Labubus, TikTok and KPop Demon Hunters: how childhood went east Asian

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:30How East Asian Culture Conquered Modern Childhood.

0:40You guys look fantastic. I look like a floating head in the darkness, which is what I am right now, actually. It's atmospheric. Yeah. All right. I think we're good. I think we're good. Let's go ahead and... Jeff Yang is a journalist and the author of A Pop History of Asian America. He's in Hong Kong when we speak on video call, and he is a foremost expert on the region. So naturally, my first question is about one of the most inescapable trends of 2025. Can you start by telling me about labubus? Of course. The labubus. We call her labubu. All my friends are like labubus. The soft-bodied, vinyl-faced fluffball taking the market by...

1:23Labubus are these odd-shaped troll doll-type creatures. So, Elika, hello everyone, it's me and Amber here today unboxing Labubus. A real Labubu? I wonder which one's inside. With quirky expressions on their faces. They can be colorful, they can be one color, they can be fluffy, they can be rough. They began as just kind of a collectible item, but rapidly turned into a must-have fashion accessory. In the UK, these furry friends can go from anywhere between 13 to 50 pounds, with rarer additions fetching up to hundreds on resale sites. And then into kind of an addiction. An addiction. Yeah. I had a fever and it was the LaBubu fever and the only solution to feeling better was more LaBubu.

2:10They've become the subject of late night show monologues. They're not even cute. It's just a Teletubby on meth. Shows like South Park and so forth have done episodes talking about La Boo Boo. So stinking cute, but it's really rare. Are you sure it's on a knockoff? Yeah, I checked. Suck it, skank. Stupid spot.

2:35But La Boo Boo's in some ways are kind of just the tip of the iceberg of the Asian pop culture explosion. Because this isn't just about which plushie toy is most popular right now, but how, from matcha to manga, Studio Ghibli to bobble tea, East Asian culture is shaping what childhood looks like. Now we're in a world where kids are growing up not just with Mickey Mouse and Frozen and Moana, They're also watching anime and they're watching K-pop and they're watching K-pop Demon Hunters. And those new things, they are changing the character and tastes of global childhood. So Gen Z, younger people around the world, Asian pop culture is mainstream culture.

3:24It is what the global generation of young people today have grown up with. And that's so very different from prior generations before.

3:37From The Guardian, I'm Nosheen Iqbal. Today in Focus, how Asia replaced America as the world's centre of culture.

3:53Jeff, you have East Asian roots, you grew up in America. What did your cultural diet look like as a child and what was big in the playground? What were the big cultural trends of the day? Yeah, I mean, you know, they were talking about what was on TV.

4:11You know, the AT and... Once upon a time, there were three little girls who went to the police academy. Charlie's Angels and... Wednesday, Wednesday, happy days. Thursday, Friday, happy days. They were talking about happy days. I mean, America was at the pinnacle of pop culture export and domination on a global basis. Sylvester Stallone. This time he's fighting for his life. If you thought about movies, you thought about Hollywood. You're going to need a bigger boat. If you thought about television, you thought about what was on network TV. It really was something that America wore on its sleeve as a soft power.

4:49Yeah. That it exerted everywhere else in the world. We came, we saw, we kicked its ass.

4:59I think that from the 80s to the 2000s, it really felt like an era of American pop culture exceptionalism. America was the center of the world economically, but also culturally. And when you thought about global culture, almost all of it was in one or other sense defined by American trends, American tastes. But I think in some ways, being Asian in America growing up in the 80s and 90s, it felt a little bit like having a preview of what was going to come next. And when do you think that total dominance of American culture began to fragment a little, particularly for children? Well, I mean, I really do think a lot of it was the rise of digital content and the Internet.

