In this previous post, I talked about a positive story made by the influence of social media. However, or I should say of course, social media had negative influence too.
Today, I would like to talk about a picture posted on Instagram that totally made Japan’s music program owe a huge loss.
BTS, also known as the Bangtan boys, is a seven-member South Korea boy idol group. The album they released in 2017 debuted at #7 on the Bilboard 200, the highest rank for an Asian artist in the history. The album sold over 1 million copies in Korea, in its first month, which achieved the highest monthly album sales in Korea’s chart history. In June 2017, Time magazine named the group one of the 25 most influential people on the internet, and this year, they gave a speech at the United Nations as ambassadors for UNICEF.
From this brief explanation, you can see how much power they have, even out of Asian countries, and because of their big power, many people are aware of their movements. Last month, a picture of BTS was posted on Instagram, which became into a big program. One of the members was wearing a T-shirt which had a print which reminds people of the atomic bomb dropped in Japan, during the end of World war Ⅱ, and a print which means Korean celebrating the atomic bomb drop in Japan. After this picture was posted, on several social media, many Japanese, including BTS fans, were sad and criticized the group. If they were just criticizing, it would not post about this story.
The truth is, BTS in so famous in Japan, and every time they release an album, they appear in Japan’s music programs. There is a data that shows when BTS come on those shows, almost all of the shows record the top 5 rating of the year. As a result, BTS is bringing many profit to these programs. However, after this post on Instagram, a huge amount of people claimed to these program, to cancel BTS coming on the show, throughout many medias, such as social media or TV interviews. Because the amount of claim was so big, every program had to cancel BTS’s appear, which could be the most loss of the year, for every program.
Through their official social media, the BTS side apologized saying that they had no intention to criticize Japan. However, now they are a group which has big influence around the world, so in my opinion, they have to be aware of each countries sensitive history.