appears equivalent, even individual lifestyles. Anything enters the mix, and the mix can be entered via any one of its components. On the other hand, a force courses through the mix to hold it together, a force that is, in effect, pre-mix and trans-mix. Consequently, although there is no pre-established hierar-chy or harmony, the different components are not entirely equivalent. Some components contribute in a different capacity, which makes them feel at once exceptional and ubiquitous (like affect). At the level of media mix, television, for instance, is one medium among others and yet becomes the fulcrum of intimacy and publicity. At the level of character, Makino Tsukushi offers one everyday lifestyle among others and yet becomes the pivot between fidelity and infidelity that launches us into multiple lifestyles. This tension between the equivalent and the exceptional is generative. It generates a sense of vir-tual unity in affective intensity, and because this virtual unity is intensive and affective, it only exists as long as it is prolonged in the process of serialization, whether in licensed productions, pirate productions, or fan productions.

What now merits closer attention is how transmedial serialization becomes compatible with transnational serialization. Does transnational serialization afford a sort of ‘nation in-fidelity’ that is like ‘media in-fidelity’ or ‘media-culture in-fidelity’? If so, what produces such a likeness between nations and media?

Transnational Serialization by Analogy

Discussions of transnational serialization tend to assume an analogy between movement across nations and movement across media. Nations and media are, needless to say, quite different in nature. Moreover, transnational serializa-tion and transmedial serialization are not necessarily of the same order. How, then, has an analogy between the transmedial and the transnational arisen



and persisted? I propose in this section to take a closer look at two ways of talk-ing about the transnational movement of media.

First, I will look at a study by Michael Keane, Anthony Fung, and Albert Moran (2007) of the emergence of a new regional television in East Asia in the 1990s and 2000s. Examining practices of adapting television programmes between China, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan, they call attention to the role of format and formatting. Second, I will look at Iwabuchi Kōichi’s widely cited comments on how the ‘odourless’ quality of anime characters lends them to globalization (2002: 28). In effect, both approaches call attention to something that lies between the transmedial and the transnational patterns of serializa-tion, and apparently enables them to operate in tandem ‒ format and character design. Both approaches also tend to highlight an erasure of national or nationalist difference. As I review and build on their discussions, I also wish to underscore how normative assumptions about nations and nationalisms tend to underpin much of the work on transnational serialization. To state my con-cern precisely: when normative assumptions about nations go unexamined, they are readily displaced onto the region. Consequently, regionalism ends up looking like an expanded form of nationalism; like supranationalism, rather than providing an alternative way of thinking geopolitically.

FormatKeane, Fung, and Moran call attention to a number of factors accounting for the rise of regional television in East Asia (2007: 3):

The reassertion of regionalism in television production is a result of several factors: the integration of East Asian economies within global markets has produced more opportunities in television production and distribution; increased levels of trade and exchange of creative personnel across the East Asian region have resulted in new niche markets; transfer of technologies through joint ventures and co-productions has created efficiencies; rising cosmopolitanism in cities has led to demand for con-tent reflecting everyday life; and new flexible models of production have emerged as a response to multi-channel platforms and digitization.

A general trend appears across these different factors: the production of distri-bution outstrips production. If there are increased opportunities for produc-ing television shows, it is due to the increasing array of channels and venues. Adaptation of European or Japanese programmes makes sense under such conditions, because producers are striving to keep pace with, and respond to, transformations in distribution.

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Keane, Fung, and Moran underscore that these new kinds of production cannot be explained in terms of one-way flow from the West. They thus invite a departure from the one-way flows associated with cultural imperialism, in which the shows and movies from the massive Hollywood industry, with its powerful international distribution networks, come to dominate or overcode television production in other regions. In fact, their study concludes that, even though many of the programmes in their study originate in Europe (or Japan), the one-way model of original and imitation actually fails commercially. A different model of programme adaptation or localization comes to the fore ‒ which they describe in terms of formatting.

The concept of the television format is not original to their study. The term format has been widely used in reference to the licensing of a general con-cept or premise associated with a particular television programme. Game shows, sitcoms, idol shows, and dramas are common choices for international licensing. It is, however, a specific configuration of such general formats (or genres) that typically is licensed and produced. One of the famous examples of a transnational format is the game show, Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? (Keane et al. 2007: 98-99; Moran 2006). In such terms, the transnational serialization of Hanadan in the 2000s may be said to build on two general formats or genres, the idol show and the trendy drama. Yet, just as the Millionaire format has its singularity among game shows, so the Hanadan format introduces singular-ity among idol programmes and trendy dramas. The television format feels at once smaller and larger than a genre, at least as genre has generally been con-ceptualized in film studies. This is surely because the concept of format builds on an analogy with media formats, either explicitly or implicitly.

The term format generally evokes file format (the way information is encoded for computer storage) and content format (the way information is encoded for display), and formatting refers to preparing something to store data (as in formatting a disk) and sometimes to putting something not for-matted for a computer (analogue) into a computer-readable format (digital). As such, to call a television programme a format conjures up an analogy with digitized media. The term format implies a sort of ‘digital equivalency’ that flattens the distance between media forms, making them translatable and exchangeable.

