What each country actually reads about Korea

Korea reaches the top of one country's reading, and it is Japan

Read the second column before the fourth. The number of distinct articles that reach a country's daily list varies enormously — 30 for Peru against 4,617 for Japan — so a share computed over a short list is a far weaker measurement than one computed over a long list. Poland is the strongest of the zeroes: 807 distinct articles measured and not one of them Korean.

What Japan reads, in order — the top 15 of 63

Japanese Wikipedia is where Korean drama and K-pop are looked up by name — the actors, the groups, the series. Nowhere else in this table does that happen.

Nine countries where no Korean article reached the list at all

A zero here means no Korean article reached that country's daily most-read list on any of the days we measured. It does not mean nobody read one. Everything below a country's daily cut-off is invisible to this instrument, and for the countries with short lists that cut-off is high.

How we decided an article is Korean

By Wikidata property, never by name: citizenship (P27), country of origin (P495), or country (P17) equal to South Korea. That rule admits co-productions and dual nationals, where Korea is one country among several, and we name them rather than hide them: Human Vapor (Japan and Korea), Bugonia (United States, Korea, Ireland), Tomohiro Machiyama (Japan and Korea), Yoshihiro Akiyama (Japan and Korea), and Pom Klementieff (Canada, Korea, France).

What this is not

This is not the total reading of Korean articles in a country. It counts only what reached the daily most-read list.

Anything below a country's cut-off is unmeasured, not zero. We did not fill it in as zero.

The source rounds read counts to the nearest hundred (views_ceil), so these are not exact figures.

This is looking something up, not watching or buying it.

Turkey is missing entirely. All 14 days returned no data from the API, so Turkey has no row rather than a row of zeroes. 46 country-days were unavailable in total.

Where else this leads

Netflix charts say something quite different. Mexico held KPop Demon Hunters in its Top 10 for 51 weeks, longer than the United States — and no Korean article reached Mexico's most-read list once in the two weeks measured here. Watching and looking up are not the same act. On the acts themselves, attention halves two months after the peak.

Sources

Most-read articles per country — Wikimedia REST API,pageviews/top-per-country, all-access, daily, 2026-08-24 ~ 2026-09-06. Read counts arrive rounded to the nearest hundred and we do not present them as precise. Korean identification — Wikidata P27, P495, P17. Collected 7 September 2026, 09:58 KST.