This edited volume brings together scholars from eight countries to explore interactions of popular cultural flows, state politics, audiences' receptions, and public debates in Singapore, Malaysia, Japan, Indonesia, Korea, Vietnam and China, and across the region as a whole. These investigations provide fresh conceptual and empirical insights into the study of the dynamic and complex interface of cultural adaptation, political identification and regional identity formation in the popular cultural consumption process in East Asia. The impact of cross-border popular cultural flows on East Asians' competing national selves and the potential of translating pleasure from popular cultural consumption into regional integration urges are thus issues carrying political significance and consequence for East Asia, and possibly with serious repercussions on the world.

List of Figures - List of Tables - Notes on Contributors - Acknowledgements - Xin Chen/Nicholas Tarling: Introduction: Pop Culture Cross Currents and East Asian-ness - Nicholas Tarling: Popular Culture: History and Theory - Charles Samuel Johnston: Can Popular Culture Tourism Experiences Help Construct an East Asian Identity? - Lee Kam Hing/Danny Wong Tze Ken: Shanghai Popular Songs and DAMA Chinese Orchestra: Claiming a Malaysian Chinese Cultural Identity - Nicole Tarulevicz: Eating the Other? East Asian Cultural Flows and Understandings of Chineseness in Singapore - Marie Thorsten: Dual-Use Aesthetics in Post-Pacifist Japan - Lilawati Kurnia: Rereading Japanese Popular Culture in the Context of the Japanese Empire in Indonesia - Changho Jo: Korean Waves as Strategic Responses to the Search for an Imagined Common Identity - Lê Thùy Linh/Hoàng Anh Tün: "Weapons of Mass Attraction": Waves of Northeast Asian Movies and Cultural Influence in Contemporary Vietnam - Xin Chen/Fengxin Ding: From Foreign Folk Songs to the "Korean Wave": Chinese Cultural Exposures and Self-reflections.