Free Global Futures in East Asia: Youth, Nation, and the New Economy in Uncertain Times (Contemporary Issues in Asia and Pacific) by Unknown Page B

in “advanced” countries, New Kujiang has been inscribed with new meanings through reinterpretations of official narratives and transformed through the actions of those who work and shop there. Contradicting views of what a “place you go for shopping” should be like remain contested on a daily basis.
    Flows and Connections
    In Taiwan’s official place-making projects, internationalization is represented by a modern streetscape characterized by tidiness and legibility. To the planning agencies, internationalization means the (re)writing of a cosmopolitan history and the engineering of a space modeled after other places in “advanced” countries. To Yuki, internationalization means constructing local difference to compete in the global market. For many merchants and shoppers, New Kujiang is internationalized not in the sense that it physically resembles Euro-American shopping streets but in the sense that these distant locales are evoked through imagination as well as material objects to build a different kind of place. Lian displays a multilingual menu on his pushcart and is proud of having a few Canadian expatriates as his regular customers. Shops put up English or Japanese business signs, and there are shops named “Tokyo” (
Dongjing
), “L.A.,” “Queen’s Boulevard” (
Huanghou Dadao
of Hong Kong), and “London” (
Lundun
). A poster outside of a curio shop in NKSM showed a portrait of John Wayne with the word
Texas
printed on it. Next to the poster were small postcards with signs from Route 66. A few corridors away, a shop specialized in merchandise associated with Japanese popular music displayed pictures of Japanese boy bands on its windows and hung posters from its ceilings. Posted on the door were ads for the latest paraphernalia from concert tours around Japan. In this cacophony and juxtaposition of “other” places, New Kujiang emerges as a place where imaginaries of local Taiwan and the global market are constructed and where different actors envision Taiwan’s place in the global map of fashionable places and commodities.
    Shop owner Sam was one of the earliest occupants of NKSM. He was in his late twenties when he began his business selling posters and photographs. Originally, he carried photo books of Japanese pop stars because they were popular among the general public. But Sam quickly realized that there was an emerging market for Japanese pop culture and turned his poster shop into an “idol shop,” offering a wider range of items. 20 As an “unauthorized intermediary” (Nakano 2002) who mediated the flow of Japanese pop cultural products before transnational record companies and television stations began to formally explore the market, Sam was able to establish his business before there was much competition. Twenty years later, he owns three shops in Kaohsiung, two of them located in New Kujiang. Sam takes frequent trips to Tokyo and Osaka to obtain posters, pictures, concert merchandise, and products endorsed by Japanese pop stars. He sees his shops as places for the exchange of information and welcomes young customers to linger in the shops, watch DVDs, and chat with salesclerks. As they learn about new releases and the latest gossip, Sam also learns about new trends in what his youthful customers are looking for.
    While not a big fan of Japanese pop music, Sam nonetheless admires the “business brain” (
shengyi naodai
) of the Japanese. Japanese products, he argues, are of much better quality than Taiwanese ones. Taiwan is an imitator of Japanese fashion, and there is always a slight time lag between the two. This ordering of Taiwan and Japan at different temporalities reflects not only the colonial legacy in Taiwan that identifies Japan as the symbol of modernity and technological superiority (Cheng 2002; Iwabuchi 2002, 2004) but also the rise of Japan’s “soft power” in the global popular cultural market (Allison 2006, 2009; Befu and Guichard-Anguis 2001; Chua 2004).