Keane, Fung, and Moran propose that localizing is a process of formatting. They indeed extend the digital or medial equivalency implicit in the term format, to the realm of local or national content: when producers localize a television show, they must discover ‘cultural compatibility factors’. Not sur-prisingly, then, Keane, Fung, and Moran contend, ‘[. . .] increasing demand for content dictates that adaptations are economic solutions to increased



pressures in the multi-channel marketplace, rather than “nationalistic” desires to propagate local content using international methods’ (2007: 6). Simply put, in their account, the television format mimics the equivalency implicit in the digital format, but at the level of national culture or local content. The tele-vision format discovers compatibility, convertibility, or equivalency between national cultures, just as the digital format flattens and equalizes the differ-ence between media, rendering them equivalent, convertible, or translatable. Thus, for Keane, Fung, and Moran, the local turns into the regional. The local is no longer constrained or confined by a particular culture. Nor is it a matter of immutable and enduring cultural properties of a nation. Transnational serial-ization, then, seems wholly analogous to transmedial serialization as discussed previously. The regional is akin to the digital.

Now, it is possible to stand back from such accounts and dismiss the implicit analogy. After all, nations and media are of a very different order. Why should we accept an analogy between them, implicit or explicit? Should we not resist this analogy, and insist on a properly geopolitical analysis of the regional and transnational?

My stance is that we should not dismiss the analogy, for the analogy is real. In the domain of television as well as personal and social media, the ongoing pri-macy of the production of distribution over and above production of contents really has constructed a series of correspondences between the medial and the geopolitical, between media and nations. We might think of the production of distribution as the condition for this analogy (which is also to say that the digital is not the condition), provided that we qualify the term condition by adding that it is not an inert ground or substrate. Rather, this ‘distributive con-dition’ is a process, a process of assembling. It must be continuously enacted and invested in, for it to go on conditioning. Below, I will turn to the production of distribution more concretely through an analysis of media networks. At this juncture, suffice it to say, I would argue that, rather than dismiss the analogy, we need to push farther with it, push it to the limit, as it were. Accounts of transnational or regional media, however inadvertently, generally shore up a normative understanding of nations and of sovereignty: nations are bounded sovereign entities filled with homogeneous unitary cultural values, for better (protective barriers, social welfare) or worse (repression of diversity, concealed hierarchies and unevenness). The risk is that we end up with a normative account of regions ‒ either as a larger, more capacious and inclusive container of cultural values (supranationalism) or as a world of unconstrained yet har-monious equivalency above and beyond nations (universalism). Fortunately, the analogy between transmedial and transnational invites us to push past this normative understanding of nations, sovereignty, and regions ‒ and towards

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the question ‘where is the region?’ Iwabuchi’s account of Japan’s globalized anime characters provides a concrete example.

Odourful CharactersFamously, in addressing successfully exported Japanese cultural production, Iwabuchi argued: ‘[T]he major audiovisual products Japan exports could be better characterized as the “culturally odorless” three C’s: consumer technol-ogies (such as vcrs, karaoke, and the Walkman); comics and cartoons (ani-mation); and computer/video games’ (2002: 27). In the instance of anime characters, Iwabuchi adds (ibid.: 28):

The three C’s I mentioned earlier are cultural artifacts in which a coun-try’s bodily, racial, and ethnic characteristics are erased or softened. The characters of Japanese animation and computer games for the most part do not look ‘Japanese.’ Such non-Japaneseness is called mukokuseki, lit-erally meaning ‘something or someone lacking any nationality,’ but also implying the erasure of racial or ethnic characteristics or a context, which does not imprint a particular culture or country with these features [. . .]. Consumers of and audiences for Japanese animation and games, it can be argued, may be aware of the Japanese origin of these commodities, but those texts barely feature ‘Japanese bodily odor’ identified as such.

Iwabuchi sees the national coming first, and then being erased. His account gives the impression that we know how Japaneseness looks and smells, and such knowledge allows producers to erase Japanese physical traits and to elim-inate Japanese bodily odour. Once odour is erased at the level of production, Iwabuchi adds, discourses on the popularity of Japanese culture overseas can apply fragrance to it: ‘Euphoria concerning the global dissemination of anima-tion and computer games prompted Japanese commentators to confer a spe-cifically Japanese “fragrance” on these cultural products’ (ibid.: 31).

Iwabuchi’s account has been widely cited and has proved influential, because it is one of the few discussions evoking questions of race and ethnic-ity. What is more, his rhetoric of bodily odour enhances the sense of physi-cality, even if that physicality comes under erasure. It thus promises to make sense of the relation between the transmedial and the transnational, in a con-crete fashion.

