Episode 60: The Rise and Fall and Rebirth of TVXQ Part 2—A Double Debut (2003-2005)
This is the second part in an episode series on the rise and fall and rebirth of TVXQ aka 東方神起 aka 동방신기. I touched on the group in my history series—which you may want to listen to first if you haven’t—but the circumstances surrounding the group’s almost disbandment and multitude of legal problems which began in 2009 and lasted for years afterwards are still contentious with fans (and anti-fans) to this day and their story really deserved proper time and attention paid to it.
I tried my best to remain as neutral as possible throughout this story and where a single narrative wasn’t possible I attempted to steel man all sides of the argument. Listeners can make up their own minds about the heroes and villains of this story.
The first episode is available here and covers the founding of S.M. Entertainment and some of the circumstances that led up to the creation of TVXQ.
Part 2 takes a look at the critical years 2003-2005 and the circumstances that led S.M. Entertainment to pivot their new boy group TVXQ to the Japanese market.
One of the most fascinating pieces of the TVXQ story is this successful localization of TVXQ to Japan as 東方神起—it’s Lee Soo Man’s Cultural Technology at work. In Korea and the broader pan-Asian market, TVXQ was a glittering idol group in the mold of H.O.T., performing Yoo Young Jin’s bombastic “SMP” songs like “Rising Sun” and “Tri-Angle" to screaming teenagers. In Japan, 東方神起 was a cool, urbane, vocal boy group singing Avex-style R&B ballads to an audience heavily skewed towards the over-30 housewife crowd that was in love with all thing Korean thanks to Bae Yong Joon and Winter Sonata.
The story of “K-Pop” is often presented as this linear march towards Current Day, where “4th generation” idol groups battle each week for global fans and trophies on shows like M Countdown but the truth is a lot more complicated. If rock band Trax had taken off in Japan as planned, would S.M. Entertainment have needed to establish TVXQ so firmly in the Japanese market? If Avex had not taken a larger role in molding TVXQ into 東方神起 would the group have seen the success in Japan that they eventually did? If S.M. Entertainment had not successfully tied TVXQ to the global narrative of “K-Pop”, would we correctly remember SG Wannabe as the top domestic Korean boy group of the era?
As you’ll hear in part 2, TVXQ’s success was not guaranteed and they will face many more problems in the episodes to come…
SG Wannabe doing what they do best: singing.
Photo of the protest outside LG Telecom against the new “MP3폰” that would not respect the DRM agreement (article and source). I believe that is H.O.T.’s Kangta to the far right of the picture?
東方神起 performing at the 2005 Avex-hosted a-Nation festival to a disinterested audience.
Sidewalk press conference to address the member rotation rumors, November 26, 2004; comments on the YouTube page contain translations.
Japanese news report from 2004 on Bae Yong Joon’s trip to Japan and the “Bae Yong Joon Fever” that erupted. Please note the ages of the women being interviewed. This point has been lost in the English narrative but Hallyu was not a youth movement when it popped up in Japan and to a certain extent the auntie fans remain a dedicated core group of support.
The songs played are:
“Mirotic” by TVXQ (live on Music Bank, December 26, 2008)
“Street's raised Us feat. Supasize” by Joosuc (from 2002 대한민국)
“Money” by Lisa
“Get Up” by CB Mass
“O Holy Night” by TVXQ (performed live on Britney & BoA, December 26, 2003)
Kim Junsu pre-debut footage.
“Diamond” by Dana (Yunho was a featured dancer.)
Kim Jaejoong pre-debut footage.
Shim Changmin pre-debut footage.
“Hug” by TVXQ (official MV)
“Sweet Dream” by Jung Na-ra (theme song to My Love Patzzi, 2002)
“Timeless” by SG Wannabe (official MV)
“My Little Princess” by TVXQ (performed live on Music Camp, May 15, 2004)
“The Way U Are” by TVXQ (official MV)
“Drive” by TVXQ (official MV)
“Mideoyo (Believe)” by TVXQ (performed live at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, October 16, 2004)
“Tri-Angle (feat. BoA and Trax)” by TVXQ (official MV)
“Scorpio” by Trax (written and produced by Yoshiki of X Japan; official MV)
“Konnichiwa” (TVXQ greeting to the media, Narita Airport, November 23, 2004)
“最初から今まで” by Ryu (theme song to Winter Sonata, Japanese version)
“Stay With Me” by 東方神起 (official MV)
“Somebody to Love” by 東方神起 (official MV)
“My Destiny” by 東方神起 (official MV)
“Rising Sun” by TVXQ (official MV)
“Love After Love” by TVXQ
Our opening song today is TVXQ’s “Mirotic,” performed live on Music Bank, December 26, 2008. I’ll put the link to the video in the show notes but two things worth listening for are the vocal ad libs and the quote clean lyrics. The line “under my skin” had to be changed to “under my sky” for broadcast because this super sexy song kept getting banned from television. The era around 2008-2009 when this was filmed is a transitional time for K-Pop fandoms and if you check the audiences in videos you’ll still see fans with balloons (pearl red in this case) rather than the lightsticks that would become standard only a couple of years later. This episode is part 2 of the story of TVXQ’s rise and fall and rebirth, so if you haven’t listened to part 1, I’d suggest doing that first.