5:44All of a sudden you start to see a lot of these things available just simply because streamers, right? like entities like Netflix and Hulu and Disney Plus, they found themselves in a need to both serve a much more diverse population on a global basis, but they also were simply looking for content. And I think the big pivot point really was COVID. What you started to see was a shifting in the balance because Hollywood was shut down. There was not a lot of new content being created in America itself. and people started to sort of venture out of their comfort zones to engage stuff that they might have not necessarily tried to sample before.

6:31Once you got to the end of your Hollywood feed, right, what was next? Well, you know, there's this stuff over here. It looks interesting. I do have to read it, but you know what? Maybe because it's the pandemic and I can't go outside People got the subtitles. I'll deal with the subtitles. Let's see how it goes. And people did. And all of a sudden, we started to see this gigantic spike in people consuming content in Japanese, in Korean, even in Chinese, in South Asian languages, all because it was being made available in subtitled form on these major streaming platforms. And being the click onto that next suggestion takes you just deeper and deeper down this sort of Asian pop culture rabbit hole.

7:13All of a sudden it felt like content from Asia and content from Hollywood was sort of on a level playing field. Amazing. Unbelievable. I'm a foreign language filmmaker, so I have a translator here. Please understand.

7:34Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films. It's interesting because I thought you might point to specific phenomenons like prior to that, like Pokemon and the many revivals since or Gangnam Style, you know, heralding like this new wave of K-pop then followed. But so when it does come to that broader wave of K-pop, K-dramas, is there a tipping point outside of Netflix and COVID? Well, I mean, when you think about it, right, in earlier waves of exposure to Asian pop culture, there was always an attempt in some ways to mediate it.

8:17When I saw for the first time Japanese cartoons on American TV, right, they dubbed it. Oh, Trixie, please stop talking. I'm trying to figure something out. So there was in English. You didn't have to read it. You didn't hear the Asian languages in your head. Right. But they also changed the definitions of things.

8:45They turned Japanese sweets into donuts. These donuts are great. Jelly filled are my favorite. Nothing beats a jelly filled donut. They translated the characters' names into Anglo names. And that sense of having to try to mediate the Asian-ness, to not make it too obviously exotic or different, was something that I think was very much predominant in how Asian pop culture was served up in the 80s, 90s and aughts. And then, of course, you mentioned Gangnam Style, right? Gangnam Style was a gigantic hit, but it wasn't a hit because people thought, oh, this is a great song. It was originally seen as this novelty, something that was so strange and weird that people initially just embraced it as a joke.

9:31So I think the difference and the thing that the mainstream that occurred after COVID really did was it made these Asian pop culture phenomena feel normal and ordinary and not like something that had to be either hidden and explained away or treated like an exotic object of weird appeal, if you will. Well, let's talk about that for a second, because that is definitely how it would have been filtered out when I was a child. But what do you think it is that has made all of this stuff so cool and appealing for little kids now? If it's not the exoticism, it's not the sort of otherness of it. I think it's just that kids these days, to use that phrase, see otherness in a very different way than I think prior generations.

10:18I still remember, I think a lot of immigrants and especially Asian immigrants have what you'd call the lunchbox moment, right? Where if you bring leftovers to your school in the cafeteria, you'd open it up and everybody would peer at you, hold their noses. Oh, what is that disgusting thing you're doing? These days, you've got kids who would gladly trade their PB &Js for whatever you're bringing from your Chinese dinner the night before. And that more maybe sophisticated or more complex palette, it really does come from growing up in more diverse societies with a much greater exposure to just kind of the wonder of difference.

11:02That's what I think has really shifted. How influential is social media in this context? And I'm talking specifically about what children are seeing. What does it look like for them? I mean, I think that if you're a child and or let's say an adolescent or a teen and you're on social media today, not only is it impossible to not encounter Asian popular culture as as kind of a central fodder for everybody's feeds. It's also the language people are using to interact with one another. People are sharing clips. People are sharing memes. People are sharing reactions and so forth drawn from television shows and music videos and cartoons and the like.

