South Korean military conscription

South Korean military conscription is a compulsory institution rooted in the country’s unresolved security situation and experienced by men as both a civic duty and a major interruption to ordinary life. In the book, it becomes especially consequential for BTS: military service threatens to halt the group’s momentum at the height of its global fame, yet the members’ willingness to serve together transforms an imposed interruption into an expression of collective responsibility and loyalty.

Historical and Civic Foundations

South Korea’s military recruitment is traced back to the Three Kingdoms period, when repeated foreign invasions made military participation a recurring necessity. Conscription became mandatory in 1949, several years after the end of the Japanese occupation in 1945, and became indispensable after the Korean War began the following year. The war never formally ended; it was suspended by the 1953 armistice rather than concluded by a peace treaty. That unresolved conflict remains part of the country’s background consciousness. Seoul lies only about 55 kilometers from the Demilitarized Zone, so the possibility of renewed violence is not an abstract historical concern but a persistent, if often muted, presence in everyday life.

The institution therefore carries a meaning beyond employment in the armed forces. Military service is described as an unfortunate necessity even after decades of relative peace, a duty and rite of passage expected of Korean men. Publicly, men are expected to accept it with patriotic pride and to complete it with a smile; privately, their expressions are often much darker. The social expectation is reinforced by a collective idea of fairness: because the danger and sacrifice are supposed to be shared, conspicuous attempts to avoid service provoke intense condemnation.

Rules, Duration, and the Cost of Time

Under the rules described for the period when Jungkook enlisted, men between eighteen and thirty-five were eligible for service and generally had to complete it before turning twenty-eight. Women were not required to serve, although they could volunteer. Physical and psychological examinations determined fitness. Those judged unfit for active military duty could qualify for social-service positions, including administrative work such as monitoring subway stations, though those assignments required a longer period of service. The standard term, once two years, had been reduced to approximately eighteen months in 2022.

The book emphasizes that the most painful feature is not only physical exhaustion, military hierarchy, or the possibility of hazing, but the loss of nearly two years of youth. That loss is particularly severe for K-pop idols, whose work depends on displaying youth, beauty, energy, and continuous public visibility. Shaving the head is thus both a practical military requirement and a symbolic ceremony: it marks a temporary departure from idol life and a return to civilian identity. On completion, the conventional greeting is that the returning man has become a man. The change can signal maturity and new possibilities, but it also marks the abrupt end of a career phase, less like a natural transition than a plant being pulled out by its roots.

For male performers, the interruption is intensified by the speed of the entertainment industry. More than a hundred new groups can enter the market in a year, and many famous groups have already been weakened by internal conflict, inflated egos, contract disputes, or artistic disagreements. The prospect that military service might coincide with a decline in popularity therefore produced widespread anxiety about BTS’s future. Foreign audiences, unfamiliar with the cultural and political nuances of Korean service, could interpret the interruption simply as a career setback, while Korean audiences understood it as an obligation embedded in national life.

Avoidance, Equality, and the BTS Act

Attempts to evade or manipulate enlistment have occurred, but they are kept discreet because openly expressing a desire to avoid service can destroy public trust. The book cites cases ranging from deliberately gaining weight or failing psychological examinations to more serious allegations. The singer MC Mong was convicted in 2011 after allegedly removing teeth unnecessarily to postpone enlistment. In 2023, Ravi of VIXX left his group amid suspicions that he had participated in a scheme involving a military broker who allegedly helped more than forty people falsify medical conditions. Yoo Seung-jun became an especially notorious case after postponing enlistment to travel to Los Angeles, obtaining United States citizenship, renouncing Korean citizenship, and losing the right to enter South Korea; his latest attempt to obtain a visa was denied in September 2024.

These cases illuminate why fairness matters so strongly. The book places the conscription debate within a society marked by serious inequality, including the highest gender wage gap among Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries in 2022 and the second-fastest-growing income inequality rate in 2023. In such circumstances, unequal treatment in military service is easily understood as another form of privilege. Even celebrities who serve in relatively comfortable civilian assignments may be viewed suspiciously, and documented injuries can be examined as possible evidence of special treatment.

There are precedents for exemptions based on achievements believed to enhance South Korea’s international prestige. Athletes such as Son Heung-min and the esports player Faker received exemptions after winning gold medals at the Asian Games, and pianist Seong-Jin Cho was exempted after winning the 2015 International Chopin Piano Competition. BTS arguably contributed more to South Korea’s global visibility than many athletes, but the criteria for extending such privileges to idols remained politically contentious. A medal on a podium is easier to measure than cultural influence, and the question of why one celebrated Korean should serve while another should not threatened to become an especially divisive contest.