Okay, so if you remember at the end of the previous episode, as we enter 2003, both SM Entertainment and the broader Asian music market are in real trouble. Here’s where we left off.
CD sales are cratering across Asia but especially in Korea where high speed internet access has turbocharged a significant piracy problem in a country that was already known for a lax attitude towards things like copyrights on music—or just copyrights on intellectual property generally. I’ve discussed it on the podcast before but the black market for music was massive in Korea; reports from Japan around this time said that of the bootlegged and counterfeit goods confiscated at their borders, 75% were from Korea.
As global money began to pour into Korea, especially in the wake of the 1998 IMF bailout, the Korean government came under real pressure from organizations like the Office of the US Trade Representative to bring their laws around intellectual property, copyrights, patents, and so on, up to a quote “global” standard. (And you can read American/Western European/Japanese standard for “global” here.)
What I’m getting to is that when mp3 file sharing via websites like the Napster-like Soribada reached Korea in 2000, the culture around consuming music in Korea was already pretty laissez-faire and music consumers were already far less tied to this idea of purchasing “official” albums from a record store and logged by Soundscan, than in a country like America or Japan. There had been a bit of an album boom in the 1990s as major music retail chains like Tower Records moved into Korea but the sales boom didn’t last. According to the Recording Industry Association of Korea, revenue from CD sales was essentially halved between 1996 and 2002. There were attempts to stop piracy by, for example, in 2002, introducing a CD that couldn’t be copied to a computer. One of the albums released using the copyright-protected CD was 2002 대한민국, from the influential “Republic of Korea” hip-hop compilation series. It was also the final entry of that series, which should speak to how well the copyright protected CD format went over with consumers.
Things got so bad that in 2004, the Korea Music Producers Association gathered artists and other industry people for a protest outside of LG Telecom, to express their frustration with LG’s new mp3 player which did not include the digital rights management (DRM) that would prevent unauthorized music from being played. People shaved their heads in front of the building. LG’s new “mp3 pon” was part of the early 2000s telecom wars which is another story for another time but the point is, again, that in the early 2000s, there was a real existential angst over the survival of the Korean music industry that went beyond just flops and hits. I’ll also add as an aside here that while foreign fans sometimes mock the Korean fans for doing things like sending protest trucks to their idols’ companies, stunts like the LG Telecom protest show that these kinds of showy public protests to express displeasure are pretty deeply baked into the music culture.
Okay, so, record sales were in free fall. That’s bad enough, right? How could it get worse? Well, if you remember from episode one, in 2002, the Korean government launched a massive crackdown on entertainment industry corruption. Payola, embezzlement, and other financial shenanigans were getting dragged into the newspapers and into the courts. The standard industry practice of things like offering financial “incentives” *wink wink* to television producers to get your artists a good spot on a music show—and in this increasingly tough business, every advantage counted—were suddenly dragged into the sunlight. One of the many companies hit was, yes, SM Entertainment. And SM Entertainment boss Lee Soo-Man was one of the entertainment company executives who had fled Korea to avoid getting prosecuted. Massive fines were levied; people were investigated. It absolutely had a further chilling effect on the music business during this time—although it’s debatable how much the industry culture of handshake deals and mutual back scratching would change in the near future.
Another important factor was… Japan. Korea and Japan have a long and difficult history, to put it mildly, because of Japan’s colonization of the Korean peninsula pre-World War II. That’s living memory for many people in the 1990s. In a tension that still plays out today, Korean businesses want access to the massive Japanese consumer market but the Korean public (and government) aren’t always willing to facilitate that. Japanese imports, especially cultural imports, were banned through the 1990s into the 2000s. Domestic record companies began looking to boost their sales by moving outside their borders—remember CD sales were dropping across Asia but they weren’t dropping in Japan nearly as quickly as in other countries.