11:44And more often than not, for young people, the things that they're clipping and sharing are coming from Asia. So the algorithm is just serving it up in the same way that I keep getting like noodle content, which actually, I guess, is the same thing. I think we all keep on getting noodle content these days. But yeah, absolutely. And it doesn't hurt, of course, that the fastest growing and largest new social media platform is itself an Asian product, right? I mean, TikTok is a Chinese social media platform. It began with a lot of Chinese content as a result. So you are talking about both the medium and the message coming from the same place these days.

12:22But without taking away the absolute joy and positivity there is to be gained by broadening our children's understanding of this whole world around them, there is also a sense that how do you maintain the culture and resist flattening it for Western consumption? How do you keep it real? One of the things which I feel is interesting about the fact that this kind of cultural engagement is occurring at a younger and younger age is that one of the things it does is it guides you to a place where you actually start learning history and you start delving into the culture of the people around you and not just their products.

13:02I think that the fact that kids are embracing language, I think the fact that kids are seeking to actually travel to Asian countries, these are all things that take it beyond simply, oh, this is cool stuff I'm watching on TV or seeing on TikTok, to these are real people and these are real cultures and communities. And if I want to be a part of them, there are things I have to learn and kind of a more respectful and humble approach I have to take to become a part of these communities instead of simply just consuming them.

13:42Jeff, if you look specifically at, say, South Korea's dominance of this cultural conversation, it didn't happen by accident, did it? I mean, can you tell me about the way its culture has been exported as a product? So this is one of the things which is remarkable. K-pop and its broad infusion into global culture isn't entirely an accident. In fact, one would argue that it's actually one of the most successful political campaigns for international soft power that we've ever seen in history. Markets collapsed and riots erupted. Hit hard by the Asian financial crisis, South Korea's government asked the IMF for a$58 billion bailout.

14:27Basically, after there was a sharp financial crisis, Korea was essentially defaulting on a bunch of sizable loans. It was a shock for a population that had been enjoying a booming economy just the year before. And there was a demand for austerity in the Korean market, which led a lot of people to lose their jobs, a lot of companies to go bankrupt, and a lot of senior executives to fall on their swords and to quit. You cannot stand this kind of attacks on the lives of the people. And in a period when Korea was trying to right the economic ship for itself, there was a recognition of two things occurring.

15:07The first was that Korea, which had been basically a heavy manufacturing entity doing a lot of building of cars and forging of iron and things like that, couldn't just succeed on a global basis by exporting hard stuff. It actually had to start capturing hearts and minds and changing the way people saw Korea in the world. So the government decided to actually really invest in popular culture.

15:38We're talking about billions of dollars being invested across a wide range of different industries. Pop music or K-pop as it's known, it's popular drama shows and it's delicious food. Everything from music, movies, TV, gaming. In 2007, Korea's game market exceeded$4 billion, with the online game sector growing more than 20 % annually. And this sort of young group of creators were emerging at exactly the same time as this was happening. And they were, you know, bringing this innovation and creativity to Korea that had not been seen before. So you had the government investing huge amounts of money in what was called Hallyu, this Korean wave.

16:15But you also had some stuff that was being put on screen and being put into the world that was unlike anything that had been seen before. Right. Korea decided that in order to be sort of a first world cultural nation, it really had to advance across all of these different industries at once. Very rarely have you seen just a lockstep collaboration between industry and government with huge amounts of money being put into all these industries at once and then kind of presenting them together. This is Korea on a plate. This is Korea on a screen. I'm giving it all to you at once.

17:07Jeff, let's look at a specific phenomenon and the success, say, that Netflix had with Squid Game.

17:18Which became their most watched show ever. And now with K-pop Demon Hunters, which has broken record after record and is just simply massive. I like K-pop Demon Hunters. Tell me about why you think that is. When you look at something like Squid Game, I think for a lot of American audiences, it was not like anything they'd ever seen before. It was a show that both had a very dark but impactful social message about inequality, about this feeling of being manipulated by the wealthy. It just felt like such a strange and maybe not as distorted as we think mirror of our own existences. And then take me, please, to K-pop Demon Hunters.