But an impasse arises in Iwabuchi’s account: while he proposes to discuss how Japanese products are de-nationalized (de-odorized) and re-nationalized (fragrance), he never addresses the fact of how Japanese products were nationalized to begin with. He supposes that we know how Japaneseness



looks and smells; he posits the prior existence of a homogeneous and unitary Japaneseness. Yet, this Japaneseness had to be produced; Japanese products had to be nationalized to begin with.

This is where the analogy of transmedial and transnational serialization entailed in our example of regional television, Hanadan, opens a perspective in which the unity and equivalency of the nation is not presumed as a foun-dation. First, we might alter Iwabuchi’s schema in which the national is de-nationalized and re-nationalized. We might consider how cultural products are simultaneously nationalized, de-nationalized, and re-nationalized. Second, if we activate the analogy between the transmedial and the transnational, we see that the process does not necessarily take place in that order, with nation-alization coming first and providing a foundation for de-nationalization or re-nationalization. Just as media mix entails a pre-mix and trans-mix, so the national involves a relation that is at once prenational and transnational. The transmedial calls attention to something at once prior to, and generated by, the unity and equivalency of media. Likewise, the transnational calls attention to something prior to, and generated by, the unity and equivalency of nations. Put another way, rather than the temporal series of odour, deodorization (odourless), and reodorization ( fragrance), we might consider the fact that our senses do not smell a specific odour without mobilizing a general ‘pre-odour’ yet ‘odourful’ relation. There is something ‘in common’ across odours allowing each one to be at once singular (incomparable, so to speak) and equivalent or comparable. An odour is at once internally differentiated (not pure but com-pound or layered) and externally differentiated from other smells.

In the instance of the transnational serialization of Hanadan, it is the region that plays the role of this pre-national yet ‘nationful’ transnational relation; this sense of something in common across nations yet somehow prior to them.

RegionThe transnational serialization of Hanadan has generated excited discussions. Amid the tumultuous political and economic changes of the past fifteen to twenty years in East Asia, in conjunction with massive expansion in telecom-munications networks and technologies, the emergence of a title that proves popular across nations or global cities in the region seems to offer a vision of something held in common, something that is already there but not quite tan-gible ‒ at least, not until this one title captured audiences across languages and cultures. Hanadan is invariably cited in discussions of Asian regionalism, for among the many television shows that have moved across East Asia in recent years, it has left a clearest trail of successful transnational adaptation, with its five different national tv versions broadcast across East Asia. Hanadan is

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incessantly evoked because it promises to give some insight into what is held in common across the region.

But where exactly is this region? The term ‘East Asia’ is commonly used to refer loosely to two geographical areas usually identified as Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. Yet, the understanding of region as at once prenational and transnational does not imply any neat correspondence with a geographical understanding of region. There are some precedents for thinking the region in this manner. Arjun Appadurai, for instance, has insistently worked against a normative account of nations and areas. He states the problem succinctly (2000: 75):

Much traditional thinking about ‘areas’ has been driven by conceptions of geographical, civilisational, and cultural coherence that rely on some sort of trait list ‒ of values, languages, material practices, ecological adap-tations, marriage patterns, and the like. However sophisticated these approaches, they all tend to see ‘areas’ as relatively immobile aggregates of traits, with more or less durable historical boundaries and with a unity composed of more or less enduring properties.

In other words, Appadurai contests the ways in which the normative under-standing of nations is prolonged in a normative understanding of areas. Within Area Studies, there is indeed a tendency to draw analogies between nations and areas. In fact, nations are commonly referred to as areas. Within East Asian Studies, for instance, while it is not uncommon for Japan or China or Korea experts to have fairly good knowledge of one or more of the other countries in the region, their area of expertise is usually defined in national terms, involving specialized training in Japanese language, history, culture, and society, for instance. As Appadurai indicates, the problem is a manner of think-ing that presupposes a given set of cultural, ethnic, or racial traits or properties enclosed within territorial sovereign boundaries. To avoid such a normative approach, Appadurai proposes (ibid.: 7):

[. . .] an architecture for area studies that is based on process geographies and sees significant areas of human organization as precipitates of vari-ous kinds of action, interaction, and motion ‒ trade, travel, pilgrimage, warfare, proselytisation, colonisation, exile, and the like. These geogra-phies are necessarily large scale and shifting, and their changes highlight variable congeries of language, history, and material life. Put more simply, the large regions that dominate our current maps for area studies are not



permanent geographical facts. They are problematic heuristic devices for the study of global geographic and cultural processes.

Appadurai’s focus on large-scale protean process geographies is intended to offer an alternative site of analysis to the received thinking of areas with fixed attributes. His focus on process geographies thus seems ideally suited to an analysis of the ‘media regionalism’ or ‘regional television’. Indeed, the anal-ogy that is constantly drawn between the transmedial and the transnational implies the existence of media process geographies not reducible to national boundaries or geographical territories. The process quality of these media geographies derives from the primacy of the production of distribution over the production of contents. The production of distribution drives and grounds the analogy between transmedial and transnational serialization, so to speak.