I mentioned in the previous episode about SM trying to launch S.E.S. in Japan but another early link-up was in 1999. SM Entertainment had worked with Japanese studio Shirogumi—aka the people who brought you classic teen idol schlock film The Checkers in Tan Tan Tanuki—to make a 25 minute 3D movie starring H.O.T. as some sort of outer space soccer players. It cost a lot of money, lost a lot of money, was considered by non-fans to be… pretty bad, and has since been sent to whatever the SM Entertainment equivalent of the Disney Vault is, where nobody has seen it since its release to theaters over 20 years ago. While the entire production was a massive fiasco, it does show that SM Entertainment already had an interest in Japan when Avex came looking for a local partner in Korea. And it also shows that SM was already trying to diversify beyond album sales as far back as 1999.
Avex, if you remember from last episode, is the popular Japanese dance music label that was quickly turning into a contemporary pan-Asian pop powerhouse thanks to acts like J-pop diva Hamasaki Ayumi. In the late 1990s, Avex had put feelers out into Taiwan—where they partnered with local firm Rock Records and then moved into Korea—where they’d found a hot, up-and-coming independent firm called, yes, SM Entertainment. This deal would become a lifeline for SM in the early 2000s because it’s thanks to the support of Avex in Japan that a young S.M. artist called BoA was able to take her modest, domestic Korean success and rocket to the top of the charts in Japan and around Asia. BoA was a true pan-Asian success story, an Avex success story.
To get yourself in SM Entertainment’s mindset at this time, when it came out in 2001 that new Japanese history textbooks soft pedaled the era of colonialism in Korea and boycotts of Japanese businesses were threatened, an SM Entertainment spokesperson was quoted as saying, “I can’t agree with the distorted textbooks interfering with business.” To quote one of the K-Pop queens of today,
“Dollar bills, dollar bills
Keep on falling for me, I love the way it feels.”
While BoA was (and is) an SM Entertainment artist, her career launch in Japan and resulting success happened while SM Entertainment and the Korean industry more broadly were in a complete meltdown. Considering Avex had saved SM’s bacon with young BoA, it’s hard to argue with the SM spokesperson not wanting a spat over Japanese middle school textbooks to interfere with the money coming in.
Another factor to keep in mind is that at this time, 2002-2003, the Korean pop scene has moved almost completely away from dance music and teen pop idols. Not only had lip syncing been banned from some major television channels as a way of pushing back against these dancing idols but the popular acts at this time were either sexy, adult-leaning solo acts like Lee Hyori, Rain, and Se7en, genuinely talented vocal groups like YG Entertainment’s BigMama, an act that YG deliberately marketed as “ugly” even though they were perfectly fine looking women, and pure hip-hop acts, which had boomed thanks to rappers like Cho PD and the trio CB Mass, who actually took aim at SM and their rival idol company Sidus, in a 2001 song called “Get Up” which says, in rough translation, “S.M. and Sidus are stuffing their pockets copying Japanese dance.” Harsh but likely echoing the opinions of a not insignificant segment of the pop music listening audience in both its anti-Japan and anti-idol stance.
What it comes down to is that SM Entertainment faced problems on multiple fronts. Album sales on a sharp decline across the board; government crackdowns on the old ways of doing business; and a lack of appetite in the public for the type of acts that SM Entertainment specialized in.
And here’s another important piece of this story: Despite the bottom falling out of the teen idol market in Korea, SM Entertainment was still attracting talented trainees via audition and scouting and had begun formalizing their training system. In early 2003, SM Entertainment, had even opened their for-profit “Starlight Academy,” which was run by yet another SM Entertainment subsidiary company. Students at Starlight were not considered SM trainees per se and most would need to pay tuition. The hook was that while you weren’t guaranteed a spot as an SM trainee, attending Starlight would get you in front of the SM talent scouts, while bringing in a nice passive income for SM Entertainment. *money cue*
But even for those talented kids who passed auditions and became trainees, agency trainees were not (and are not) guaranteed a debut. Despite that crucial fact, as it later came out in court, SM Entertainment trainees were asked to sign exclusive contracts. As a 2006 court case filed by actor Yoo Min-Ho revealed that in January 2003 he’d signed a contract with SM Entertainment that tied him to the company for ten years after the release of his first album, with a penalty of “5 times the amount invested by SM, 3 times the expected profit during the remaining contract period, and an additional compensation of 300 million won” if he broke the contract. In 2007, the details of Kim Ji-Hoon’s contract with S.M. Entertainment were also made public in a similar lawsuit. His contract, signed in 2001, was exclusive for a period of “only” five years from the date of the release of his first album. The problem was that Kim Ji-Hoon, like Yoo Min-Ho, was an actor and neither would ever release an album which meant both were tied to SM indefinitely. He was subject to similar draconian penalties for breaking the contract.
