If, as journalist Jeff Yang said, the locus of pop culture in Asia shifted from Japan to Korea in the last ten years, how did Japan lose the throne?

Japan’s pop culture dominance is hurting, and not just in music. Sanrio, the Japanese company that invented Hello Kitty, had a sales slump from 1999 to 2010 and is trying to bring in new characters to reduce its reliance on Hello Kitty. The Japanese film industry suffered greatly from the decline of anime. As for the once dominant video gaming industry – well, it’s not a good sign when one of Japan’s top game designers (Keiji Inafune, creator of Mega Man) announces, “Our game industry is finished.”

South Korea is ready to rush in where Japan now fears to tread. Japan lost its place as a cultural tastemaker in Asia about ten or fifteen years ago. There are a number of reasons for this. First of all, Japanese pop culture, like the Japanese archipelago itself, is too isolated from the rest of the world to have remained a sustainable global influence. This is evidenced by the phrase Japan Galapagos syndrome – coined by the Japanese themselves – which compares Japan’s cell phone market to...

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