Interest in anime, gaming and K-pop is fuelling a boom in Korean and Japanese university degrees that is helping to revive modern languages departments struggling with falling enrolments.
Acceptances to study Korean more than trebled from 50 to 175 between 2012 and 2018, while Japanese places grew by 71% in the same period, according to a report published this year by the University Council of Modern Languages (UCML). More students now study Korean than Russian, and more take Japanese than Italian, the report shows.
Experts who spoke to the Guardian said this was due to the popularity of east Asian culture – in particular K-pop and J-pop, Japanese video games, anime and popular films such as Parasite, and series such as the violent survival drama Squid Game – which has been boosted by their accessibility on platforms such as Netflix and Spotify.
According to Netflix data, the South Korean series Squid Game is comfortably its most viewed show of all time, with 1.65bn hours of the series streamed in the first four weeks after its release date.
The rising popularity of Korean…
