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Blogpost 4: "Hallyu in the Philippines"

Before, when K-Pop idols come to the Philippines, only few people know about it, and the media doesn't even cover it. Like during the 60th Korea-Philippines Friendship Festival last 2009, when the groups SHINee and Mighty Mouth went here to perform, I couldn't find any local media coverage of this event. The only coverage I found was from the South Korean news channel Arirang.

Lately though, I've been hearing lots of reports about South Korean celebrities and artists coming to the Philippines on the local news and on social networking sites. For example, when the world-famous boyband Super Junior came over for their Super Show 3 concert, it was shown on TV Patrol and MYX (the local MTV).

Apart from the news, another noticeable presence of Hallyu on Philippine television are the K-Dramas, also known as Koreanovelas, that have slowly replaced the Spanish telenovelas that used to air in the afternoons. The local networks dub the episodes in Filipino, as opposed to simply subbing them, before broadcasting them to the public. The most popular titles here are the Endless Love series (specially Winter Sonata) and Boys Over Flowers which is a Korean adaptation of the Japanese manga Hana Yori Dango, and the Taiwanese drama Meteor Garden.

In the book entitled "The Korean Wave: A New Pop Culture Phenomenon" written by the Korean Culture and Information Service, they provided a copy of the statistics of a popular site where you could watch K-Dramas online for free named DramaFever.com.

These charts show that Korean dramas are popular not just among Asia but also in America.


More and more hallyu idols are visiting the country for fan meets, concerts, and album signings. All these we can thank miss Happee Sy and PULP Magazine for.

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