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[article] J-pop's popularity grows silently
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Last Saturday, Melon-AX, a live music hall in Gwangjang-dong, eastern Seoul, was densely packed with 1,800 screaming fans of Japanese boy band ARASHI.
The most number of people that have ever gathered at the venue was celebrating the group's first official fan club meeting in Korea. The event, originally scheduled for 3 p.m., began nearly an hour later, but none of the girls, with their yearning eyes, seemed to care about the delay.
Finally the curtain rose, and the five members of the group bounded on the stage, greeted by shrill screaming from the fans. Meanwhile, one of the reporters seated in the front row of the second floor whispered: "Who the heck are these boys?"
Quietly but surely, Japanese pop musicians have been winning the hearts of young Koreans. The quintet - with well over 100,000 Korean fans in eight different fan clubs - is definitely in the frontline, but they are not the only ones.
Goto Maki, a former member of girl group Morning Musume, who visited the country earlier this month, has more than 130,000 enthusiastic "official" Korean fans registered with her fan club. Both ARASHI and Goto are scheduled to have their first concerts here in November (ARASHI on Nov. 11 and 12, and Maki on Nov. 19).
Another young, sexy female star, Koda Kumi, visited the city of Gwangju last Friday for the Third Asia Song Festival, exciting legions of her fans at the event.
"We were so surprised to see so many Korean fans coming to see us so early in the morning," said Ohno Satosh, the leader of ARASHI, looking back on their short visit to Incheon International Airport on July 31, which attracted some 2,000 fans.
Until now, Japanese entertainers have been working on becoming household names in Korea, rather than trying to earn benefits from their album sales. The situation, however, will be totally different once J-pop stars are allowed to sing and chat on local television shows, in their own language.
"It seems like, while we are blowing our own horns about the unprecedented success of Korean cultural products in Asia, Japanese pop culture has been accepted as part of a mainstream youth culture here," Chung Se-hoon, a graduate student of Kyung Hee University, told The Korea Herald.
"Our trade surplus with Japan in the pop music market can be reversed at any moment," pop columnist Kim Jung-hoon said in an interview.
So why do Korean teenagers go wild for Japanese boy bands like ARASHI, when there are so many boy bands of our own such as Shinhwa and TVXQ, who are as attractive as (and undisputedly taller than) their Japanese rivals?
"They know how to take care of their fans," said Park Bo-kyung, a high school girl at the fan meeting, of her idol. "It seems like all the members are really close to each other, which makes me like them even more," added another teenage girl who wished to remain anonymous.
During the event, which lasted for over an hour, in which the boy band sang two of their hit songs, "Wish" and the special version of "A.RA.SHI," they never sat for a moment, although they were asked to. "We cannot sit when our fans are all standing to see us," said Matsumoto Jun, the youngest member of the group.
At the end of the concert, Ohno asked their photographer to capture them with all of their Korean fans, causing exhilaration among the girls. "We'll come back in November for our first concerts here, but I want to take a few photos so as not to forget these meaningful moments," said Ohno.
One thing is sure: they are strong enough to overcome a language barrier and win lots of Korean hearts, which must be something for Korean entertainers who target the overseas pop music market to think about.
By Lee Yong-sung
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J-pop's popularity grows silently
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26th September 2006, 11:57 AM
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