K-Pop Star Reveals Physical Abuse Trainees Suffer If They Make Mistakes

February 28, 2017

K-Pop star Jay Park has recently made some very revealing statements on what went on behind the scenes during his years-long training.

As a guest on The Glow Up Podcast’s 13th episode, Park talked about his early years in the industry, specifically his days as a trainee for talent management firm JYP Entertainment. In the episode, he narrated about his motivations and experiences in moving from Seattle to South Korea, stating some of the cultural differences he discovered during his transition, AllKpop reports.

According to Park, his decision to move to Korea was due to some of the financial woes that his family was experiencing at the time. His original plan was mainly to earn enough money and then travel back to the U.S. Park, at the time. barely spoke Korean and had a limited understanding of the Korean culture.

Having trained under JYP Entertainment for about 3 and a half years, Park came to understand the amount of hard work a future K-Pop star must go through to become successful.

As someone who was once an “artist development”, Park received vocal and dancing training along with numerous others.

In describing how the training’s stringent measures have affected him, he stated, “It helped in a lot of ways but it kinda killed my passion and creativity”, and that is, “Kind of like programming. Sing it like this, do it like this. So you lose your individuality.”

According to the superstar singer, he felt lonely to the point of crying at times due to the challenging work.

“The culture in itself was kinda like when you get certain lyrics or you get certain dance move wrong, they would like literally hit you,” he also revealed.

“That’s kinda like the Korean way you know. It’s not like that now. Much better now but back then there were like, ‘You motha f*ck’.. (laugh) but they wouldn’t do that to me because I was good at dancing. But I would see this dude next to me, he would be getting some sh*t wrong and get his ass whooped.”

Among the other subjects Park touched during the interview included a controversy from years ago involving some nasty comments he made on MySpace.

The scandal was so huge at that time that it ultimately got him cut from the group 2PM.

“You know I was in culture shock. I was very ignorant. I was very naive. I said some comments. Someone dug up some of the comments that I said, ‘Korea’s wack’, ‘I don’t know what’s going on’. That’s how you talk when you’re young. Like ‘Korea’s gay’… Over here, everyone talks like that but if you translate it literally… They were like ‘Ahh, Jay Park’s racist. He doesn’t like Koreans.'”

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