BoA in Japan: Soft Powers and Teenage Dreams
BoA promotional image for her Japan in 2001/ SM Entertainment
In the last weeks of winter 2001, a 14-year old girl left her home in Korea to move to Japan. She left behind her parents and two older brothers with the unique purpose to release an album, something she had already done once in Korea to modest results. But the trip felt mysterious to the child, namely because she was too young to have any ambitions to succeed in Japan.
She made the trip alone.
Kwon Boa knew when she arrived there would be no one to greet her, so she found her way to the Tokyo Skyliner subway, and from there, to her new home. “I couldn’t even dream of taking a taxi,” she recalled years later with a sly voice. “I took the bus.” Her company’s budget was tight, so BoA became familiar with trains and subways in the first few weeks of her time in Japan.
The teen arrived with only a few months to prepare for a heavy cycle of promotions in March, just as the cherry blossoms sprouted from the tall trees that loomed over her head. The pastel pink petals littered the streets with scents of lilac and rose. In Tokyo, strawberry farms opened to the public and the mountains that loomed over the city welcomed her with hints of the peaks she left behind.
BoA’s move to Japan, while tightly financed, had been years in the making thanks to her boss, Chairman Lee Soo-man of SM Entertainment. "Japan has 130 million people and it’s similar to the U.S," he told BoA years later in a documentary. The CEO is known for his wildly imaginative – and competitive – spirit, so he threw down the gauntlet.
“It’s the second biggest market in the world,” he explained. His reasoning was straightforward, he remembered: ‘If you can’t beat Japan, won’t you just fail completely?’ So I thought, ‘We must go to Japan.’”
Japan was, and still is, a juggernaut in pop culture with its contributions of anime, manga and J-Pop. But Lee wanted Korean pop music to be the lightning rod for a Hallyu wave that had slowly begun to trickle out into the world. "To become an idol, the artist should debut at the age of 13 to 15 and make success at 16 to 18,” he theorized about his plan. “And [then] I found BoA."
“BoA's entry into Japan is meaningful because it was carried out after thorough preparation through the Japanese branch of our Korean entertainment company,” Lee Soo-man said in an interview the week of her debut. This was just phase one, he teased. The western market was a focus, too.
“We plan to branch out into other global markets.”
BoA promotional image / SM Entertainment
Lee, an astute businessman who once was a pop star in the 1970s, would not be the only one directing BoA’s debut. He placed the majority of the duties in the hands of Nam So-young, a thirty-five year old Korean woman who had spent the past seven years making a name for herself in Japan.
Nam moved to Japan in 1995, straight out of college, after she accepted a job with the pop label Sampony. She, like BoA, knew very little about Japanese culture or the language when she arrived. She spoke Japanese “in her own way” but found it difficult to follow conversations. The faster someone talked, the less she could catch.
Nam found that it was extremely difficult to adapt to the new culture. Her weight dropped and she would vomit nearly every morning out of stress. Some nights she drank to forget how difficult things were. She thought about returning to Korea often, but her pride wouldn’t allow it.“The person who appeared like a savior to Nam,” Kyung-cheol Yoon wrote in 2005, “was none other than Director Lee Soo-man.”
Lee was “fascinated” by Nam’s approach to marketing in Japan. He liked her work with Sampony, and felt that she was needed for BoA’s debut. It benefitted SM not only that Nam is Korean, but that she had spent nearly a decade on the ground in Japan. She knew her way around the market and could speak both languages fluently.
In the winter of 2001, SM Entertainment formalized plans to move into the Japanese market with the creation of SM Japan in partnership with the Japanese label Avex Trax. Lee appointed Nam as Chief Executive Officer. Her role would be to direct the marketing efforts for BoA’s debut. In some ways, she had to capture lightning in a bottle: No Korean had succeeded in Japan the way Lee envisioned.
Nam’s first order was to introduce BoA to the Japanese music industry with an exclusive showcase at Belfare Concert Hall on March 7. That winter, SM projected her Japanese activities would bring in 1 billion won in sales, which would be critical to this business venture being a success. There was no room for even one mistake.
Meanwhile, the 14-year old tried her best to absorb the Japanese language and culture as promotions began.
It was apparent on her first variety show appearance just how new the language was to her. In the interview, she gamely smiled and nodded along to the MC’s statements, usually answering in short, clipped sentences. But she struggled to keep up when the MC would go off track. “You don’t understand what I’m saying,” the MC told her with a wide smile.
“Your accent is difficult to understand,” BoA joked and laughed self-consciously. “Please speak more slowly!”
BoA’s manager assisted her with translations when possible, but it was mostly up to the teen to figure out how to orient herself to what was happening. “The interesting thing is that since the questions and answers were quite similar, I ended up memorzing them,” she said. “I learned Japanese the hard way.”
The stakes were high for everyone, but perhaps most acutely for the singer, who struggled her first year alone in the country.
“Honestly, I didn’t have much ambition for myself,” BoA recalled years later. “What could I possibly achieve there? I was only in eighth grade. They told me to go to Japan, so I went and did my best.”
BoA’s debut in Japan followed decades of tense relations between Korea and Japan.
In 1910 Japan annexed Korea. This brutal and dehumanizing assimilation of Japanese culture nearly decimated Korea's history. Author Alexander Chee describes a “legacy of the Japanese occupation government’s 35-year colonization program, intent on assimilating Koreans culturally and politically, erasing their language, history and culture.” Japan would refer to Korea as the country’s “lost sibling race” that needed to be “re-educated”, but Koreans were demeaned and looked down on as an inferior race.
