Lee Dong-Hoo's paper, Cultural strategies of remakes looks at how television programs are adapted across proximate cultural environments -- in this case from Japan to Korea. The example discussed at length in the paper is the Korean trendy drama, Yojolady (A Lady of Refined Manners), which is itself a remake of Yamatonadeshiko (Fuji TV 2000). The paper provides a sophisticated account of the influence of Japanese popular culture in Korea as well as taking into account audience acceptance of Japanese production values.
       Yojolady is a case of strategic 're-making'. If we were to use industry terminology, we might say also it is an example of re-versioning, or to use the more contemporary parlance, it is a format. Remakes, reversions, and formats are all part of the process of recycling ideas -- a trend prevalent in today's media environment. In some instances these strategies of remaking are legitimate creative responses to competition, while at other times they are more about the wilful exploitation of copyright. While the example cited here is a legitimate co-production, the strategies used to differentiate the product are not dissimilar from many of the more exploitative instances of copying addressed in the first section of Lee Dong-Hoo's paper.

Formats and formatting

As a great deal of Lee's paper deals with what are essentially formats, I will direct my discussion primarily to the issue of cultural borrowing and hope that this generates some useful discussion of this much maligned practice.¹ It has often been suggested that Japan's business success in the modern era was founded on copying, assimilating, and localising Western models. It is now observed that countries in the region are copying, assimilating, and localising Japanese models. The predominance of copying as a business model and as a production strategy is important to understand, and a great deal of speculation is current in the television industry as to the ethics of format adaptation, in particular the question of creative ownership of ideas. While the concept of a format has been central to media economics for some time, it has only recently entered into mainstream media discourse. In short, the format is a template, or a production model into which different content can be inserted. In industry parlance the metaphor of 'the pie and the crust' is commonly used. So we can say that ingredients of the various cultural pies are drawn from different recipes but the basic form (crust) is the same.
       While the study here concerns a Korean adaptation of a Japanese recipe, there are many well-known cases of the formatting of Japanese material in the East Asian region, such as the Taiwanese idol drama, Meteor Garden (in Chinese , and the Chinese version of TBS' Shiawase Kazoku Keikaku or (in English) Happy Family Plan (in Chinese ).²
       The television format has come to be widely viewed as a solution to a creativity deficit. In short, it is easier to copy someone else's success than to take a risk on a new untested idea. The mindset of copying has become more entrenched in the new era of television as channels proliferate, in turn creating demand for content that can be packaged and re-packaged in themed channels e.g. reality, lifestyle, drama, etc. The significant dynamic of the present era in television therefore is adaptation, transfer and recycling of narrative and other kinds of content. This tendency is not limited to television but instead is characteristic across many media and related areas of culture industries.

Modes of adaptation

In placing this phenomenon in an industry perspective Lee Dong-Hoo nominates three modes of adaptation, which she refers to as cloning, developing, and collaging respectively. The first category (cloning) describes wholesale mimicry of the original concept; the second is where some part of the original program is extracted and used to seed a new format; finally, the third type of adaptation is genuine hybridity where elements of two or more programs are refashioned to form a new product.
       These strategies represent what Albert Moran has elsewhere called open and closed adaptations.³ An open adaptation is where there is a significant degree of flexibility in how the original text or format is remade. Most unlicensed formats are open adaptations. It is easy to see that a loose adaptation effectively reduces the likelihood of legal action for breach of copyright. So developing and collaging are strategies where some part of an idea is utilised with significant new material being added. There is often a greater degree of creativity involved in this kind of formatting.
       The closed adaptation model corresponds to Lee's cloning strategy. Cloning may be legal, as where the license fee is exchanged and the format is produced according to set instructions. Agreed minor variations are the norm, as in the case of Beijing Television's remake of Happy Family Plan. However, when there is no exchange of license fees, and the product is a direct copy, we can say that cloning is contravening the copyright of the originating company. Instances of unlicensed copying of Happy Family Plan in Korean and Taiwan have aroused the ire of TBS.⁴
       If one takes a purely legalistic approach there is not much that can be done to stop wilful copying. Rights are not innate or inherent. Rather, they are constructed aspects of the competition between different program producers, local and international, and between different users of program content and 'brands', such as broadcasters, cable, radio, telephone and internet. This emphasis on rights helps secure the general conditions for the process of selling the same content over and over again across a series of different media. This is the new face of media globalization.

Comparisons

The bulk of the paper uses Chatman's notion of 'narrative projects' to identify differences and similarities between the Japanese original and the Korean remake. Lee's analysis is rich in detail and I won't attempt to summarize the argument except to say that while the remakes are identifiable as versions or formats, there is cultural disparity evident in the actual ingredients. This demonstrates that formats/ adaptations require a significant degree of fine-tuning to make sense in a second country. Of course, one needs to bear in mind the fact that the original drama Yamatonadeshiko exists in cultural memory. Therefore perceptions of the value of Yojolady - its success as a remake or as a creative text in its own right - are necessarily refracted through the knowledge of the Japanese original.

Following the discussion of narrative Lee Dong-Hoo analyses audience response, using information gleaned from Internet communities. The results confirm that prior knowledge is indeed crucial. Those who had not seen the Japanese version were generally supportive of Yojolady (64 per cent), while those who had the opportunity to see Yamatonadeshiko were more likely to be critical of aspects of the remake. A regular criticism was that Yojolady was not sufficiently localized, and was in fact a poor copy. These comments relate back to the early section of the paper and criticisms voiced during the 1990s that Korean popular culture blindly and often exploitatively copies Japanese ideas.

Concluding remarks and topics for discussion

In summary, the paper draws attention to the difficulties of localisation and raises a number of questions that generate further discussion. First, it identifies the issue of maintaining a balance between the innovation found in the foreign product and the traditional concerns of Korean narrative. As seen in the audience response to Yojolady, this is more easily said than done. But if effective cultural translation is to occur, how can this balance be negotiated? Second, there is the convoluted issue of creativity to consider. Is the 're-made' hybrid product genuinely creative or merely exploitative? If it is exploitative, what does this say about the development of the Korean creative