and has since attracted a lot of academic attention, because Japan is the first modernized or westernized country in Asia and Japanese popular culture has been dominant in many East Asian countries for several decades. Korea is no exception; its popular culture has also been heavily influenced by Japanese pop culture. Now at least some members of the Japanese population are fascinated with Korean popular culture.
Japanese popular culture, however, has been popular since 1970 in a few East Asian countries such as Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore. At first, audiences of Japanese popular culture in these countries were limited to a minority of enthusiasts but became widespread in the 1990s, especially among young people. At that time, the Japanese cultural industry, which had been mostly inward-looking because its domestic market was large enough to support it, began to search for overseas cultural markets.
Concurrently, a few Korean popular singers gained fame in Japan even before 1998, and some Korean films, such aswere well-received by the Japanese audience in the early 2000s . A series of events, including the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games and the 2002 FIFA Korea-Japan World Cup, also helped change Korea’s image in Japan, and the otherwise sore relationship between the two countries turned into a more friendly one .