The consequences of this colonial rule would be severe: For nearly a century, the countries would experience a fractured relationship and Japanese culture was banned once South Korea won independence.
Decades after the end of World War II and the devastating division of Korea, the South Korean government began to signal it’s interest in using cultural products to boost their economy. Films and dramas were some of the first media that Korea exported, mostly to other East Asian countries in the early 90s. However the government understood that to survive they would need to largely invest in a “healthy” cultural sector. As Dal Young Jin writes in a Pacific Affairs journal, “The pivotal culture policy objective focused on arts, such as painting and traditional music, and tried to establish cultural identity while promoting the excellence of the arts, meaning that Korea’s cultural policy was largely synonymous with its cultural policy.”
In January 1994, President Kim Young Sam gave a speech that emphasized the importance of commodifying something many would soon call the “Korean Wave”. President Kim predicted that in the 21st century, “the culture industry will be the largest industry through the advancement of diverse audio-visual media.” (Jin, Pacific Affairs)
But by that point, hip-hop had already landed in Korea and a new generation had begun to shift the culture.
Wounds were still fresh in 2001 when BoA moved to Japan. BoA’s grandparents would have been old enough to remember or live through the war that ended Japan’s control.
SM’s partnership with the Japanese music industry was on the heels of a newly healed partnership between the South Korean and Japanese governments. Tensions between the countries began to ease in 1998 when South Korean president Kim Dae-Jung announced that the country would lift it’s 53-year ban on Japanese cultural products. (Shin Hyunjoon, Korean Studies)
“After signing a joint declaration with Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi to advance bilateral relations during a visit to Tokyo, Kim promised a gradual lifting of the ban that had been imposed since Japanese colonial rule over the Korean peninsula ended in 1945,” Jon Hershovitz reported in an October 8, 1998 article that appeared in Variety.
Perhaps most important in repairing relations was the first public, formal apology issued by Prime Minister Obuchi for the country’s colonial rule.
“Lifting the ban will be a stimulus to society and it will help to further develop South Korean culture,” President Kim said in an interview with a Japanese media outlet named NHK. In the following years, Korean music and Japanese culture began to flow between the two countries, and executiives like Chairman Lee saw an opportunity to capitalize on the exchange.
The two years that led to BoA’s Japanese debut were a time of transition for SM. The changes inside of the company and in Korean pop music signified an end to first generation K-Pop. K-Pop’s unraveled from a youth callousness and rebelliousness led by Seo Tajij and the Boys. But even with it’s white hot success, popular groups like H.O.T and SES disbanded by the turn of the millenium, while new groups like Black Beat and N Jiyeon failed to find success. Shinhwa, SM’s best bet at longevity, also failed to achieve sustainability just a few years into their career.
Years later, Chairman Lee would admit that BoA’s debut in Japan, too, was not a success. “Jumping Into the New World - Don’t Start Now” debuted at number twelve on the Japanese charts, which was a disappointment for both Avex and SM. The year following BoA’s debut in Japan was particularly challenging for the teen. She battled extreme loneliness and didn’t understand why she was still in this strange country with a manager and no successful album.
On an episode of her documentary series, BoA recalled how isolated she felt with her manager, a kind woman named Kim Eunah. “What I remember most is when we were both living together. When there wasn’t work, it was just the two of us at home.
“How much longer do we have to stay here?” she’d ask Kim.
“Come on, you’ll be done in a year,” Eunah would say encouragingly to shrug her off.
But BoA’s time in Japan was in danger of being cut short. In fact, as Lee revealed in Nobody Talks to BoA, the president of Avex Trax considered dropping the teen’s contract due to disappointing album sales.
But Chairman Lee had faith in his protege. “I told them, ‘Think proudly of the fact that we live at the same time as someone like BoA. Also I told them, they won’t find anyone like her in ten years. That’s how amazing she is.”
The CEO listened to Lee’s case, and finally asked one question. “Should we give her another try?”
As the company prepared for BoA’s first album, she returned to Korea. The recording for LISTEN TO MY HEART was complete and she had begun studying for her school qualification exam. She had put Japan behind her, and was instead, focused on her studies.
“That’s when I got a call,” she remembered. “Saying that I have to come back to Japan quickly. I was told, ‘Hey you’re number three on the Oricon chart.”
For a brief moment BoA was stunned.
“Aren’t you mistaken?” She asked her manager. Every single she released over the past year had failed. Why would she now succeed? It didn’t make sense.
But BoA’s manager was not mistaken. LISTEN TO MY HEART would become her breakthrough, eventually selling over one million albums and making her the first South Korean artist to succeed in Japan, in a stunning win for her, SM, and eventually Korean culture at large.
Two decades later, she smiled at the absurdity of it all.
“So,” she said with a hint of amazement. “I ended up rushing back to Japan.”
This article is part one in a series about BoA’s time and promotions in Japan. Look for part two in November!
A portion of research for this article comes from the following citations:
Jin, Dal Yong. “The Power of the Nation-State amid Neoliberal Reform: Shifting Cultural Politics in the New Korean Wave.” Pacific Affairs, vol. 87, no. 1, 2014, pp. 71–92. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43590824. Accessed 11 Sep. 2022.
Shin, Hyunjoon. “Reconsidering Transnational Cultural Flows of Popular Music in East Asia: Transbordering Musicians in Japan and Korea Searching for ‘Asia.’” Korean Studies, vol. 33, 2009, pp. 101–23. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23719262. Accessed 28 Aug. 2022.
