According to Moran and Keane (2004), Taiwan opened its cultural borders in 1992, which allowed greater cultural flows into the region, in which Japanese genres and formats proved itself to be popular in the region. Of note were idol dramas, which were mentioned earlier. In particular, idol dramas based on Japanese manga (or comics, if you will) were particularly popular. This led to the localization of idol dramas.
An example to note is Meteor Garden, an idol drama based off Hana Yori Dango (or Boys over Flowers), a successful Japanese shoujo manga (comics which were written to appeal to girls.) It was a classic high school love story in which a poor girl fell in love with a selfish rich guy from the infamous clique F4. (Flower Four. Frankly, I wonder why a more masculine name wasn’t chosen.) Instead of writing the characters as Japanese, the drama was written in a Taiwanese context which made a few changes to the plot and the content itself.
For those non-Asians who have no idea what on earth I am talking about, this was all the rage when I was in secondary school:
The era when centre partings were still cool, and it was okay for men to rebond their hair.
Its popularity was good enough for the drama to inspire a serial and for the four male leads to form a boyband called F4. Apparently, Christine Sun says that they outrank Hello Kitty (which is also Japanese!) in terms of popularity among Taiwanese youth. Strangely enough, the Japanese later released a drama based off the same manga and it did not match the popularity of the Taiwanese one.
From here, we can see that the popularity of F4 was owed not only because it was a Japanese/Asian influence, but because it was localized to suit a local context.