SM Entertainment suffered no penalty if they failed to keep their end of the deal. The company’s argument was that they had invested a lot of money in these young trainees and deserved some guarantee of payback if the trainee left but the judge slapped them down saying that the entertainment business was high risk-high reward and if you want the high reward, you need to accept the risk.
In the last episode I emphasized that Lee Soo-Man and SM had not been an outlier during the 2002 crackdown on entertainment industry corruption but there was one exception: SM Entertainment had been singled out for the draconian penalties they’d imposed on their talents for breaking their contracts—penalties out of step with the rest of the industry. The Korean Fair Trade Commission had even issued a corrective order about their contracts in July 2002, at which point SM Entertainment sued the FTC. It wasn’t until 2004 that the Seoul High Court ruled that these contracts were, in fact, an unfair trade practice. It could be coincidence but soon after this judgment, H.O.T.’s Moon Hee-Jun, who was mentioned in the lawsuit as having signed one of these unfair contracts, moved from SM to a different company.
So that is where the Korean music industry and SM Entertainment stand as we pick up our story from episode one. It’s mid-2003, Lee Soo-Man has finally returned to Korea to face the embezzlement charges (spoiler alert: he’d eventually be pardoned) and BoA is the one SM Entertainment artist bringing in significant money. And young BoA is grinding hard for that money, not only in Japan and Korea but globally. With the industry in something of a slump, BoA’s success across the region is held onto as a source of pride not just for SM but for Korean entertainment: Hallyu. And her crowning achievement of 2003 is a televised showcase that aired on December 26, held with another global pop sensation, albeit this one is from the Western hemisphere: Britney Spears. And there is one more musical guest; SM Entertainment proudly presents their brand new boy group, singing NSYNC’s famous acapella arrangement of “O Holy Night”:
Dong Bang Shin Ki. DBSK, TVXQ, THSK, and, in Japan, they’d be known as 東方神起. The Gods Rising from the East.
Despite BoA’s success in Japan, TVXQ was initially formed to pick up where H.O.T. left off and target the massive Chinese market. H.O.T. member Moon Hee-Jun revealed in an interview recently that H.O.T. had had a massive Chinese fan club membership of something like 800,000 people when they were disbanded so you can understand why Lee Soo-Man and SM would want to try and recapture H.O.T.’s success there. TVXQ’s name, the members’ nicknames, and even their early, wacky visual kei styling would all be a nod to H.O.T.’s popularity in China.
TVXQ’s introduction on the BoA/Britney showcase showed them all dressed all in black with spangly silver accents, singing a capella. It signaled that these boys were not going to be mere “singing entertainers,” they were singers, real ones. They were marketed as a group where each member could take a lead vocal, unlike the dance-heavy groups of a couple of years ago. These five boys didn’t know it yet but they would eventually become the foundation of K-Pop as we know it today. Without TVXQ, the Korean idol industry would almost certainly have faded and passed, leaving us with nothing but our yellow and white balloons and fond memories of the hammer dance.
As I begin to introduce the trainees who became TVXQ, remember they were preparing for debut not only in the middle of an industry meltdown but also in the middle of SM Entertainment’s lawsuit against the FTC for making talents sign unfair contracts. There would have been a lot of pressure on these teenagers to sign whatever was placed in front of them, not only because they may not have another chance to become singers and at least four of the five desperately needed the money, but also, possibly, out of a sense of obligation to SM Entertainment, knowing the investment already sunk into their training and debut preparation, a number estimated to be about 8 billion won by an SM spokesperson.
This is TVXQ, as selected by then-SM CEO Kim Kyung-Wook:
Kim Junsu aka “Xia Junsu” joined SM Entertainment as a tween trainee in 1999. He was not only extremely cute but also had a powerful singing voice. Junsu had been working as part of a trio with two other trainees, both of whom would eventually end up in Super Junior, when he was selected to be in the elite unit TVXQ. Even at this young age, his vocal ability shone through.