At the same time, even though I agree with Appadurai that the nation or the national should neither be assumed to ground analysis, nor given analytic priority, we cannot easily bypass or entirely bracket the nation in the context of regional television. On the one hand, television networks were (and are) subject to nationalization, and national broadcast networks remain powerful. On the other hand, as indicated by the rise of soft power and national brand-ing as well as the governmental push for regional media trade agreements, the nation still strives to exert power over media production and circulation. Consequently, where Appadurai sometimes characterizes his approach to the region as postnational (1996: 22), I would characterize the region in the context of media regionalism as being necessarily at once prenational and transna-tional. This is precisely what imparts an affective valence to these media geog-raphies, as we will see.

Media Process Geographies

Two media geographies deserve attention in the context of the transnational serialization of Hanadan: (1) home networks, related to television plug-in media platforms such as vcrs, vcd players, and game consoles; and (2) chan-nel proliferation due to the development of cable and satellite television. In both media geographies, the production of distribution outstrips production of content. Again building on Raymond Williams’ account of television, I see in each of these media geographies an assemblage of polarized tendencies ‒ flow and mobility on the one hand, and privatization and centralization on the other. Let me begin with the first media geography.

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First WaveNissim Kadosh Otmazgin notes, ‘Media piracy markets in East Asia play a con-spicuously important role in fuelling the regional confluences of popular cul-ture by facilitating and accelerating the diffusion of related products throughout restrictive conditions’ (2005: 514). Otmazgin underscores that restrictions on the importation of Japanese culture in Taiwan and Korea remained largely ineffective, because media piracy blatantly ignored government censorship, and Japanese pop cultural products were widely available (ibid.). Regionalism in East Asia may thus be characterized as primarily market-driven, but, espe-cially in the 1990s, these markets were not top-down markets: consumers and distributors drove them, bypassing and even defying government regulations and corporate markets. From the early 2000s, however, government policy has begun to intervene more visibly, after the fact, in an effort to bend regionalism toward multinational corporate interests within nations, entailing centraliza-tion and privatization. Governments belatedly apply top-down measures, not only in the form of new trade agreements (which is to say, new trade regula-tions and property protections) but also in the form of national branding or soft power.1 These developments give the impression that media flows could not be contained by the national boundaries or restrictions put in place to circumscribe them. Yet, if we consider these developments from the angle of media and technologies, we see a transformation in the assembling of flow-mobility and centralization-privatization.

This first wave or trajectory of media regionalism in 1990s depended largely on technologies for recording and playing television and movies, involving primarily peripheral devices or plug-ins for the television, which were trans-forming the tv set into combination monitor-receivers within personal net-works. The vcr market, for instance, reached its maturity between 1990 and 2001 (Higuchi & Troutt 2008: 321-26), and recording television shows or making copies of rented or borrowed movies became common in Japan. Beyond Japan and South Korea, in neighbouring countries (especially China and Southeast Asia), instead of the vcr, it was the video cd, or vcd, that became widespread not long after its invention in 1993. Interestingly, it is the vcd that frequently received blame for the rampant pirating of audiovisual materials throughout

1 For a presentation of Japanese soft power initiatives from the governmental perspective, see Akutsu Satoshi (2008: 12). For a defence of Japan’s soft power as leading toward regional harmony, see Yasumoto Seiko (2013), and see how this stance plays out in an analysis of the localization of Hanadan in Yasumoto (2011). In contrast, Otmazgin (2005: 503) debunks the very notion of soft power.



Asia. A news report in 2000 sums up the situation from the American perspec-tive (Smith 2000):

The disc player makers and the pirates grew in tandem, until today there is an oversupply of both. China produces 20 million vcd players annually, but current market demand is only half that amount. Videodisc shops, kiosks and sidewalk hawkers, meanwhile, have saturated the major cities with pirated videodiscs. By the end of 1998, according to govern-ment press reports, about 50 million Chinese families owned the players and were regular buyers of movie discs.

The emergence of the dvd on the market in 1995, in conjunction with the spread of Internet, especially to mobile phones, extended and refined this first dimension of ‘expanded television’ centring on peripherals that resituated the household television within a personal network.

Pirate video cassettes and disks, in many respects, did what broadcast tele-vision had previously done when faced with a surfeit of distribution capac-ity: repackage or repurpose whatever contents were available inexpensively. But there were also some important differences. First, the ability to add sub-titles significantly enlarged the scope of contents available for piracy. Japanese animation, for instance, became available in Hong Kong bootleg copies with Chinese and English subtitles, first in Chinatown stores and then online. Second, consumers could now possess copies of movies, music, and television shows. Although they did not own them in the legal sense of having reproduc-tion and distribution rights, their de facto possession of such contents spurred new distribution networks as they shared and collected personal libraries. Third, console devices such as vcr and vcd players as well as game consoles transformed the television into a device that alternated between receiver and monitor. This process had begun as early as the 1970s, but it was in the 1990s that this ‘computational’ transformation of television became dominant, and the unification of television and computer became part of everyday life.

