Younha would be another great example of a korean artist who also crossed over to japan for awhile... she's fluent in japanese and has crazy piano skills
actually, i would say korean is more similar to japanese. both korean and japanese have an "alphabet", hangul and hiragana/katakana, but chinese on the other hand doesn't. (mandarin has ㄅㄆㄇㄈ, but memorizing characters is necessary once you get past the basic stages. sure japanese has kanji, but korean also has hanja (even though it might not be used as often as kanji is used in japanese) and they are both based off of chiense characters. and i think asian artists get their popularity spread around asia... japanese/korean artists are big in taiwan too....take rain for example... korean but a big superstar in all of asia... just not in the western half of world lol
