They may be South Korea’s most successful cultural export and the first K-pop act to top the US album sales charts, but BTS must still perform military service, the government has said, defying calls from the band’s fans for their idols to be granted an exemption.
Almost all able-bodied South Korean men must start almost two years of military service by the time they are 28, although exceptions are made for classical musicians and athletes who win international competitions.
BTS’s management has said that all of the band’s members would serve in the military without complaint. “The company believes military service is a duty,” Bang Si-hyuk, the founder of Big Hit Entertainment, told the Hollywood Reporter last month. “We will try to show the fans the best of BTS until, and after, the members have fulfilled their service duties.”
South Korea, which is technically still at war with North Korea, does not look kindly on celebrities who attempt to wriggle out of military service. Steve Yoo, also known as Yoo Seung-jun, was deported and banned from entering the South after he avoided conscription by becoming a naturalised US citizen in 2002, months before he was due to be drafted.
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