Kaohsiung

Busan is Jungkook’s hometown and the decisive starting point of his trajectory from an ordinary coastal childhood to international pop stardom. The book treats the city not as a marginal backdrop but as a substantial southeastern port whose beaches, pebbled shores, and rugged coastline complicate the familiar underdog story of a boy leaving the “countryside” for Seoul. Jungkook’s departure from Busan gives that story its emotional center: he leaves home at thirteen, enters the demanding world of Big Hit Entertainment, and spends the next decade turning distance from his family into the discipline of performance.

A Major Southeastern City

Busan is described as South Korea’s second-largest city, located in the southeast and known for its sandy and pebbled beaches and steep coastal landscape. Although Seoul overshadows it economically and culturally, the book explicitly rejects the idea that Busan is backward. Its status matters because the standard BTS origin narrative reduces seven members from different hometowns to boys from outside the capital who move toward the center of national ambition. Busan therefore represents both genuine distance from Seoul and a fully developed urban world in its own right.

The city belongs to a wider map of origins that includes Gwacheon, Ilsan, Daegu, Gwangju, and Geochang. These places are not interchangeable: they mark the varied regional backgrounds of the seven members and expose the enormous perceived gap between Seoul and other parts of South Korea. Busan’s inclusion in that map gives BTS’s rise a provincial and national dimension before it becomes an international one.

Jungkook’s Childhood Home

Jungkook was born and raised with his parents and older brother in Mandeok-dong, a Busan neighborhood of square houses with brightly colored roofs resembling Lego blocks. The available account of his early life is limited, but the memories he does share are intimate and concrete. His father dressed as Santa Claus and slipped into Jungkook’s room at Christmas, his mother took him to a playground to play basketball at the end of the day, and his grandmother lovingly raised two chicks he had bought for a thousand won.

His parents gave him an unusually wide freedom for a Korean family of the period. They were not preoccupied with his grades, allowed him to pursue what interested him, and intervened mainly when he made a specific mistake, such as cheating on a spelling test. Jungkook consequently remembers childhood as happy and relatively free from the academic pressure imposed by many Korean parents. His gratitude toward his parents is tied to the fact that they let him do what he genuinely wanted.

The Departure for Seoul

Busan is also the place Jungkook leaves behind. When he was thirteen, he traveled alone for two hours by KTX toward Seoul, carrying his belongings from the train through a narrow lane near Hakdong Park to a plain apartment on Nonhyeon-ro 149-gil. The move was not a symbolic journey undertaken after childhood had ended; it was the beginning of his adolescence in training. He left the family home only two years before his first public video appearance, at a time when he was still young enough to experience the dormitory as an extension of homesickness.

The contrast between Busan and Seoul became physical in the trainee dormitory. Jungkook lived with roughly nine other teenagers in a modest two-room apartment of about 50 to 56 square meters near a convenience store in Nonhyeon-dong, Gangnam. When he missed his mother’s cooking, he ate instant ramen while crying and bought banana milk after rehearsals as a small consolation. Once the seven BTS members had been chosen, they moved into the “Blue House,” a third-floor apartment where all seven slept in one room on three bunk beds; the youngest Jungkook slept on a single mattress on the floor and waited until the others were asleep before bathing because of his shyness.

From Busan Audition to BTS

Before leaving Busan permanently, Jungkook’s first important public opportunity came in the city during the third season of Superstar K in 2011. Thousands waited outside the Busan Exhibition and Convention Center from early morning, entering audition booths covered in the program’s advertisements. Jungkook was thirteen and hopeful, but his audition was not broadcast. The recording was recovered years later from approximately two thousand preliminary auditions, showing him in an Evisu white long-sleeved shirt and black jacket, carrying a backpack and singing softly under the number B-71.

He first performed “Lost Child” and then chose “This Song” by 2am when asked to sing again. Jungkook did not advance, but seven agencies gave him business cards after recognizing potential in his gentle voice. He selected Big Hit, then the smallest and least successful of the companies that had approached him. His choice was influenced by pre-debut videos of RM, whose style recalled G-Dragon, and by his father’s recommendation of the company’s founder, Bang Si-hyuk. Busan thus becomes the scene of an apparent failure that redirects his life: rejection from the televised competition produces the contacts that lead him to BTS.

At Big Hit, Jungkook’s arrival helped change the group’s intended identity. BTS had initially been planned as a rap and production-centered hip-hop group, but his presence contributed to the shift toward an idol group combining rap, singing, and dance. Although he was the youngest member, he became the main vocalist, responsible for the most difficult vocal parts. The journey from the Busan audition booth to the role of central vocalist transforms the city from a place of origin into the first stage of a career that would eventually open paths for Asian artists in the West.

A Place of Memory and Scale

The emotional force of Busan persists because Jungkook’s later career repeatedly exposes the distance between public triumph and private origin. At a 2023 solo showcase for Golden in Seoul, he wondered aloud where he would have ended up had he never become an idol and remained incredulous when a fan insisted he would have succeeded at anything. His uncertainty recalls the boy who left Busan without knowing whether the choice would work. The book also connects his later reflections on lost childhood, accelerated maturity, and dependence on BTS to the fact that he never had ordinary time to discover himself outside the group.

Busan therefore functions as more than a hometown entry in a biography. It is the first threshold in Jungkook’s narrative identity: a recognizable family neighborhood, a city with its own scale and history, an audition site where he failed to advance, and the departure point for the cramped Seoul life that made his career possible. Its significance lies in the tension between rootedness and movement. Jungkook’s global image is built in stages, but the story begins with a child from Mandeok-dong carrying his belongings away from Busan toward an uncertain future.