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Hong Kong protests
This Week in AsiaPolitics

K-pop’s top awards show MAMA to skip protest-hit Hong Kong for Japan’s Nagoya

  • The Mnet Asian Music Awards has been held in Hong Kong every year for the past eight years, but this time the event will take place in Nagoya
  • The move comes as several event organisers have given Hong Kong a miss, as thousands continue to take to the streets to protest against the government

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K-pop group BTS receive the Album of the Year at last year’s awards. Photo: MAMA
Crystal Tai
For the first time in eight years, K-pop’s biggest awards show will not be staged in Hong Kong due to the city’s ongoing protests and instead take place solely in Nagoya, even as South Korea and Japan are engaged in their most bitter diplomatic row in recent history.
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CJ Entertainment and Merchandising (CJ ENM), the organiser behind the Mnet Asian Music Awards (MAMA), announced it would hold the event on December 4 at the Nagoya Dome, a stadium that seats an audience of up to 30,000.

The event has been held in Hong Kong since 2012, and in the past two years also had multi-city shows in Vietnam, Japan and South Korea. But this year, only one event will take place in Japan.

Korean news agency Yonhap, in reporting the event date, suggested the organiser was giving Hong Kong a miss because of the city’s increasingly violent protests, which are entering their 16th week.

But CJ ENM in its statement only addressed the Japan-South Korea trade row and said: “The consensus was that civil and cultural exchange should be separated from political issues and they should continue.”

Several event organisers have skipped out on Hong Kong and cancelled events or taken them elsewhere as thousands continue to take to the streets to protest against the government.

The movement was a reaction to an extradition bill that would allow the city to send suspects to jurisdictions it did not have an extradition arrangement with, including mainland China. With the bill now scrapped, those at the helm of the movement have demanded amnesty for those arrested, an independent probe into police use of force, and universal suffrage.

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