Popular Culture and the Transformation of Japan-Korea Relations (PDF)

Stephen Epstein is the Director of the Asian Languages and Cultures Programme at Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, and served as the 2013-14 President of the New Zealand Asian Studies Society. He has published widely on contemporary Korean society, literature and popular culture and translated numerous pieces of Korean and Indonesian fiction, including the novels Who Ate Up All the Shinga? by Park Wan-suh (Columbia University Press, 2009), The Long Road by Kim In-suk (MerwinAsia, 2010) and Telegram by Putu Wijaya (Lontar Foundation, 2011). He has co-produced two documentaries on the Korean indie music scene, Us & Them: Korean Inidie Rock in a K-pop world (2014) and Our Nation: A Korean Punk Rock Community (2002). He co-edited Complicated Currents: Media Flows, Soft Power and East Asia (Monash University Publications, 2010) and The Korean Wave: A Sourcebook with Yun Mi Hwang (Academy of Korean Studies Press, 2016).

Rumi Sakamoto is Senior Lecturer in Japanese at School of Cultures, Languages and Linguistics, the University of Auckland, and is convenor of Asian Studies, Chinese, Japanese and Korean programmes. She has published widely on Japanese popular culture, nationalism and war memory. She is a co-editor of Popular Culture, Globalization and Japan (Routledge 2006) and Japanese Popular Culture (Routledge 2014). Her current research looks at cultural representations of kamikaze pilots and Self-Defense Forces in postwar Japan.