Not gonna lie, it's both interesting, enlightening, and entertaining watching yall discussing Zoomers and Zoomerisms. As a Zoomer myself I enjoy watching the elders here give their wisdom
The discussion of the "Japanifcation" of American culture is interesting, though. I think the excitement over J-pop has mostly died down here, and has been completely replaced by K-pop. I couldn't tell you specifically
why Korean pop culture has overtaken Japanese culture here, particularly with Nintendo, Pokemon, Dragon Ball, and ofc the J-Pop fad 5-10ish years ago, but it has. I think the attraction to it is logical. K-pop and J-pop is pop music in the most perfect sense - sleek sounding techno-instrumentals and outfits, mini-storylines for every group, young and attractive men and women that are essentially made in a factory to look, act, talk, and sing almost the same, but each are given artificial personality quirks that they have to follow. The music videos and concerts are highly-well produced. It's all as clean and as sleek as possible.
K-pop and J-pop have even swallowed traditionally anti-capitalist and anti-corporate aesthetics and genres like rap and heavy-metal. This is a pretty good video on the
"idol" and anti-idol" movements in Japan, and how the anti-idol movement has become almost as well-polished, suave, and centrally controlled and manufactured as the regular idol movements.
It's an interesting contrast to the type of mumble-rap that is now popular. Which by its nature is supposed to not be clean or sleek like K-pop is. It has that depression hedonia vibe to it. A lot of it is smooth and autotuned, but is incredibly slow and low-key, which is on purpose. It sounds like getting drowsy on Xanax.
Now the overlap between say, Post Malone and BTS fans is not gonna be that big, but I've def seen a lot of k-pop girls I know be fans of people like Frank Ocean who don't have the clean-cut corporate appeal that the k-pop groups have.