Japanimanga and techno-orientalism.

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Kirk W. Fuoss's essay "Lynching Performances, Theatres of Violence" (1999) demonstrates how nineteenth-century technology helped to coordinate lynching mobs in the U.S. as a form of popular entertainment. In relation to American history, Fuoss points out how entire peoples and places were set aside as living stages for these "lynching dramas," mainly thanks to frontier newspapers and postcards that regularly promoted a hyperbolic, self-inoculating injection of neighborly scorn and hatred.

Among history's relentless variety of racially tinged platforms of demonization and rivalry, one of whose abiding demeanors is "blackface," little has changed in the modern mass media. Of greatest concern here is the Internet, now having created a virtual lunar playground for generating racist stereotypes and fantasies about the nationalist other. "There is no before-racism in U.S. history. Nor, unfortunately, is there an after-racism," says Fuoss. No country today is immune from this onslaught, nor is any broadband or pop art form. This includes Japanese mangaka Sharin Yamano's hugely popular Kenkanryu (variously translated as "The Anti-Korean Wave," "Hating the Korean Wave," or even "Hate Korea Wave") series of comic books, except that here the technology involved only repeats in cyberspace what is its most ancient, sublunary form.

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First released in 2005, Kenkanryu started life in Japan as an underground webcomic whose meteoric rise to manga status triggered an unprecedented Internet phenomenon in response to the "Korean Wave" pop culture boom. Racism as an aesthetic object of contemplation in Asia is nothing new, nor is the image of fear and loathing generated among rival nations like Japan, North and South Korea, China, and Taiwan. But what has changed is the increasing technical sophistication of the different regional "silicon majorities," which allow ethnic prejudices to circulate as geographically attuned anecdotes, jokes, and popular imaging, all geared toward prioritizing the homegrown self over the distant other.

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Since it first appeared on Yamano's website in 2003, Kenkanryu has stirred up a lot of controversy throughout the Asian region, largely preoccupating such Internet forums as Japan's 2channel and Korea's Joins and Naver URLs. Korean daily newspapers have also turned their attention to the continuing popularity of these comic books. Kenkanryu, with its in-your-face Korea-bashing, originally arose in response to the heated rivalry between Japanese and Korean soccer fans when both countries co-hosted the 2002 FIFA World Cup. The narrative kicks off with the Korean players being accused of getting away with murder when they became the first Asian team ever to reach the World Cup semifinals. Targeted at a specific age group, teenagers have been chosen to relate these petty grievances, redirecting the action to a Japanese high school.

The comic advances Japan's traditional enmity with Korea in a present-day setting, revealing their mutual antagonism in sports, economics, and technology. Available through the Japanese version of Amazon.com, there are three Kenkanryu books to date, a manual on how to read them systematically, another racist comic about China called Introduction to China (2005), and two Korean responses that address the "Hate Japan Wave" (including Korean cartoonist Yang Byeong-seol's Hyeomillyu, released in 2006). Hating the Korean Wave is also a backlash to the recent wave of Korean films, music, and soap operas that have inundated the international and especially Japanese markets, epitomized by the sensational airing of the KBS TV drama Winter Sonata on NHK in early 2002.

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On November 19, 2005, the same year Kenkanryu was published in book form by the Shinyusha company, Norimitsu Onishi wrote an article for The New York Times called "Ugly Images of Asian Rivals Become Best Sellers in Japan," channeling Yukichi Fukuzawa's 1885 "Datsu-A Ron" (Good-bye Asia) editorial in which the renowned author describes "the winds of Westernization" blowing across Asia and the attendant snuffing out of Japanese supremacy. Fukuzawa insists that Japan's innate supremacy, which is unlike that of any other Asian nation, is not only clearly superior to any Westerner's, but is the most capable of outmaneuvering the West on its own turf. "Good-bye Asia" even manages to anticipate Japan's violent colonization of Korea between 1910 and 1945, while continuing to find an echo in contemporary Japanese prejudices against the Korean and Chinese peoples. Fukuzawa is still revered as one of the founders of modern Japan, his face appearing on the [yen] 10,000 bill.

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A good example of how the nationalist agenda is sporadically unleashed as a way to fuel hatred between the two countries is this summer's controversy over regional ownership of Dokdo (Korean for "solitary island," a group of small islets in the Sea of Japan, also known as Takeshima in Japan). When a diplomatic debacle erupted last July over Japanese and U.S. moves to revoke Korea's "historic claim" to the territory, the local media turned Dokdo-happy overnight. Koreans had just taken to the streets over the import of American beef, but suddenly their mood soured against Japan. It wasn't that these demonstrations had ever been particularly focused, resorting to anything that came their way: the beef crisis; the 2002 incident involving an USFK armored vehicle accidentally running over two young girls near the DMZ; and now Dokdo.

One highlight of this media frenzy was pop-ballad singer Kim Jang-hoon's bid to launch a series of ad campaigns in The New York Times, aided and abetted by PR wizard Seo Kyong-duck. The first of these, published on July 9, 2008, opens with "Do You Know?" and continues, "For the last 2,000 years, the body of water between Korean and Japan has been called the 'East Sea.' Dokdo, located in the East Sea, is a part of Korean territory. The Japanese government must acknowledge this fact." That the rest of the world calls Korea's East Sea the "Sea of Japan" is not the whole disagreement, however. Rising tides of rightwing nationalist groups in Japan, even the disputed territory being provocatively mentioned in high-school guidelines, points to a long history of pent-up resentment and envy.

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These are just a few of the ill feelings forever threatening to burst the Dokdo bubble, an outcome made all the more likely by overzealous Korean news coverage and TV specials linking tourism and manifest destiny to the campaign for national repatriation. One could even find online a virtual tour of the islets, on which Korean flags had been implanted in imitation of Second Life "metaverses." Given this torrent of media coverage, it's not surprising to find undercurrents of Korean patriarchy and hyper-masculinity percolating through the whole Dokdo affair.