Understandably, such transformations have encouraged a general story about the breakdown of centralization (government regulation) and privatiza-tion (corporate ownership and profits) due to uncontrollable flows of content (piracy). This story has, in turn, reinforced the idea of a radical break or rup-ture, and has produced the sense of an ethical standoff and even an opposi-tional confrontation between those who spur flows and those who regulate them (especially pirates and hackers versus governments). While there is truth to such stories, when we look to the genealogy of television, we see a different kind of event, a transformation in the assemblage of flow and segmentation,

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mobility and privatization. This transformation becomes particularly visible in transmedial serialization or media mix, which effectively provided a solution; that is, a transformed assemblage of polarized tendencies. Media mix encour-aged a sense of consumer participation and possession while finding creative new strategies of licensing and franchising to assure profits. This is why there was a persuasive burst of buzz, especially in the late 1990s and early 2000s, about anime media mix as an alternative business model that saw piracy not as antithetical to corporate profit but as integral to it (Leonard 2005).

The transmedial serialization of Hanadan corresponds with this strategy of assemblage that had become dominant by the 1990s: manga, film, anime, anime film. In effect, centralizing tendencies associated with the state and household are not becoming weaker; they are incorporating more mobile ten-dencies, which makes for a sense of multiple and diffuse centres: the house-hold becomes more like a network, the product becomes more like a world, and the state more like a corporation. It is not surprising, then, that practices of self in Hanadan feel poised between liberal industrial ideals of personhood and neoliberal deregulation, while striving to avoid the pitfalls of both kinds of self.

Second WaveThe second wave of media regionalism came with satellite and cable televi-sion. This wave has a deeper history and thus is not really second chronologi-cally. I place it second simply because its impact came dramatically to the fore with the transnational serialization of Hanadan in the 2000s.

Broadcast relayed by satellite began in Japan in the early 1960s (in prepa-ration for simulcast of the 1964 Tokyo Olympics), and Japan’s first broadcast satellite (Yuri 1) was launched in 1978, and the second in 1986 (Yuri 2). nhk had started its tests with direct satellite broadcast in 1984, and nhk launched its bs1 in 1987 (via Yuri 2), and bs2 in 1989. While satellite television in the 1980s gave rise to excited discourses on new media and media futures, it was in the 1990s that it became a more daily experience. Yet, as the key role nhk played in launching satellites and developing channels suggests, the emergence of satellite tv in Japan did not result in a wide-open proliferation of channels and contents. Rather nhk and the five major commercial stations sustained their dominance. Indeed, as discussed previously, in their approach to satellite and to cable, the discourses of these major broadcasters stressed getting high- resolution television to even the most remote consumers in Japan at a reason-able price, rather than emphasizing diversity or proliferation of content. The challenge to received configurations of broadcast media, then, would come from the rapid rise of mobile phones with internet service, which boomed by



the late 1990s. As such, although I do not wish to imply that there was no diver-sification of television in 1990s Japan, the impact of proliferating channels due to satellite broadcast was not really felt until the late 1990s and early 2000s. This is probably why Japan, despite its genuine lead in technological development, entered into transnational serialization or regional tv roughly in sync with its neighbours, in the 2000s, when new networks, especially satellite broadcast, made for a wealth of new channels with sufficient content to fill them. This is how Hanadan moved into transnational serialization in its second decade.

Meteor Garden, the Taiwanese localization of Hanadan, aired on a public station, cts, and yet its format built directly on the programming associated with star tv, a satellite broadcast service that leapt into the global headlines in 1993 when purchased by Rupert Murdoch. The New York Times described it thus (Shenon 1993):

With his $525 million takeover last month of Star tv, Asia’s pioneer satel-lite television service, Mr. Murdoch has bought himself at least the poten-tial of reaching two-thirds of the world’s population. And as a result, he is now close to creating the first truly global television empire. Star’s five satellite channels can be seen in 38 nations in Asia and the Middle East ‒ from Tokyo to Tel Aviv, from Mongolia to Malaysia, and all of China and India ‒ and can reach, by Star’s estimate, 45 million people who have the necessary equipment. Hong Kong-based Star, Mr. Murdoch’s most impor-tant acquisition since his debt-restructuring crisis in 1990, completes the arc of a Murdoch television empire that also includes Fox Broadcasting in the United States and half-ownership in British Sky Broadcasting, the largest satellite service in Europe. Mr. Murdoch’s willingness to risk half a billion dollars for a controlling stake in a two-year-old television service that has not turned a profit, and may not anytime soon, underscores the excitement in broadcasting circles about the possibilities of pan-Asian television.

