Within recent years we’ve collectively watched the growth of orientalism and East Asian media in the western world. What is orientalism? Orientalism refers to the style, artifacts, and traits of the people in Asia, which we’ve seen a recent growth in popularity and representation globally. One of these economic industries is the South Korean music genre k-pop, which has shown growth in the past 20 years to an international billion-dollar industry. K-pop put South Korea in a steady growth in economics. The most famous groups of international stranded are BTS, bringing a reported 3.9 billion dollars per year to South Korea’s 1.8 trillion dollar economy. In other countries such as Japan, anime, another word for the Japanese style of animation, is a booming industry. Shows like One Piece, Jujutsu Kaizen, and Demon Slayer are just some of these extremely popular shows. This style of film brings in an estimated 40 billion plus dollars to Japan’s 5 trillion dollar economy and is a popular reason many people travel to Japan. 

 How does this affect the western world? In the last 10 years, East Asian entertainment productions has seen amazing growth making billions of dollars. A big reason for this is modern technology apps like YouTube have spread orientalism in entertainment. Some of the most monumental songs are Psy’s hit Gangnam style, which has 4.6 billion views and a BTS song Dynamite which broke the record for most simultaneous views for a Youtube premiere these both opened the window for international K-Pop fans. No matter what your opinions are on Asia, it’s no doubt that the influence of Asia will only be growing from music, fashion, beauty, and media, within the world. Japanese “J-beauty” and Korean “K-beauty” are rising from Asia to the world. These trends in Asia have spread from East Asian countries to western interface as trends from TikTok, a Chinese owned application, created many new fans in the beauty industry.

This growing era of popularization in East Asian media and cultural influences in the western world/ international industries, is still growing and inspiring further groups of people in the future. With an estimated $92 billion dollar expansion globally in the Asian-pacific region’s economy these changes will spread trends, culture, and media through the western and international world.