The Korean rap song “Gangnam Style” has become a huge phenomenon, introducing people all over the world to the randomness of K-POP. But for various reasons, the song hasn’t been all that popular here in Japan, in part because no Japanese version was released (most K-POP groups release one here) and also because Japanese are tiring of Korean culture after a summer of squabbles over islands and unprecedented insults to their Emperor. It’s widely believed that Korean fans express their patriotism by repeatedly pressing the “F5” (reload) key in Internet Explorer in order to push the YouTube view counts of their favorite videos up, something which the president of the Korean Wave Research Institute, a group funded by the South Korean government to promote K-POP around the world, angrily dismissed. According to Yasu, the staff member who keeps our site stocked with artbooks and awesome 2013 calendars, there’s another reason the song hasn’t caught on here: Japanese fans don’t like it. He says, “To Japanese, what’s good about K-POP is it’s approach to beauty. The extreme beauty of the male or female stars as they perform, the many hours they spent preparing for a performance, that’s enjoyable to see. We don’t feel the same ‘beauty’ when we watch Gangnam Style.”
Japanese have been cool towards “Gangnam Style.”