18:07What and why? So K-pop Demon Hunters is brilliant and fascinating. And I have to say, I think maybe no phenomenon has grown quite as rapidly on a global basis, nor has it been so deeply penetrated across different generations, age groups as K -pop demon hunters.

18:33and it's it's kind of remarkable because this this movie this animated movie set in korea brought to life by korean immigrants and asian americans asian canadians in north america has truly become this global cultural mainstay have you heard this song yes okay have you watched the film yeah like five times in a way that i don't think anybody believed was going to happen not the creators not netflix and not sony the studio that originally developed and created the animation itself it's like something upbeat that just makes you just really happy and like i cried watching the whole film because it just made me feel so great and i think that part of the reason why it's it's become so incredibly popular is not just because it is this confection of remarkable music, just so catchy, so incredibly well-performed.

19:26I mean, the kids love it. And the kids love it, and they have it on repeat. It is the Frozen of our era, right? But it's also something that has become a multi-generational thing. Adults and children are watching K-pop Demon Hunters together. They both know the lyrics by heart, including the Korean lines, right? Yeah. And I think that really is kind of like the next level, how Asian pop culture is mainstreaming. It's no longer something that was pushed to the fringes and was kind of a cult and novelty. It is something which just has become universal. Yeah, part of the dominant culture. And what do you think, in terms of what we're talking about, what do you think has been the broader cultural societal impacts of all of that from Los Angeles, where you normally live, to London, where I am?

20:17I mean, I think that in a lot of ways, the pervasiveness of Asian pop culture, it really shows the way that the world is tilted on its axis. We really are looking at a time when the biggest markets in the world, the largest audiences in the world are in Asia. Asia has a greater degree of influence as creators and as manufacturers than ever in history. I would argue that no single nation is ever going to have the kind of cultural dominance that the United States has had over the last century or so. And I mean, even now, Korea seems to be reigning ascendant in popular culture. But the biggest film in animated history is actually a Chinese film called Nezatu, right?

21:07Which has made$2 billion around the world, continues to be watched on streaming platforms voraciously. People are still just discovering it in Western countries.

21:21coming up why influencing childhood culture matters for world politics

21:37jeff you've given me a really kaleidoscopic panorama i guess of culture and where it is now and it's all really fun and it's inspiring but of course i'm going to ask you about the politics because when it comes to soft power which is what you've described here which is what has been exported in some ways or is being leveraged why is it so important i think that soft power is critical for a couple of reasons we're in a world where as much as people still love asian stuff they don't necessarily love asian people all the time we saw that during you know the pandemic right Yeah. So the first step towards humanizing people is just to see them as as aspirational and as real.

22:20When you actually see people on screen and fall in love with them. Right. When you when you see people as heroes, as protagonists, then it's a lot harder to mistreat them in real life. It's a lot harder to dehumanize them in real life. And so we're starting to see a lot of people just actively seeking greater representation, greater diversity in America. But in geopolitics, too, South Powers is equally critical. I mean, we've always known that for global rivalry, Hollywood at one point during the many wars we've had with Asia was engaged to create propaganda. Should Fu Manchu put that mask across his wicked eyes and take that scimitar into his bony cruel hands, all Asia rises.

23:11He'll declare himself Genghis Khan come to life again. And he'll lead hundreds of millions of men to sweep the world. To inject into people's perceptions of Asia the kinds of stereotypes that we still see today. In 30 seconds, I got to call the police. All the time of disturbance. I cannot sleep. Now I think you're starting to see Asian countries, now that they have the ability to create cultural endings of their own, they're trying to push back on some of those stereotypes by saying, actually, we're kind of cool. But when it comes comparatively to the US and say the 80s and 90s and so on, and there's this real pop culture hegemony, it's not just about Coca-Cola and the Lion King.