The boy Named Ji Hoon.
A teenage boy, Ji Hoon used to question himself, why is he facing the kind of situation where his family had to starve, why is everything hard for him, why did the world turned its back to him. Numerous numbers of questions popped out on his head every day.
His mom was sick, his father was facing bankruptcy, and all that he could do is just watching. As a teenage boy who can do nothing, he was determined to change the fate of his family; he wanted to help his parents and protect his little sister. Situation got worse and the helpless young boy tried everything he could do to help his family and to save his dying mother. He even worked at the construction site at such a young age. As a high schooler, he was not able to focus on his study.
A ray of light seemed to lighten his way on 1998 when he was accepted as a member of a 6-membered boy band named FanClub. The light gets dimmer as the group didn’t get much response from the netizens as well as the people of South Korea. At that time, Koreans weren’t quite ready to accept the image of young cute teenagers singing and dancing on stage. The ray of light was completely vanished in the thin air when the group was then disbanded after releasing 2 full albums.
However, young Ji Hoon still believed that his future is there. He continued working hard and set his goal to be a successful solo artist. He failed an ample amount of auditions before he finally met Jin Young Park, a triumphant singer, producer as well as the founder of JYPe Company. Ji Hoon knew that this would be a colossal turning point of his life. He was persistent to give all he can. Park turned the music on and asked him to dance. Ji Hoon danced his heart off until the music stopped and that was about four hours non-stop. After the tiring dance, they asked him to go home. He thought that he wouldn’t make it just like the other auditions. They always told him that he’s good but he didn’t pass all of the auditions due to his mono-eyelids and his typical-Asian-Korean look.
A month passed without any news from JYPe. With his mother’s condition getting worse every day, Ji Hoon thought of giving up. Without proper medication, his mother lost the battle with her severe diabetes. At that time, he just gave up and decided to be a useless person. He was totally losing hope. He turned the house upside down with no one that could stop him. Not even his sister and his father. In his rampage, to his surprise, he found an account book along with a short hand-written note from his late mother under the bed. The quite amount of money is the money that his mother saved for him and his little sister for their future. She could just use the money to buy medicine for herself. Instead, she saved the money for her children. He will never ever forget his mother’s will for him to take care of his little sister. He promised to himself to change their lives and be someone that his mother will be proud of.
In the same year, he was recruited as a trainee of JYPe Company. During his early trainee days, he was a backup dancer of other JYPe artists. He was then trained separately from other trainees. After 2 years of suffering, facing some random challenges from Park Jin Young as well as his other seniors, not to mention, a quite amount of resistance, Jung Ji Hoon, finally was standing on his own feet on his very first solo stage with the title track of his first album, Bad Guy. He was there as Rain. A question was asked to JYP, ‘Why Rain?’, and he simply answered, ‘His small melancholic eyes shaped like rain drops and from now on, every time it is raining, people will remember him’.
To his disappointment, 2002 was not a good year for a new artist to make a debut. Instead of focusing on new faces in the K-pop industry, people were more interested in the Football World Cup game. Early that year, they chose to cheer the football stars name rather than cheering on the new singers. The senior singers once again tried to bring his hopes down by telling him to forget his dream.
Not wanting to give up, Ji Hoon once again went up the stage to promote his follow up track from the same album after the football fever is gone. Throwing aside the ‘Bad Guy’ image, he came with a fresh cute boy-ish image for ‘Instead of saying goodbye’, performing on stage with the big boxing gloves. Despite the weird concept of the song; sad lyrics with cheerful beat, he totally stole the heart of Koreans. He managed to prove it by being able to top the K-Chart within 2 weeks of promotion. By the end of the year, he swept all the newcomer awards from music programs in all TV stations in South Korea. His popularity raised up after a 20 seconds appearance with a weird but cool dance on a variety show called ‘Love Letter’.
