And then something even more unexpected happened. The country, which throughout its history had always been on the receiving end of culture—from China, from Japan, from the United States—became, almost overnight, a leading exporter of pop culture to the rest of Asia. From Japan to China, Vietnam to Malaysia, the "Korean Wave" of music, television dramas, movies, online computer games, and fashion has been winning fans across the East: Seoul is now an arbiter of cool. When Bae Yong Joon, the South Korean star of the popular soap opera Winter Sonata, arrived at his Tokyo hotel in November 2004, hundreds of middle-aged Japanese women—not a socioeconomic segment usually associated with rowdiness—rushed his car, resulting in a ten-minute mini-riot. Ten of the women were taken to the hospital with bruises and sprains. And in America, the Korean pop star Rain was recently named one of Time's one hundred most influential people.

Korean filmmakers, meanwhile, have been plumbing the peninsula's modern history for subjects that were long off-limits. Movies such as 2000's Joint Security Area focused on South Korea's relations with North Korea, just as the enduring Cold War on the peninsula began to thaw. Yet another taboo was broken during my stay in Seoul, when The King and the Clown, a movie about a love triangle among three men, produced a cultural moment similar to that of Brokeback Mountain in the United States. Though it was one of the first movies to deal with homosexuality in South Korea, it quickly became the highest-grossing film in the country's history. And South Korean horror auteurs such as Kim Ji Woon, director of 2003's A Tale of Two Sisters, and Park Chan Wook, creator of the Oldboy films—along with their Japanese counterparts—are the current obsession of Hollywood producers and studio heads.

Much of the credit for the country's cultural renaissance must be given, oddly, to the South Korean government, which has offered the kind of support that artists elsewhere would envy. New art and film departments have opened at universities across the country, and laws require theaters to screen domestic films at least 146 days a year. But the bigger reason is that the country's democratization has led to the unshackling of the tightly controlled entertainment industry, which can finally express decades of pent-up creative energy.

You could find this new creativity, and excitement about its manifestation, all across Seoul. Late one afternoon, in a dimly lit, book-lined Hongdae basement café called Yri, I met Elena Jung, a twenty-nine-year-old singer with the pop band Cosmos. Jung, bright in a turquoise jacket, has been performing in Hongdae clubs for about eight years, and says that the music and dance scene has matured and grown more diverse, especially in the last three or four years. "Hongdae is more dynamic and lively now," she told me, lighting a cigarette. "Koreans are looking for new things."