Critical Connections: Forum on Cultural Studies in Asia and Beyond
16 March 2012, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand

CONFERENCE KEYNOTE SCHOLAR AND GUEST SPEAKER

Ajarn Viriya SAWANGCHOT                                           (Mahidol University)                                                                                                              email: <tvsawang@gmail.com>

"X-Japan and Politics of Affective Labor in Thailand"

Recently, Asian cultural industries have been the subject of intensive critical discourse especially within the frameworks of national economic policies, business investments, regional trades and international relations. Though there are growing interests in these subjects, there are currently few debates over inter-Asia cultural flow and its power.

The aim of this paper is a critical study of Asian cultural industries in Asian countries focusing on popularization of Japanese rock band, X-Japan, in Thailand. The rise of popularity of Japanese pop music in Thailand can be traced back to the mid-1980s when So Shen Tai, a Japanese girl band, enjoyed hit songs among Thai youth.  However, at that time, if compared to Cantonese pop music, Japanese songs had less influence on Thai popular music in general. But globalization in the 1990s and the economic slump in Japan accelerated the intra-regional flow of Japanese cultural products. Then Japanese cultural industries moved from licensing agreement with local companies to eventually opening more diversified local socio-cultural platforms such as fan clubs, import shops, small media and concerts. In Thailand, in the mid-1990s, X-Japan become extremely popular among Thai urban middle-class youth and sometimes Thai fans flew to Japan to buy X-Japan albums and their related goods. It can be argued that Japanese cultural industries have shown signs of progress with not only the assistance of the business agencies but also multi-private connections. They also made efforts to invent market and inter-national relation strategies by connecting through created various effects on trans-local identities among Asian cultures.

In terms of these, my questions raise the investigation on how do Asian cultural industries enrich and empower the lives of Asian people, particularly among X-Japan fans in Thailand? In general, moreover, how has the inter/intra- relationship among Asian countries changed.