Thanks! I do think there's a shift there from niche audience to much more significant mainstream attention (which can of course be fleeting, which was also kind of built into the original argument: attention moves on from time to time ...). I do recall the time when movies like "Old-boy" were favorites among the arthouse track/festival circuit-going audience as well, but those were never the headlining poster in a multiplex the way that a "Parasite" now pulls off.

I lived and worked in Korea for a German tech company for a few years (since returned to Berlin), working on-site with customers, and since about 2018/19 there's a very significant uptick in other people showing an interest and asking me questions about the experience. This often takes the form of "my teenage daughter is a BTS fan and learning Korean" and things like that.

Korea and Japan have a lot of shared history and have deeply affected one another, and in particular the business culture and the economic structure of Korea are heavily informed by Japanese influence, yes.

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On a completely separate note, re interesting depictions of fantasy-Asia in a Western popculture/punk context: The headlining novel of the biopunk subgenre, Bacigalupi's "The Windup Girl", is set in a future Bangkok. I've never been to Thailand and can't comment on how ham-fisted or not this may be, but it was also an interesting step away from the Japanese culture-dominated vibes of speculative fiction pre-2000.