By Mark Buckton - Taipei Twenty-five years ago, the notion that the centre of gravity in global pop music might shift away from Los Angeles, London or any of a number of Western capitals might have sounded far-fetched. Yet today, the evidence is unmistakable: first Japanese pop, then Korean pop, has turned East Asia into the most potent cultural export engine of the early twenty-first century. In terms of reach, fan loyalty and the all-important concept of soft power, neither the United States nor Europe has produced anything to match it in decades. Japan In the late 1990s and early 2000s, J-p...