After passing an audition for SM at the age of 14, Jung Yunho aka “U-Know Yunho” famously ran off to Seoul to become a trainee against the wishes of his father in 2000. He worked low wage jobs and even slept rough when he didn’t have enough money. That passion for hard work and determination to succeed would carry Yunho through the rest of his career. Even as a trainee, his stage presence was obvious and he was even spotlighted in a 2001 song by SM soloist Dana, who at the time was being promoted as “the next BoA.” Ironically she would re-debut a few years later as part of The Grace, the female version of TVXQ.
Kim Jaejoong aka “Hero Jaejoong” joined SM as a trainee in 2001 at 15 years old. The way he tells the story, he was so desperate to get out of his rural hometown that he ran off to Seoul with nothing but bus fare for a one way ticket in his pocket. Like Yunho, Jaejoong worked really hard, earning money at part-time jobs to pay his way in the city.
Before getting selected for TVXQ, both Jaejoong and Yunho were part of an F4-style group called the Four Seasons.
Shim Changmin, aka “Max Changmin”, is the maknae or youngest member of TVXQ. The story goes that he was scouted while playing badminton and even though he didn’t want to audition to be a trainee, his mom made him go so that she could meet BoA. Changmin joined SM as a trainee in 2002 and rather than a love of singing or dancing, my impression is that he has an athlete’s mindset of not wanting to be beaten. At their debut, Changmin was especially known for his large eyes—he was also nicknamed bambi for his deer-like appearance—but the sweet exterior covered a core of steel.
And, finally, Park Yoochun aka “Micky Yoochun,” joined SM as a trainee in 2003. His family had moved to the United States in the wake of the financial crisis but after winning a local singing competition held by the Korean community in his area, Yoochun had moved to Seoul to try his luck there. Since this new group was going to be the next generation of H.O.T., it seems pretty clear in retrospect that Yoochun was slotted directly into the “Tony Ahn” role as the returnee from America.
The five trainees first met as a group on July 26, 2003, at a beauty parlor, about a month after Lee Soo-Man had returned to Korea to face the embezzlement charges. There was some uncertainty at first as none of the five had worked together except for Jaejoong and Yunho but they were all sent to live together and train together for the next few months and then, sometime in November or December 2003, they were told they would be debuting and were given their legendary name: Dong Bang Shin Ki.
Once this train was in motion, they would not be able to get off.
A couple of weeks after their dramatic introduction on the BoA/Britney showcase, TVXQ’s debut single “Hug” was released on January 15, 2004. It was a sweet mid-tempo ballad, very much in the style of popular Korean drama OST songs like “Sweet Dream” from the popular 2002 drama My Love Pattzi, which starred SM talent (kind of, it’s complicated but she was supposed to debut in a girl group with BoA but SM didn’t have the money at the time so they outsourced her) Jung Na-ra, who also performed the theme song.
For old heads like me, “Hug” has a distinctly Korean ballad sound. The harmonies, the vocal tones, the rhythm… Listening back almost 20 years later, it has a very nostalgic sound. The sound of a bygone era. The MV was a soft, creamy daydream. Featuring lots of big eyes and tender looks to camera. The song and video are like a hug on a rainy day, just warming you up from the inside.
“Hug” broke from the dance-heavy hip-hop influenced boy groups that had bubbled up post-H.O.T. but while TVXQ were musically different from a group like H.O.T., they were still presented as idols and there was a glamor and a sense of performance baked into everything.
Here’s what I mean, a few days after “Hug” was released, another vocal-based boy group debuted, a trio called SG Wannabe who were under the Chaebol-affiliated MNET label. SG Wannabe’s debut song, “Timeless” has an extremely similar feel to “Hug” and SG Wannabe were also marketed as a boy group who could sing. BUT SG Wannabe looked and acted like boys next door—not idols. They had normal hair, wore normal clothes, and stood around on stage like normal dudes when they performed. Even in their relatively subdued debut stage, TVXQ had worn spangly accessories that sparkled under the stage lights. TVXQ had carefully styled hair. And they danced. SG Wannabe were just a plain vocal group.
Don’t get me wrong, SG Wannabe were a good group and they had a lot of fans and depending on how you want to measure popularity, they were likely more popular than TVXQ in Korea in those early days after debut, but let’s be real: by 2004, in Korea, the ceiling of earnings for a purely vocal group like SG Wannabe was just a lot lower than it would be for an idol group. SM Entertainment understood that, even if the company was in a slump. Because TVXQ had something SG Wannabe didn’t—organized and devoted idol fans. Cassiopeia.
