2021 Letter
&gt; They care instead more about cultural issues, which is why people have fond views of Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan<p>Apart from anime Japan is pretty much a cultural desert for us, Westerners, right now. Compare that to the excellent movies they made back in the &#x27;50 to the &#x27;70s, back then they were on the vanguard of world cinema together with the French (la Nouvelle Vague) and the Italians (Fellini, Antonioni, Pasolini), as Hollywood was on its dying bed.<p>Taiwan is even more a cultural wasteland, I can only name you Tsai Ming-liang (who apparently has just filmed his last ever feature film) and Hou Hsiao-hsien, other than that it&#x27;s only the idea of money and of making money that comes out of Taiwan.<p>South Korea is a little bit more complicated. There&#x27;s K-Pop that&#x27;s definitely a thing among younger people (I&#x27;m personally 40+ so I&#x27;m not in their target demographic) and there&#x27;s Korean TV dramas, which rival Turkish TV dramas in many parts of the world, but I would say that&#x27;s not probably what the author had in mind. SK used to have a very, very vibrant movie scene in the 2000s and a little in the early 2010s, its Busan film festival was one of the most interesting movie festivals in the world at some point, but for some reason or another all that is a thing of the past now.