This book provides perspectives on relationships between Asian popular culture and a number of major socio-political issues and movements, including war responsibility, democratization, globalization, urbanization, modernization, and gender reconstruction. It consists of studies of film, music, television, anime, architecture, and computer-mediated communication in China, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, Malaysia, and Singapore. Themes include the relationships between popular culture and nationalism, Western social forces and cultural forms, regionalism, political change, modernity, traditionalism, and gender identity. The three sections of the book—memory, city, celebrity—are interlinked in their shared concern with the socio-political functions of popular culture.