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In recent times, the nationalist campaign for expanding Korea's international profile has been extended to sporting events, including the Olympic Games, soccer, and golf, as just another way of outdoing its neighbors. Thus has the Korean independence movement been reborn, re-igniting old imperialist motives of conquest and domination in the modern sporting, technological, and economic arenas. And with each Pyrrhic victory, there appears a corresponding return to what is thought "original" or essential in Korea's ancient heritage. Conversely, Japanese bigotry toward Koreans fuels nationalistic pride not only in Japan but also in Korea. This relationship of time-honored conflict between neighboring countries reifies those arbitrary, race-based hierarchies that traditionally kept them apart. In today's cyberculture, we assume that a virtual common denominator ensures that everyone stays connected, transgressing all accepted boundaries. But the global ideal of instantaneous identity swapping has only spawned a corresponding rise in racial differentiation and egocentrism.

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In Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity, and Identity on the Internet (2002), Lisa Nakamura argues that "in the absence of racial description [on the Internet] all players are assumed to be white," making techno-orientalism the projection of a pan-Asian future in which a mystical form of Asian cyberpunk supplies endless opportunities for personal escape. The essentialist claim that cwybertechnology has at last brought about multicultural unity and democracy is only a thin cover for what Nakamura refers to as a "false sense of racial equality--or post-racial cybermeritocracy--cosmetic multiculturalism."

That is to say, the new "post-racial" distraction afforded by technology and virtual tourism amounts to old-style colonization by other means. At the same time as virtual exotica proliferates on the Internet, certain racial and sexual stereotypes keep the master race idea alive and kicking. But all this preening is not only due to the Internet. Already in 1974, Rolf Olsen's documentary film Shocking Asia revealed the West's deeply voyeuristic connection to Asia--a name, one can't forget, belonging to a trio of women's names used to divide and conquer the ancient Hellenic world. Yet whether such mythic perversions originate in the East or in the West, today's pan-Asian disciples are dominated by the same gangsta-inflected Zen perfectionism one sees in films like Blade Runner, the Matrix trilogy, and Kung Fu Hustle.

This resurfacing of Asian hypermachismo is indeed a critical challenge, coming as it does from a misplaced sense of inadequacy. Even the recent wave of Koreanness in the media is a mixed message of sorts, meaning that it ends up being the same message of violence whatever direction it comes from, whether from inside or outside the national borders, especially in a country already cosmetically divided against itself. When all is said and done, this constant rattling of light sabers is a defensive move against the very real threat of an ongoing internal malfunction.

In my recent exhibition, "Addressing Dolls," I try to demonstrate the underlying co-dependency of what is rapidly becoming a universal condition of racial brinkmanship. In 99 Miss Kim(s), one sees a wall of North Korean fembots whose common name--the most common Korean name--is not only shared by North Korean dictators Kim Il-sung and son Kim Jong-il, but by my mother as well. The assigned number of dolls refers to September 9, the anniversary of the founding of Korea's communist "evil twin." Alongside this installation is Dresses for Different Events (2008), a series of large digital prints of cutout dresses for paper dolls, based on genuine 1970s South Korean editions. Teeming with esoteric national symbols, in stark contrast to North Korea's mandated uniformity in dress and deportment, here we glimpse an emerging desire for a Western, open-market style of national identity, something that can be slipped on like a costume on a paper doll.

Right now, I am working toward a show that takes the universality of Kenkanryu as its premise. It is undoubtedly significant that so many of the Japanese characters have Caucasian features, with big eyes and, frequently, blonde features, while the distinctive Korean characters reveal small slanted eyes and a big mouth, somewhat like the old blackface stereotype. There is also a section in Kenkanryu called "Far East Asia Investigation Committee Report," which at one point highlights the idea that Koreans alone suffer from Hwa Byong (anger disease). That the mouths of Koreans are larger than normal is further evidence of their always being angry.

Throughout Kenkanryu, there lies a concerted effort to demonstrate the inferiority of Korean culture and manufactured goods. Even Kendo, the Japanese martial art of sword fighting, has allegedly been corrupted by Kumdo, its Korean equivalent. More astoundingly, another segment in Kenkanryu rails against how Korean bloggers have single-handedly defiled the World Wide Web, which is rich coming from this piece of cyber-violence.

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Last summer, I traveled to five Japanese cities during the Beijing Games, conducting interviews with the local people. Dressed as an ordinary tourist, each day I appeared in a different ethnic costume--Chinese American, Korean American, Japanese American, Taiwanese American, and so forth. In the same vein as Chronique d'un ete, Jean Rouche and Edgar Morin's 1960 documentary film in which the question "Are you happy?" is put to students, workers, and migrants on the streets of Paris, my work questions the racism of media avoidance itself, as it appears in those short, no-comment replies I got from the Japanese regarding anything Chinese.

As a final counterpoint to this "false cybermeritocracy," I propose an animation piece describing how Candy Candy--the Caucasian-looking icon of the 1980s Japanese TV and comic series that has influenced the look of legions of Korean girls as well--and Ichimi, the leading female character in Kenkanryu, meet and fall in love. Openly lesbian lovers, they are North Korean spies who travel the globe taking out rightwing U.S. politicians--or martial arts masters of race.

MINA CHEON is a Korean American media artist and educator who lives and works between Baltimore, New York, and Seoul. "Addressing Dolls" was exhibited at C. Grimaldis Gallery in Baltimore between February 28 and March 29, 2008. Her Kenkanryu show will appear at SSamzie Space, Seoul in the spring of 2009.