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Service.com slash podcasts. I'm Ron Amitter. I'm a historian of China and East Asia at Oxford University, but in this

series for the first time I've come to visit South, to find out how it's become this region's

silent cultural superpower, and why that matters to its people.

As Polster Kim Jyune told me, South Koreans still vividly remember how powerless Whilst the

Kym Giyun told me, South Koreans still vividly remember how powerless their country once was.

Korea was always kind of the periphery.

The ally of the United States, but basically considered to be a little brother and it used to be the

colony of the Japan and a long time ago is it used to be a sort of a defect to colony of China so Korean people have kind of inferior

feeling toward the superpowers and always wanted to be the mainstream of the

global power particularly in the cultural wave well this is the first time that Korea start to export our

culture and it's a really good feeling actually and we are popular outside

the Korea. Movies have played a big role in this, but the genre that's really conquered Asia and beyond is K-pop.

Kim Jeeun though questions how Korean it really is.

K-pop is not really a Korean culture, it's a Western culture if you really want to

show and demonstrate the Korean culture to the foreigners and other people then you have to

delve into what really had and maintain so far.

So they are going back to traditional.

And traditional doesn't have to be boring.

True, K-pop isn't a million miles from Western pop music, but it is somehow distinctive, slicker, sharper, more overwhelming.

Its performers train for years and compete for the chance to debut.

...