Nonetheless, as if to confirm Keane, Fung, and Moran’s insistence that the new regional tv in East Asia does not entail a one-way flow of content from the West, the dream of profiting from exporting American content to Asia did not play out as anticipated (Shiau 2008). Rather, one of the cheapest sources of content, at least initially, was Japanese television, for which there already existed considerable local interest due to a number of factors. What is more, Japanese television had already made inroads in Taiwan. In addition to recep-tion of spillover broadcast from nhk and other Japanese stations, cable tele-vision had already become established in the 1980s, through an illegal catv

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station called the ‘Fourth Channel’. Consequently, ‘Cable tv (catv) penetra-tion to households in Taiwan exceeded 70% in 1996, just three years after the authorization of commercial catv in 1993’ (Ishii et al. 1999). Cable television in Taiwan filled out its slots with programmes from new satellite channels such as star and cnn. This situation allowed ‘trendy dramas’, which had become popular in the Japan in the 1990s, to become highly popular in Taiwan as well. As Ishii, Su, and Watanabe (1999: 418) write:

While catv and satellite channels require a large number of programs, they lack the professional human resources required to produce such programs. The restrictions of the Broadcasting and Television Law limit the proportion of overseas programs to less than 30%, but do not apply to satellite broadcasting and catv. Consequently, a large number of imported programs are aired on catv. Star tv Chinese Channel, for example, has aired many Japanese tv dramas called ‘trendy dramas,’ pop-ular among young people. These dramas are dubbed in Chinese and are viewed mostly through catv.

In other words, with the use of non-local content by new broadcast networks, not only is recycling-by-licensing cost effective (often decidedly cheap), but also there is a good deal of spill-over in that the broadcast contents make their way into other networks, for instance, onto catv or into the vcd market.

It is not surprising, then, that Meteor Garden, the Taiwanese version of Hanadan not only draws on the Hana yori dango manga but also on the already well established and highly influential formats of Japanese trendy dramas as well as the Korean dramas that were starting to attract wider audiences. This makes for an exceedingly capacious yet singular format. Hsiu-Chuang Deppman’s analysis refers to Meteor Garden as an idol drama as well, while situating between trendy and post-trendy formats: ‘Taiwanese idol dramas like Meteor Garden combine two interrelated genres in Japanese tv programming: “trendy dramas” and “post-trendy dramas” ’ (2009: 92). She draws on Iwabuchi Kōichi’s distinction between trendy dramas, which focus on the ‘depictions of stylish urban lifestyles and trendy nightspots abundant with extravagant designer clothes and accessories, sets with chic interior designs, and the latest pop music, all of which clearly reflected the then prevailing highly materialis-tic consumerism Japanese young people enjoyed under the so-called bubble-economy,’ and post-trendy dramas, which focus on ‘sympathetically depicting young people’s yearnings for love, friendship, work, and dreams’ (Iwabuchi 2004: 9-10). Finally, in the wake of Japanese trendy dramas in Taiwan came



the ‘Korean Wave’ or Hallyu from the late 1990s, which may or may not have influenced Meteor Garden but certainly paved the way for the reception of the Korean version of Hanadan (Sung 2010).

Meteor Garden also marked the moment where local production began to catch up to the new channels, helping to launch Comic Ritz Productions Company, which subsequently produced a number of other television dramas in Taiwan. Production of content never catches up, however, and the produc-tion of distribution continued to pave the way, now for Meteor Garden to travel. When the Japanese satellite channel bs-Nittere broadcast Meteor Garden, it was reputedly in an effort to increase ratings of satellite stations, precisely because there were now more channels than local production could fill. As for its popularity, with its combination of girls’ manga with trendy drama and idol singers, it was primed to strike the right note. It makes sense, too, that the Korean production of Hanadan could envision a nearly simultaneous audi-ence in Korea and Japan as well as pick-up by other Asian networks.

Looking at this second media geography through the lens of the transna-tional serialization of Hanadan not only provides further evidence of the pri-macy of the production of distribution but also hints at another assemblage of flow-mobility and privatization-centralization. Again, the basic story would seem to be one of media flows undermining or overwhelming national con-fines, and yet, as the evocation of Rupert Murdoch suggests, ownership of media was being concentrated into fewer and fewer hands, effectively priva-tized in new ways. We see concentration of ownership, proliferation of chan-nels and independent producers, and transnational serialization ‒ a licensed repurposing of contents, in which contents have been transformed into a sort of schema or concept rather than contents in the usual sense. The force of distribution is effectively built back into contents, realizing a potential for seri-alization, and actualizing a virtual unity or affective intensity.

In her study of trendy drama in 1990s Japan, Gabrielle Lukács underscores the historical demise of Japan’s ‘mass middle-class society [. . .] that constituted 90 percent of the population’ (2010: 6). The consequent ‘lifestyle-oriented dra-mas do not target specific demographics (defined by gender, age, and income ranges); rather they define target markets by lifestyle characteristics’ (ibid.: 43).

