KCON gathers 68,000 fans in Japan

The K-pop fanbase in Japan has become increasingly younger, while Korean life style is further permeating the neighboring country.

According to CJ E&M, one of the largest content providers in South Korea, over the weekend, roughly 68,000 people visited the KCON event held at Makuhari Messe, a large-sized convention center in Chiba city of Japan. As one of the biggest global Korean culture events, KCON has been hosting every year in different continents including Americas, European and Asia since its launch in 2012.

The number of spectators gathered this time was around 4.5 times as large as the audience that the first KCON mobilized in 2015, when roughly 15,000 fans made the visit. The KCON 2018 presented various programs, such as a cooking class for “dakgalbi,” a spicy stir-fried chicken popular with Japanese, a Korean lesson applicable to social media vernacular, as well as Korean cosmetics and fashion clinics.

The focus of this year’s KCON was to “spread the Third Korean Wave.” The term is used to describe the latest popularity trend of Korean culture, which is expanding into cosmetics, fashion, video games, and webtoons mainly for teenagers, following the phenomenon’s initial epicenters from dramas and pop music. As a sideline event, a convention for small-and medium-sized enterprises was prepared, and 35 out of the 50 companies that participated were beauty and cosmetics companies.


imi@donga.com