Something to understand as we dive into what happened next is the mentality of those fans. Remember, album sales were tanking across the region and the Korean music industry hadn’t quite figured out what to do about it. At the time, sales were still a primary source of revenue for music companies. A normie group like SG Wannabe can release maybe one album a year and expect a substantial part of the fanbase to buy it. But release two or three albums? And a raft of singles? There’s no way these normie music fans are going to sink that much money into a group, no matter how much they like them. You risk audience fatigue. A group like TVXQ can release three albums and that full slate of singles and expect every fan to buy at least one copy. Every. Fan. Plus merch, plus fan club memberships, plus online content subscriptions, and so on.
So, as you look at TVXQ’s activities, keep that at the back of your mind.
From February through the spring, TVXQ did the rounds of the Korean music shows, gathering fans with every appearance. The songs performed were “Hug” and a B-side from the single, “My Little Princess,” another ballad. Then as summer hit, they began making their first moves into the Chinese-speaking market. Unfortunately, TVXQ did not speak Chinese. Watching them on the red carpet at the 15th Golden Melody Awards in Taiwan in May 2004 is painful. The members—and remember that Changmin isn’t even 18 yet at this point—try to look like they aren’t completely confused at what’s happening while being asked questions in Mandarin.
Their second single, “The Way U Are,” an up-tempo dance number written by Daniel Pendher, a Scandinavian pop songwriter, was released on June 24, 2004. The MV for “The Way U Are” takes place in what looks like an upscale bar with copious shots of pool balls being sunk and all of the members in lacy black tops and leather pants. And taking us right back to the glory days of H.O.T., their hair gives major visual kei vibes, with lots and lots of volume and asymmetrical chunks. If “Hug” was a gentle embrace, “The Way U Are” said “make sure you don’t poke your eyes out with my spiked hair, babe.”
Singing Entertainers were back, baby!! And they were singing! While entertaining us!
Through that summer into the fall, they participated in the SMTown promotions with the easy-breezy “Drive,” written by the same songwriter who gave us “Hug,” and did the music show circuit with “The Way U Are” (and as an aside, I highly recommend all of these performances because the styling is incredible.)
Their first Korean album, Tri-Angle, was released October 14, 2004, and in the middle of all of this, they found time to travel to Los Angeles to participate in the 2004 Korean Music Festival held at the Hollywood Bowl where they sang their brand new ballad, “Mideoyo,” (“I Believe”) to an audience was full of screaming teen girls waving pearl red balloons.
The title track of Tri-Angle was “Tri-Angle,” a full on Yoo Young-Jin joint that melded heavy metal, R&B vocal lines, and classical music and an incredible anime-themed MV for the most H.O.T.-like song the group had done yet. It was the full SM Production package. The styling is incredible, with the members looking like something out of the Final Fantasy series and BoA doing a guest appearance dressed like she’d just arrived direct from Lothlórien. Yunho has these feathers glued around his eyes that make him look like a fallen angel. Again, no matter how good a group like SG Wannabe is (and they were good, please understand that they were good) vocals alone cannot match the power of Yunho looking like a fallen angel.
Along with BoA, S.M. rock band TRAX also guest starred on the song. TRAX, as a side note, had just debuted in July 2004, and were meant to attack Japan’s rich rock market. Their single “Scorpio” which was released in December 2004, was even produced by Yoshiki.
Anyways, things seemed to have been going along just fine for TVXQ. Or were they? In the middle of a performance of “Mideoyo” on Inkigayo on November 21, 2004, Yoochun started crying. Fans were upset and outraged. The dreaded words were being whispered around fan spaces: member rotation. It was a concept that Lee Soo Man had floated with H.O.T. to extreme fan pushback and (spoiler alert) that he would not give up on until he was booted from SM completely in 2023.
Anyways, the fan outrage was immediate and it was massive. Cassiopeia went to battle. There was a website (which now only exists in partial form on the wayback machine) www.only5tvxq.com that had an online petition and a call to boycott SM until this was resolved. Five days later, November 26, 2004, the situation had become so untenable, with fans actively camped outside of SM protesting, that the members held a last minute press conference on the sidewalk. Full credit to YouTube commenter Viv Cameron for this translation:
Junsu: You (all) seem to be under the impression that other members will be rotated into TVXQ and be active as TVXQ. That is absolutely not true. TVXQ is 5 members. Our target is Asia. So, only in China, the 5 members will not change but one more person will come in to strengthen/reinforce and will be active as six members in China only and then in Japan and Korea, us only five members will put out albums.
