This has been completely under the radar but Korea has been very aggressively pushing it's culture for years. There are tons of funds available for people that

This has been completely under the radar but Korea has been very aggressively pushing it's culture for years. There are tons of funds available for people that study Korean history, the Korean language, and write books that positively portray Korea. It's all part of some very intense nationalism and a comically inflated sense of self importance One particularly hilarious example is they managed to get some remote tribe in Indonesia to use their alphabet to write their language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Dissemination https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hangul#Dissemination As far as I can tell Korea is definitely the new-cool in the rest of Asia. Japan is kinda seen as very last year/decade. All the trendy stuff is coming out of Korea. I wonder if Taiwan will ever be a cultural hub. They seem to have all the right ingredients