In 2020, the National Assembly’s National Defense Committee approved the measure popularly called the BTS Act. It allowed a pop-culture artist recommended by the Minister of Culture, Sports and Tourism for significantly improving South Korea’s image at home and abroad to postpone service for two additional years, permitting enlistment at thirty rather than twenty-eight. The amendment argued that young pop artists often achieve their greatest accomplishments in their twenties and that interrupting their careers at their peak could harm both the artists and the nation. The measure postponed service; it did not settle the more controversial question of complete exemption.

BTS’s Collective Decision

BTS members never requested an exemption and appeared reluctant to accept one, in part because the group’s public identity as a national source of pride would have suffered if it seemed to receive unequal treatment. Jin announced his enlistment in December 2022 at age thirty, followed by J-Hope in April 2023 at twenty-nine and SUGA at thirty in September. RM enlisted in December. The younger members—Jimin, V, and Jungkook—could have waited roughly three more years, but chose to enlist alongside the others.

That decision differed from the usual strategy among K-pop groups. Groups commonly enlist in waves so that some members can remain publicly active and continue releasing music while others serve. Staggering the process limits commercial damage, whereas BTS’s coordinated approach accepted a sharper collective interruption. The decision made military service part of the group’s shared history rather than an individual burden distributed across several years.

Jungkook’s own conduct gave the choice an intimate dimension. On December 8, a few days after the group’s last live broadcast, he spoke to ARMY after a run, wearing a black cap over his newly shaved head. Sitting in his apartment beneath orange lighting saved under the name “izakaya,” he admitted that he was sad when fans said they were sad, while also presenting enlistment as something every Korean man must eventually do. The moment exposed a divide between the public BTS idol expected to enlist with a patriotic smile and the private young man acknowledging the emotional cost.

Jungkook could have postponed service because he was the youngest member and had only just released his first solo album. The book interprets his immediate enlistment not simply as loyalty to the country but as loyalty to BTS. He later stated that BTS mattered more to him than his solo work, and during the group’s final broadcast he was visibly moved while speaking about missing the boy group’s dressing rooms and rehearsals. Conscription consequently became a test of belonging: it interrupted his individual career, but it also allowed him to remain aligned with the group’s collective path.

Military Identity and the Loss of the Idol Self

Jungkook and Jimin entered the Army’s Fifth Infantry Division in December 2023 in Yeoncheon County, Gyeonggi Province, approximately sixty kilometers north of Seoul, where Jin was already serving as an assistant instructor. After five weeks of basic training, Jungkook became a cook, chopping vegetables and preparing large quantities of meat for soldiers. Apart from the single word “Unity,” posted on Weverse on January 17, 2024 as the division’s motto, he remained absent from social media until March, when he returned with a brief greeting to ARMY.

The change from global pop star to enlisted soldier is presented as more than a change of workplace. Jungkook’s career had been built around continuous performance: singing, dancing, styling, livestreams, fan interaction, and the carefully managed visibility of idol life. Conscription removed him from that system and placed him inside a collective institution where rank, routine, and national duty superseded individual branding. His military role as a cook made the transformation especially ordinary. The voice associated with stadiums and international broadcasts was now attached to the practical work of feeding other soldiers.

The interruption also converged with Jungkook’s deeper uncertainty about identity. In “My Time,” he reflects on being forced to mature quickly and on living as though his life were a film performed for other people’s entertainment. He had achieved the dreams of becoming a pop star and the “cool” artist he once wanted to be, but the song also registers what those achievements cost: childhood, relationships, and time. He had rarely been allowed to discover who he was outside BTS. Conscription, arriving after the group’s pause and his solo debut, therefore became both an imposed absence and an interval in which the question of selfhood could no longer be deferred.

The institution’s significance lies in that double movement. Military service subjects the idol body to national discipline, interrupts the commercial circulation of youth, and demands public proof of equality. Yet for BTS, the same interruption became a collective act that protected the group’s moral standing and reinforced its internal bond. Jungkook’s service does not erase the grief of lost time, but it places that grief within a shared civic and artistic history: a moment when the idol steps out of the spotlight, serves alongside other men, and returns not unchanged but with a different relationship to adulthood, duty, and the group that remains central to his identity.