This was TVXQ’s first big crisis. Despite the press conference, rumors still swirled. Was it really true that no members were going to be removed? The Taiwanese press had reported on November 22 that auditions were to be held in Taiwan to select a new member. And if this press conference was a cover-up for a botched rotation, who was it that was going to be rotated out? Which member needed to be protected by the fans? Was it Yunho? His fansite Gratia had allegedly been one of the key organizers of the protest. Was it Yoochun, who had been crying on stage, or was it Jaejoong, as hinted at by a recent photobook? And what was up with this “additional member” to be added for the Chinese market? (A strategy Lee Soo-Man would later employ to similar massive fan backlash with Super Junior.)
Cassiopeia couldn’t trust anything coming from the company and though the flames died down after the protest, the seeds of doubt had been planted, in the fandom and likely within the group as well.
In the middle of all of this drama, TVXQ had gone to Japan for a quick promotional trip to celebrate the release of a commemorative Japanese version of “Hug,” which was distributed on the Avex-affiliated label Rhythm Trax. The song was considered something of a test balloon release for SM Japan and not an official debut.
So, while fans in Korea were circulating the online petition and whipping support for a boycott, on November 23, 2004, TVXQ arrived at Narita airport outside Tokyo where they greeted fans and Japanese media at the airport with an adorable sung “Konnichiwa” or “hello”. They did a quick tour of some major record stores and returned to Korea… where they were greeted by protesting fans at the airport and were followed by protesting fans to SM headquarters where they had to give the emergency press conference.
Fun times.
The shifting of focus to Japan didn’t come out of nowhere. Yes, BoA had done well and yes if you wanted to sell albums, Japan was still buying them but another factor were these three little words: 冬のソナタ (Fuyu no Sonata). In April of 2004, Japanese national broadcast channel NHK had started airing 冬のソナタ, a Korean drama originally broadcast as 겨울연가 in 2002. In English we know it as Winter Sonata. It was a massive hit with women in their 40s and 50s, kickstarting not just a boom of female leisure tourism to Korea but also making an icon out of leading actor Bae Yong Joon or as he’s known to his Japanese fans: ヨン様 (Yon-sama).
A couple of days after TVXQ made their modest greeting to the press at Narita Airport on November 23, Yon-sama arrived on November 25 to promote a new photobook and photo exhibition. He was greeted by 3,500 fans. They followed him to his hotel where ten women were sent to the hospital after getting injured trying to chase his car. Again, I want to emphasize that these were not teenagers but women in their 40s and 50s. Sent to the hospital because they were chasing an actor’s car. The same day that TVXQ gave their sidewalk press conference to their teenage fans, Yon-sama addressed the Japanese media to humbly apologize for the hysteria he’d caused, all while Tokyo riot police kept an eye on the crowd of housewives.
And then there was the Yon-sama effect. Every product he endorsed was suddenly experiencing a massive bump in sales. According to one news article I saw, Lotte put his face on packets of gum and women were just buying entire pallets. The same article said electronics chain Bic Camera said women were coming in asking for “Yon-sama’s camera.” That is pretty incredible and I strongly suspect that the SM boardroom looked at what was happening in Japan and thought, “Let’s get a piece of that sweet housewife action, too.”
JYP Entertainment had packed up the massively popular Rain to Japan where he released a Japanese edition of his album It’s Raining on February 16, 2005, followed by a massive tour in the summer, culminating at the Budokan. YG Entertainment quickly hustled Se7en to Japan, where he released his Japanese debut single on February 23, 2005: “Hikari”.
TVXQ made their actual official Japanese debut a couple of months later on April 25, 2005, with “Stay With Me Tonight.” It sounds exactly like what it is: a low budget J-Pop boy group song. Written by Haneoka Kei, who is very much not a pop music composer, the charms of TVXQ’s voices are handcuffed by a very pedestrian melody and an arrangement probably better suited for some of the non-singing quote “singing entertainers” from Johnny’s & Associates. It sold about 10,000 copies.
TVXQ would spend the rest of 2005 bouncing back and forth between Japan and Korea. As soon as a promotion was wrapping up in one country, they’d be shuttled back across the Sea of Japan/East Sea to release something else. After the promotions of “Stay With Me Tonight” and a quick hall tour around the country, they were packed back off to Korea for promotions for their 2005 Summer album, released June 25, 2005, the title track of which, “Hi Ya Ya 여름날,” they’d somehow found time to film in Bora Bora; then back to Japan for the July 13, 2005 release of “Somebody to Love,” also written by Haenoka Kei and also selling about 10,000 copies, more Japanese promotional activities (including a small “a capella tour” of various record stores), and then in August came the a-Nation festival, held by Avex—who also announced the purchase of a large stake in SM Entertainment.