If the transnational serialization of Hanadan proved capable of building a singular Hanadan format by way of the trendy drama genre, it is because its transmedial serialization already implied a multiplication of target lifestyle markets (for instance, male idol fans and shōjo manga fans in the film adapta-tion). In effect, transnational format may be thought of as an amplification of media mix. But in terms of its assemblage of tendencies, format leans toward a

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combination of deregulated flows and creative licensing that favours lifestyle consumption and concentrated wealth. The neoliberal pole of practices of self in the Hanadan franchise responds to this assemblage.

I previously showed how the region plays the role of a pre-national yet transnational ‘nationful’ relation, which imparts a sense of something in com-mon across nations yet somehow prior to them. Looking at these two media geographies provides a way to consider what exactly is coming into common?

Coming into Common

The transnational serialization of Hanadan has inspired a wealth of com-mentary on commonalities and differences across the different ‘national’ ver-sions at the level of contents as well as its reception and repurposing by fans.2 I have consistently, even insistently, placed the emphasis on the production of distribution rather than on contents or reception, for it is the primacy of distribution that makes transnational serialization analogous to transmedial serialization. As such, like Appadurai, I do not assume any pre-existing, endur-ing values at the level of nations or areas, or in the Hanadan franchise. Rather than ask, ‘what is in common?’ focusing on distribution leads me ask what is coming into common?

Contingent PossessionThe answer is simple and, as a consequence, complex: a mode of expanded television is coming into common, with television expanding along two axes, peripherals and piracy on the one hand, and channel proliferation and capture of spillover broadcast on the other hand. Generally speaking, then, coming into common entails a specific formation in which the production of distribution (piracy and capture of spillover) takes precedence over and above the produc-tion of products or contents. The phrase ‘coming into common’ acknowledges two facts. First, not only do consumers not own the actual infrastructures or properties, but also ownership of infrastructures and properties continue to be consolidated and concentrated into fewer and fewer hands. Coming into common, then, does not mean owning. In fact, as copyright wars and Japan’s initiatives to become an intellectual property nation indicate, the sense of

2 For a careful and insightful study of online fandom in North America related to Handan, see Li (2009). Hong-Mercier (2012) provides an account of French fans. Mafumi (2011) con-ducted an extensive survey poll of audiences’ attitudes towards television in Beijing, Seoul, and Tokyo.



possessing associated with this ‘coming into common’ may actually run coun-ter to private ownership.

Second, while the emerging sense of regionalism does build on values that may, in some respects, be said to be already there, the actual selection of val-ues is contingent and unpredictable. Consequently, as with the invention of national traditions, those values do not causally determine the formation of regionalism, even though they do take on a sort of force or potentiality with regionalism. The popularity of the Hanadan ‘flower boys’ across nations, for instance, may retroactively activate a sense of some historically shared tradi-tion, but its emergence as a new regional trope or format is contingent and unpredictable. As such, just as coming into common may run counter to own-ing, so these formats may run counter to received genealogies and historical emphases. After all, the popularity of flower boys, for better or worse, potentially makes women’s desires central to the formation of regional values. Fang-chi Irene Yang addresses a similar question: ‘[f]aced with the sweeping popularity of Korean dramas in Taiwan, the Minister of Information Bureau proposed to restrict Korean dramas to non-primetime slots in the name of protecting local tv industry in 2006,’ and female fans protested this decision (Yang 2012: 420). Referring to Meteor Garden to gauge the politics of such dramas for women, Yang concludes: ‘Korean dramas and Korean living, based on consumption as a fantastic solution to social and systemic inequalities, reduce democratic poli-tics to life politics; however, paradoxically, they also provide an occasion for understanding of women’s “disagreement” rooted in their unhappy reality and this disagreement is the basis of democratic politics’ (2012: 420).

It is possible, of course, to connect this sense of media regionalism or com-ing into common with broader socioeconomic transformations in the areas of Southeast and Northeast Asia. On this heading, I find Otmazgin’s account refreshing for its emphasis on the emergence of a new urban middle class and a cosmopolitan bourgeoisie across these areas. At the same time, Lukács’ account of the breakdown of class formations and the rise of lifestyles in the context of trendy drama is persuasive yet almost diametrically opposed to Otmazgin. In fact, we cannot assume that urbanization, socio-economic class, or lifestyles is a ground upon which regionalism happens. Instead, if we wish to consider the productivity of conditions, if we wish to pursue the Marxist con-cern for how circulation of commodities generates unevenness in the context of media regionalism, we must consider how the production of production remains out of sync with the production of distribution ‒ at once in medial terms and in affective terms. The feeling of media regionalism is not gener-ated or determined by the infrastructure as in the old and rather dubiously deterministic model in which the so-called economic base determines

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superstructure. Rather, that feeling is generated by the gap between infrastructures (the gap between productions of production, distribution, consumption). The primacy or ascendency of distribution makes for a feeling of connectivity that is not due to or reducible to shared conditions of labour and capitalist ownership (production), or shared qualities of culture (consumption), or pro-duction of space (urbanization), even though it is evidently linked to them, or rather, forcibly assembled with them. As such, as Yang’s account hints, the resulting politics of feeling depends on the extent to which such feelings serve to erase and mask the discrepancies between infrastructures, or on the con-trary, to reveal and exacerbate them.

