Seoul:
Stubborn Korean fans cheer and applaud as their favorite superhero strikes pose in brightly colored uniforms with the sounds of soulful Japanese ballads, a nostalgic throwback to the VHS era.
It’s been decades since Choudenshi Bioman, a Japanese superhero series, last on television, but the epic tales of Good and Evil still resonate deeply with these Korean millennials.
And while their masked heroes are now on track in the ’60s, the chance to meet in person at a sold-out concert hall event in Seoul this month was way too good to hand over, even ticket prices starting at 300,000 won ($210).
“Most of us here are office workers and ticket prices were not cheap, but that didn’t exceed our means as a lifelong fan,” Oh Myung-Hoon, 39 said.
“It wasn’t a matter of choice for fans like me. It was a must.”
Choudenshi Bioman and his companion show, part of the Super Sentai series, well known to Western audiences as an inspiration for the Power Ranger phenomenon of the 1990s, tell the story of a group of people with special powers fighting over supervisors intended to dominate the world.
The show aired during the time of Japan’s transformation into a global cultural power, and its animation and film studios produce content that has been seen all over the world.
However, many Korean fans of Choudenshi Bioman initially didn’t know that the show was Japanese.
Imports in Japan are prohibited
For decades, South Korea has imposed drastic restrictions on Japanese cultural imports due to historic tensions caused by Tokyo’s colonial rule over the peninsula in the early 20th century.
It was not until 1998, more than half a century after South Korea’s independence that Seoul began to lift the ban on Japanese media content.
The Japanese Superhero Series – best known in Korea through Bioman and Flashman – is one of several exceptions to the ban imported to VHS tapes, which became an unusual and important phenomenon in the 1980s and 1990s.
Still, authorities have requested that all Japanese texts in the series be replaced with Korean and dubbed, effectively erasing traces of Japanese origin.
This allowed the series to flourish in an era of stronger anti-Japanese sentiment, media columnist Kim Doon told AFP.
“The media that dominated my youth were all Japanese, like the Animated Galaxy Express 999, but I had to see Korean through dubbing,” said the 49-year-old.
“The 1970s and 1980s were peak anti-Japanese-anti-anti-anti-emotional times with the belief that anything related to Japan is bad.”
However, he added that times have changed “because of Korea’s powerful cultural exports and a vibrant economy.”
Some scenes managed to avoid censorship and showed Japanese characters in the background – mysterious young Korean kids.
Cha Jeong-In, a 39-year-old game developer, admits she is confused by the “unrecognized letter.”
“I asked myself, ‘What is that?'” she told AFP. “I later learned that it was all made in Japan.”
A good victory over evil
For the actor who appeared in the Hero series, the Heartfelt reception in Seoul was exhilarating and confusing, especially in a country where Japan’s content was once heavily censored.
“I was really surprised because I didn’t expect this to happen 40 years after filming,” said Kazunori Inaba, who played Red Mask at Maskman.
The 68-year-old former actor currently runs a ramen restaurant in Tokyo and said it was “difficult” to describe devoted people after his decades of fantasy dramas he still enjoys in Korea.
“If this job we did could be a good bridge between Japan and Korea, we did a really good job,” he told AFP.
“I think heroes are really important, especially when you’re a kid. As you grow up, you forget about them,” he said. “But rewatching them can help you regain memories.”
Game developer Cha said she spent $1,500 to come to Seoul from the Philippines, where she currently lives.
“If I missed this opportunity, I thought in their lifetime they would never meet face to face for their senior age,” she told AFP.
“They all taught me that good things always win evil and that I should not choose the path of cheating,” Cha said. “They planted those values in me.” AFP