In Taiwan, people tend to compare the Korean dramas with the Japanese idol dramas, for they both come from nearby Asian countries and has both successfully targeted the younger audience. As Leung's paper has showed us, the most recognizable features that the Korean dramas share with the Japanese idol dramas are: a, the urban appeal; b, beautiful settings and music; c, romance; d, idol effect; e; melodrama. Leung's comparison is a textual one, and is itself a culturally situated textual reading.

For Taiwanese audience, the conditions of possibility for Korean popular cultures to succeed are different from those of Japan. Historically, Japanese popular cultures have been present in Taiwan's everyday life for decades, and most people, regardless of age, have had "Japanese experiences" in good or bad terms. Korean popular cultures, on the contrary, were foreign for most Taiwanese till recently.

The Japanese popular cultures caused some concerns on Taiwan's cultural identity in the 1990s, and the cultural debate on the youngsters' "Japan craze", or "Hari", was full of anxiety. The "Hari" cultural trend had changed the young generation's worldview and consumption mode, which results in a pervasive scale of cultural change, from as broad as the imagination of a modern urban life to as specific as favorite brand names and fashions. Different from the "Hari" trend, the influence of "Hanliu" is narrowed down to the consumption mode. It has successfully promoted Korean idol stars and related Korean products, though not in the scale of Japanese commodities.

Aesthetically, the "Hari" trend has changed the Taiwanese youngsters' aesthetics on self-images such as how to wear make up and how to dress oneself. The major cultural influence of "Hanliu", on the contrary, is unarguably the boom of plastic surgery, because most pretty faces in Korean dramas are said to be the outcome of plastic surgery. Plastic surgery is no longer considered a shameful practice and a cultural taboo. The most recent development has been a combination: the famous Japanese cosmetic product line DHC has announced a Korean star Kim Hee-sun () as its 2004 spokeswoman in Taiwan and Korea.

From my interviews, I have found out how Taiwanese twenty-year-olds compare the Japanese dramas with the Korean dramas. Their points could be roughly categorized into the following five aspects:

1. The Taiwanese audience, especially that of the younger generation, draw a very clear distinction between the Japanese and the Korean TV dramas. A hierarchy has been drawn in which Japan is on the higher end of modern culture, and Korea the lower, therefore the more familiar resemblance of Taiwan. Such hierarchy is at the first glance a cultural one, but it echoes the economic status of the nation.

One of the interviewees points out that his parents hold a reserved opinion about the "Hanliu" : "My parents said that they could understand if I go Japan-craze, because Japan is a more advanced society, but they think it absurd that I like Koreans, because Koreans are just like us Taiwan."

2. Gender inequality and male chauvinism in Korean dramas make significant impression on the audience. Korean dramas attract not only young audience, but also female audience of older ages. Korean dramas are considered to be more suitable for family viewings because they contain more family matters than Japanese idol dramas.

An interviewee said: "My mother would ask me to switch the channel if I were watching Japanese idol dramas, but my mother would actually watch Korean dramas with me and wouldn't force me to change. My mother would be watching the program and complaining about the male chauvinism in the stories, and said that she couldn't imagine there would be even worse male chauvinist families than Taiwanese. My mother quite identified with Korean women's problems and said that she had gone through all the same problems."

3. "Struggle over tradition" and controversial female characters are appealing to young audience. Unlike Japanese idol dramas where the urbanity and individual happiness are the themes, the conflicts between Confucian tradition and social modernity are some of the major cultural experiences in Korean dramas, which the young audience engages with Korean deeply. This coincides with Leung's points on "Confucian values" and "conservatism".

4. Narrative structures are different between Japanese dramas and Korean dramas. This is perhaps the most important distinction between them. In this comparison, interviewees give an easy formula by placing Taiwanese local dramas on the one end and Japanese idol dramas on the other, situating the Korean dramas in the middle. The most distinctive differences among them are the length of each drama series. The Japanese idol dramas are well-structured and extend no longer than twelve episodes, with each story line clear and efficient. The Taiwanese local dramas are tediously long, each series could go on for more than 40 episodes, or even 100, if the ratings are high.

In terms of length, Korean drama series are quite in the middle, because they don't go as short as the Japanese idol dramas, either would they go as long as the local ones. One interviewee said: "Korean dramas are new to me, they look very different from what we used to watch. They are not as dreamy and unrealistic as the Japanese dramas, the Japanese dramas are too idol-oriented. Korean dramas are similar to ours, but they are not as family oriented as Taiwanese dramas." Another interviewee said: "Their (Korean) stories and patterns are like ours: two major male characters and two major females. You don't see such complication in Japanese idol dramas often."

In a word, on the account of story patterns, the interviewees tend to value "realistic" stories over idol approach, and some look for familiar story patterns, while some favor the difference.

5. The marketing strategies between Japanese dramas and Korean dramas are similar. The interviewees all agree that both adopt powerful commodity promotion strategies, but they are also aware that the contents are different. One interviewee concludes that Korean dramas are successful because they "sell products in a Japanese way." By "Japanese way", it means a combined packaging of idol stars and commodities. However, a very significant difference is that Korean dramas relied on internet promotion at their beginning stage, therefore the Korean drama fans rely on internet information more than the Japanese drama fans, who can have various access other than internet to Japanese information.

It is interesting to see how the discourse of difference has been formulated among the drama audiences. In Leung's paper, the concept of "co-evalness" of social economy and drama tempo is made to explain the correlation between the social development and the audience's preferred tempo of dramas, this concept is also applied to explain the downward market of Japanese dramas across Asia after Japan's economy went slow in 1998. However, how a country's economic condition influences its cultural products, and therefore the overseas market's reaction to them, is not an easy reduction. It is too early to jump into the conclusion that as soon as the economy goes down, the cultural products lose their overseas market. For example, when the Korean pop songs made their triumph in Taiwanese market, Korea was under the economic crisis of 1997; and Korea was still in recovery while Taiwan started to import Korean dramas in 1998.

Nevertheless, economy does posit an important factor in the cultural hierarchy of drama category, but I would suggest a more cultural perspective on this economic factor. In Taiwan's case, the Korean dramas do not "take over" the market from Japanese dramas, they simply share and divide the market pie, and they have made the "economically determined" cultural hierarchy even more visible. It wouldn't be easy for Japanese cultures to lose their cultural privilege in this hierarchy, quite contrary to that, it would even confirm Japan's position on top of other Asian countries.

At this point no one can come up with an easy formula to explain why a certain cultural form spread, and what a perfect modern Asian touch is. How Korean dramas succeeded in Taiwan differed from the Japanese idol dramas, and how Taiwanese idol dramas appeal to other Southeast Asian countries was different from the Japanese and Korean dramas. Although it is tempting for us to draw a conclusion from the economic determinism to state that the audience's preference is related to the economic status of the society, we should hold our pace and avoid making this categorization our final point, for this finding only evens out the social differences among audience groups and, in turn, cultural difference is made to prove nothing but the already there economic differences.