Look no further than Victor Milan's Black Dragon trilogy, he was the original 80s Japanophile. He played the Japanese Drac idea utterly straight, with all its masks and undercurrents. And he even predicted the aggressive rise of saccharine J-pop/K-pop girl bands at least a couple years before it was mainstream in Japan itself, God rest his soul.
In that sense he might have gone a step too far, since the original idea is that Dracs were people of all races playing at being Japanese.
Now its China, and as demonstrated in Firefly/Serenity we get cursing in Mandrin, ideograms, and more cultural stuff.
Not actual curses, but yeah.
When a country does the economic equivalent of leaping on the world stage, the mainstream media picks it up and runs with all the cultural stuff as well to fill headlines. Then if any cultural ambassadors are around, they start getting attention, even if they didnt before, and they lead everyone else into it. Its suddenly cool to be interested in that stuff, and people learn more about it and feature it in whatever they write.
Like what Game of Thrones did for medieval and dungeons and dragons stuff. ASOIAF fans leapt from the back rooms of FLGSs and secondhand bookstores (around the discount bins) into the limelight cause suddenly it was cool to think and talk about knights and dragons, it was no longer the domain of geeks.
Same thing.
Who knows what the next big thing will be. Maybe HBO will do a Georgian series next. Then there'll be this huge interest in Regency lifestyles and you find a lot of content coming out based around it, Davions suddenly acting like Jane Austen characters.
Then maybe I'll get hired by Buzzfeed to write about Napoleonic line and column tactics...