What, then, makes Hanadan popular? What is its lure to feeling?

Lure to FeelingPreviously, I characterized the Hanadan manga in terms of its openness to mul-tiple viewpoints and its dramatization of a conflict between practices of self, between a flagging liberal middle class and burgeoning neoliberal elite. The combination of these two aspects makes it at once localizable and ‘regionable’. Space does not permit a fuller account of the ‘national’ versions of Hanadan ‒ indeed, that is precisely the effect of serialization ‒ and so, by way of conclu-sion, let me explore how what is ‘coming in common’ is related to the two media geographies, the two waves or trajectories of expanded television.

The two media trajectories are not automatically compatible; each one pres-ents its ‘solution’ to assembling flow-mobility and privatization-centralization. But the solutions are somewhat out of sync.

On the one hand, although sovereign enclosure is present from the out-set in Makino Tsukushi, it begins to feel like a distant horizon, for it retreats when approached, whence the sense of a limitless world. This effect is like the ‘product worlds’ of transmedial serialization: while licensing strives to own the media mix world, the media mix world depends, in part, on the work of fans to diversify its offerings, to expand its horizons. This sort of serialization is like an outward explosion ‒ but ejected fragments do not simply fly outwards, for the collective weight of all the bits provides enough gravitational force to hold things in bounds, keep them in orbit. The result is a horizon that makes the world or universe finite, while the horizon feels internally generated. In affective terms, it is like the Freudian model of psyche: a sovereign enclosure under constant threat of attack or invasion. Yet, the breach in the wall ‒ as when Makino Tsukushi’s radical autonomy turns into fidelity to one boy ‒ does not make for an encounter with something radically other, out of place, inhabiting and disturbing her thoughts, but serves primarily to expand and enlarge Tsukushi, as if she could explode recklessly through different lives



and lifestyles yet always remain herself, pull herself together. Infidelity none-theless remains infinite. Thus, what operates from the outset as an external limit feels internally generated and somehow infinitely capacious. It is as if liberal regimes of regulation could at once stem and enjoy the excesses of neoliberalism.

On the other hand, there are no enclosures only flows, like free-to-air and satellite signals spilling out of the air. Of course, you (or someone) may have to pay for subscriptions, but stuff seems to be incessantly flowing from all direc-tions, making for an environment whose boundaries are given only by the extent to which you roam. Awareness of something like an external limit comes in the form of hook-ups, using wires, cables, dishes, and modems. For, proper-ties now are formats. This is why it feels as if centralization and privatization always step in after the fact and can only really happen in the last instance. If wires and cables of the reticular network come to converge (usually to entwine and knot themselves around cities), it would seem to be a matter of contin-gency rather than destiny ‒ a matter of spontaneously arising waves, vogues, and fashions. Yet, there remains the sense of a trajectory that might operate in relation to destiny, in the way that cable subscriptions operate in relation to increasingly privatized media ownership. In affective terms, it is as if Makino Tsukushi’s destination in the manga ‒ to become a household maid and then a wife ‒ functioned in a purely formal manner, much as a ‘mobile’ series might set up an imaginary endpoint that never truly arrives. This domain is akin to transnational serialization.

Precisely because these two ‘solutions’ to the problem of ‘mobility + privati-zation’ or ‘flow + centralization’ are out of sync, their assemblage must contin-uously be enacted, socially. This enacting or assembling of tendencies is what makes television into a social technology, to adopt Williams’ turn of phrase. The example of Hanadan adds another dimension to Williams’ problematic, the dimension of the region. Transmedial serialization and transnational seri-alization may each be taken as a social technology of television, and today these two social technologies are being assembled, within and across nations. This is what makes for regional tv or media regionalism. The affective flipside of media regionalism, then, is the affective ‘indistinction’ that arises between the transnational and the transmedial ‒ the sense of possessing a series with-out holding any rights over any of the items within the series. Simply put, it is a feeling of ‘to have but not to hold’ ‒ a care for in-fidelity.

The affective flipside of ‘media coming into common’ hinges on this care for in-fidelity, which is closely related to the parasocial powers of television ‒ what is strange is brought into the home or hand, rendered small and inti-mate, responsive, and yet strange in a new way, because it is a media entity,

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an image-human. The television-enhanced sense of being powerfully and inti-mately connected with strangers takes a double twist with transnational and transmedial serialization, at once highlighting the mediatic nature of these intimate strangers and drawing upon received forms of cultural and ethnic difference; that is, strangers whose strangeness is entirely familiar and domes-ticated. Within this double twist arises a lure, a lure to become some sort of exotic domestic or domestic exotic ‒ maybe a foreign maid, maybe an unruly pet. In either case, as the example of Hanadan indicates, the liberal notion of personhood, of the sovereign person, remains, but only as a point of departure or premise, as if we were indeed now living in the aftermath of sovereignty, both personal and political.

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