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.

Sure, but is there a Chinese or Japanese or Indonesian film or TV show you think just as many people around you know from the same time frame? And I mean, that's still anecdotal - what isn't anecdotal is that the upscale KaDeWe department store I live nearby in Berlin had a Korea week a while ago, and so on. And whose pop music export has flash mobs and dance troupes dancing to it in the streets of every major city for years now?

As for gaming, I think another good example is the celebrity of various Korean e-sports athletes. I assure you there's plenty of young kids who can name them.

In the end, my assertion is this: Right now, in terms of attention/popularity in Western pop culture (since we're relating to Neuromancer and fiction here), there's only one Asian country that is gaining at such a rate and is the most comparable to the attention Japan enjoyed in the time Neuromancer was written.

I would also readily say that the Korean Wave isn't nearly at the same levels als Japanmania was in the 80s, though. Actually, not sure - I think it both isn't and is also dwarving it at the same time, due to changes in how media is consumed directly vs. impressions by proxy. Depends on the metric.

Obviously there's also a lot of attention on China, but that's more related to economics and politics - although Liu Cixin's works as a scifi author would be a great and very topical example to the contrary! (There's other interesting comparisons to China to make, e.g. both had successful stretches in arthouse cinema with Wong Kar-Wai for example, but so far it's not really converted over to the mainstream for Chinese film.)

The recently popular Lost Ark is another video game by Korea.

I'm surprised you've never heard of the kpop groups BTS or Blackpink in Germany.