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On November 11th, the Center for Asian Studies hosted Distinguished Professor Millie Creighton of the University of British Columbia. Her visit to Boulder was made possible by a grant from the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) Northeast Asia Council (NEAC) Distinguished Speaker Bureau, and by the University of Colorado President’s Fund for the Humanities. Professor Creighton met and lunched with graduate students, gave a public lecture on the popular cultural consumption of the ‘Korean wave’ in Japan, and also gave a guest presentation in a geography graduate seminar on Japanese department stores and cross-cultural perspectives on consumption.

Millie Creighton was a co-founder of the Centre for Japanese Research at UBC where she also serves on the executive board of the Centre for Korean Research. She works on issues of gender, labor, law, popular culture and consumption, and minority cultural politics within Japan and, secondarily, Korea.

Her lecture presentation explored the impact of Korean popular culture – the so-called Korean Wave, or ‘K-pop’ – on Japan, on Japanese attitudes towards Korea, and on resident Koreans within Japan. She guided her audience through  apparent shift in Japan’s perceived 'ethnic erotic economy,' the intensive fandom of middle-aged Japanese women over young male Korean stars and of Japanese tourism to Korea inspired by Korean television soap operas. Her talk thus addressed two growing fields of interest at CAS:  contemporary Korean culture and society, and the transcultural dimensions of regional change in Asia. With a growing interest on campus in Korean Studies, CAS hopes to host more events in the future introducing the community to the dynamic influences of ‘K-pop’ throughout Asia and the world.