It’s no secret that fads come and go in Japan as quickly as the little plates at a kaiten zushi joint [ha, how’s that for a bad simile?]. Something can be the the national obsession one minute and then completely forgotten the next, abandoned for some other bauble of empty stimulation providing fleeting entertainment to the masses who desperately seek an escape from the humdrumery of their vapid existence [sometimes I make up words, too!].

2004 will likely be remembered as the year when the “Kankoku Boom” rocked Japan. This sudden and overwhelming influx of all things Korean into Japanese popular culture — everything from movies to cuisine to hair styles — was precipitated by a phenomenon by the name of Fuyu no Sonata (Winter Sonata). Starring Bae Yong Joon and Choi Ji Woo, this serial television drama about an incestuous group of friends who play in the snow whilst declaring their love for one another quickly took Japan by storm, stealing the hearts and fancies of Japanese women and leaving Japanese men scratching their heads wondering what was so appealing about an effeminate Harry Potter lookalike with an ever-present vacuous smile.

The resulting mass hysteria was a Japanese marketing executive’s wet dream — a flurried frenzy of excessive consumerism, the likes of which had not been seen in Japan since footballer David Beckham had women licking toilet bowls in the wake of the 2002 World Cup. The Korea Boom is now all but over, but ironically, it did more to improve relations between Japan and South Korea in one year than had been achieved through diplomatic and economic means in the past 50 years.

Despite the fact that you couldn’t walk five feet in Japan during the past year without being exposed to Bae Yong Joon’s (or “Yon-sama,” as he was dubbed by the media) smiling mug, Judy had never expressed any interest in Winter Sonata nor any other aspects of the Korean fervor that had washed over the nation. However, last month, on a fateful visit to our local video store, Judy decided to see what all of the hype had been about and rented the first DVD of the series. In spite of my previous comments about TV dramas, in order to make an effort to partake in the interests of my wife-to-be, I committed to watching the series with her — in full (yes, I know what you’re thinking: BIG MISTAKE).

Like an inner city schoolboy after his first “free sample” from the neighborhood crack dealer, Judy quickly became hooked. Night after night was spent in front of the television, watching episode after episode of Korean actors wearing turtleneck sweaters and crying on cue. Of course, she wasn’t content with only watching the episodes dubbed in Japanese, she would also re-watch a number of select scenes in their original Korean, in order to savor the succulent voice of Yon-sama in all its glory (and also because Japanese dubbing is so craptastically bad, it makes me wonder whether I’m living in a country full of mentally deficient halfwits who need to rely on ridiculously exaggerated cartoon voices in order to tell the difference between men and women).

If any of you were wondering why I didn’t post very often during the month of February, now you know the reason. Yes, twenty episodes, each lasting over an hour, in the period of only a few weeks. Madness, I tell you, madness. Of course, the completion of the drama only fueled Judy’s obsession; she subsequently spent countless hours scouring the internet for pictures, articles, film clips and anything else she could find related to the drama. Thankfully, she seems to be coming back to reality little by little, however she recently started watching another drama starring Bae Yong Joon, entitled Hotelier. This time, however, I made the decision from the start not to watch it with her. That lesson has been sufficiently learned.

[Necessary disclaimer to prevent castration or other acts of vengeance at the hands of my fiancée, who probably won’t find the above amusing in any way whatsoever: Okay, honestly speaking, the drama wasn’t that bad, and I may have exaggerated Judy’s behavior just a little (althoughthatdoesn’tmeanthatanyoftheaboveisuntrue!).]