Situated at the intersection of East Asian media studies and cultural history, this article investigates the forgotten effort to package and promote Three Girls, Asia’s first transnational girl group, by Columbia Records in collaboration with the Japanese Empire in the 1940s. I first examine the context from which Three Girls emerged by comparing two different “modes” of what I call the imperial media mix: the Nichigeki mode and the Manchuria mode in the 1930s. I then trace the debut and disbandment of Three Girls, highlighting the tensions between mass mobilization and mass entertainment, and explain how Japan’s imperial expansions both enabled and necessitated the production of a transnational girl group as part of its campaign to promote pan-Asianism throughout the Empire in the 1940s. Finally, I turn to a third “mode” of media mix, one that is based on Ri Kōran’s individual star image. Specifically, I analyze how Ri Kōran—the central member of Three Girls—became her own Ri Kōran media mix, exceeding and even conflicting with the imperial media mix that produced her. Illuminating the triangulation of empire, girl group, and media industry, this article’s contribution is two-fold: (1) For media studies, it expands media mix theory and context by approaching Three Girls (and Ri Kōran) as the concretization of a complex web of technological, social, and cultural relations; (2) For East Asian cultural history, it examines Three Girls both as a historically bounded phenomenon and as a prototype of Asia’s transnational idol groups that have become global sensations today.

The nine-episode Korean-language series Squid Game became a global sensation immediately upon its premiere on Netflix in September 2021. The show’s popularity and critical acclaim in the anglophone world had been unprecedented for a non-English series. This review provides a symptomatic reading of Squid Game’s global success and a short analysis of its visual appeal. It also explores the tension between Squid Game’s smooth and flat aesthetics that enables the show to travel and the culturally specific contexts it references. 

This chapter discusses the space-clearing flânerie of post-1997 Hong Kong literature and culture as it appears in Dung Kai-cheung’s novel Atlas: The Archeology of an Imaginary City and Hong Kong indie band My Little Airport’s music. Drawing from postcolonial theory, it rethinks flânerie in post-1997 Hong Kong as an act of worlding. Comparing the lexical flânerie in Dung Kai-cheung’s Atlas and the sonic flânerie in My Little Airport’s songs as two ways of worlding Hong Kong, it continues the inquiries of the formation of a post-handover Hong Kong subjectivity in the field of Hong Kong studies. This chapter demonstrates how the flâneurs and flâneuses of contemporary Hong Kong, in their continuous strolling as an attempt to clear themselves a space in the post-handover city, open the possibilities of belonging in pluralistic ways with a new Hong Kong subjectivity that is both local and cosmopolitan.