The reception at a-Nation must have been disheartening for the young group, especially knowing that their fellow countryman Rain was off headlining at the Budokan. There was a core group of Cassiopeia with their pearl red balloons at the front of the stage but nobody else knew who they were or cared. They were the bathroom break act. And TVXQ in their performance looked and sounded like a generic J-Pop group. Actually, they looked and sounded like a low budget Johnny’s & Associates group, with Yunho even doing a kind of low budget Sakurai Sho of Arashi style rap. That is not what the attendees of a-Nation were there for. Something had to change but now with Avex owning a bigger stake in SM Entertainment, it would… bye-bye SM Japan, hello Avex.
But first, in September, there was the Rising Sun showcase in Korea as pre-promotion for their second Korean album. During the rehearsals, Jaejoong was rushed to the hospital with what sounds like a chronic stress injury that had finally snapped. Literally. The cartilage in his knee ruptured. It’s a very common stress injury for people like high performance athletes and professional ballet dancers and considering TVXQ were neither, I think it’s a clear sign that the members were being worked too hard and without proper rest and physical training. As is the fact that despite the media reporting that Jaejoong had been told to rest for at least a week, four days after collapsing, he was on stage for the Rising Sun showcase. The footage is brutal. Fans sobbing in the audience while Jaejoong himself also looks ready to burst into tears.
The album, Rising Sun, was released on September 12, 2005, and promotions went ahead through the fall with a masked dancer standing in for Jaejoong on music shows. The title track was another classic Yoo Young-Jin SM Production joint and the album did just about as well as Tri-Angle. A strong showing from the young group but there was room for growth. A lot of room for growth.
Then it was back to Japan for the release of “My Destiny,” their third Japanese single and the first one post-Avex buying a big stake in SM and the change in quality is enormous. The song was written by Matsura Akihisa, who has an ear for vocal R&B and who would go on to work with artists known for their quality vocals like Little Glee Monster, Misia, and Juju. “My Destiny” is a smooth R&B ballad that really gives the members voices center stage. They no longer sound like discount Johnny’s; they sound like what they are: a vocal-based R&B Korean boy group… from Avex.
It’s also interesting to compare the smooth lines of “My Destiny” with the bombastic “Rising Sun,” which had been released just weeks before. “My Destiny” is a straight ahead R&B ballad; “Rising Sun” is the full Yoo Young-Jin SM Production package: heavy metal combined with dance music and sprinkled with R&B extravagance. The video for “My Destiny” shows the members in various classic romantic scenarios—Junsu is in a church clutching a bouquet of flowers, Yunho is getting drenched in the rain—while the “Rising Sun” video is a frenetic explosion of post-apocalyptic dancescapes and erotic Christian imagery. In a lot of ways, this is really the beginning of TVXQ splitting into two distinct groups. There was Dong Bang Shin Ki in Korea, a group who had outrageous hair and did the full SMP thing. Then in Japan, there was the struggling 東方神起, a classy Avex boy group who sang panty-wetting R&B songs.
As we enter the end of the year awards season, TVXQ is announced as selling just over 600,000 albums within Korea. That’s sales from their two albums (Tri-Angle and Rising Sun each sold about 300,000 copies in 2005) which was good enough to get them second place behind—wait for it—yes, SG Wannabe who sold about 660,000 from a regular album and an… “irregular” album (about 500,000 and 150,000, respectively) Remember what I said about devoted fans? But with the additional sales of the singles from Japan it was enough to carry TVXQ over the threshold to become the biggest Korean artist by sales volume in 2005.
And if that wasn’t enough, they’re roped into helping launch S.M. Entertainment’s new boy group, Super Junior, with a single called “Show Me Your Love.” You can hear more about Super Junior in my history series but quite a few of the underlying problems we’ve picked at in this episode will be fully unleashed with Super Junior.
So as we close out part two of this saga, TVXQ are being worked like dogs on both sides of the East Sea/Sea of Japan, to the point that Jaejoong has already been sidelined with a major stress injury. They have a fairly large and devoted teen fanbase in Korea but despite their hustle, filming variety show content and magazine fluff pieces along with the touring and music promotions, they have yet to really break through to the Japanese market. However, Avex has just bought a bigger stake in SM and sales of their third Japanese single had seen a rise of about 50% over the first two. They had a ways to go but 東方神起 were definitely on the way up.
Let’s play TVXQ out with a b-side from Rising Sun, featuring lyrics by both U-Know Yunho and Micky Yoochun: “Love After Love”.