Due to the quite late success, he then released a second album entitled ‘How to avoid the Sun’ and started to promote the title track, ‘Ways to avoid the Sun’ in 2003. He came with a new suave image with his unique sunglasses dance. Before the album, he made his debut as an actor in a drama, ‘SangDoo, let’s go to school’ as a leading role. The drama rating was quite good.
Ji Hoon continued his acting career in 2004. He starred in a popular drama called ‘Full House’. The drama was a big success that its copyright was sold to various countries including Malaysia. His performance in the drama won him The Best Actor Award in 2004. Just like the role he played in the drama, which is Lee Young-Jae, a big Asian star, his worldwide popularity kept rising. As his growing numbers of fans didn’t get enough of him in the drama, the release of his third album in 2004 was sold over a million copies in Asia. ‘It’s Raining’, the third album topped the chart in Japan, China, Taiwan, Thailand, Indonesia and of course his own country. The once helpless young boy had now taken all over the Asia.
Seeing the king size response from the fans, the company decided to launch this boy’s first ever world tour in 2005. The ‘Rainy Day 2005 Global Tour’ was a major success as a record of 150,000 seats sold in 8 cities and the ‘sold-out’ sign was out after only 30 seconds going on sale.
Rain’s ‘Clouds’ keep growing as he released his fourth album, ‘Rain’s World’ in 2006. In the same year, he acted in his first film, ‘I’m a Cyborg, but that’s okay’, a cute comedic film. The film was awarded the Alfred Bauer Award at the 57th Berlin International Film Festival.
Another tour was launched in December 2006. The ‘Rain’s Coming’ global tour, as expected was also a big hit. The K-pop wave, to be exact, the ‘Rain’ wave had totally invaded the whole Asia. The tickets sales were expected to be over US$100 million. He made his debut in Japan in the same year, releasing another album, ‘Eternal Rain’. He was the first Korean ever to perform at the Tokyo Dome, the largest auditorium in Japan.
2006 was indeed a lucky year for Jung Ji Hoon when he was mentioned in the Time Magazine in an article that named ‘100 Most Influential People Who Shape Our World’.
The next year, he made it into ‘People's’ 2007 list of the "Most Beautiful People in the world”. Rain also topped the Time Magazine’s online poll by earning almost half a million votes from people all over the world and sent Stephen Colbert to the second place on the list.
After earning so much honor and success, Ji Hoon made a decision to leave his ‘nest’, the JYPe. He flew away, found himself a comfortable place, and built a new ‘nest’ on his own. Park Jin Young, the man who raised his hands and bring Ji Hoon up, reluctantly accepted this situation and responded by saying, “..Instead of considering him as my younger brother, now I can only see him as another singer..”
In his own company, JTune Entertainment, he managed to stand on his own and released his fifth Korean album entitled ‘Rainism’ other than releasing a new boy band named MblaQ. The ballad title track of his album, ‘Love Story’ was loved by his fans and even more loved is the single that he released right after that, ‘Rainism’. In Rainism, he was back to the ‘bad boy’ image but with a softer heart inside. In 2008, he also acted in his first Hollywood film, the Wachowski Brothers-directed, Speed Racer. With his not-so-good English, he can only smile and said “I’m so excited” every time the reporters asked how he feel.
He got the leading role in his second Hollywood film, Ninja Assassin. Although the film was released in 2009, it took them almost a year to complete the preparation for the film. Rain undergo a hard hell-like training every day for 8 months only to get him the perfect body shape for portraying a real ninja. All his hard work was paid off when he the Biggest Badass Award at the 2010 MTV Movie Awards.
In December 2009, he launched the first JTune Entertainment tour, ‘Legend of Rainism’ in Las Vegas, Nevada. The tour continued to several cities worldwide.
Earlier this year, Rain released a special mini-album with the title, ‘Back to The Basic’. One of the tracks in the album, ‘Hip Song’ was listed in the Original Sound Track of the latest Jackie Chan’s movie, Karate Kid.
From his debut in 2002 until now, Rain had starred in numerous numbers of Commercial Film. He also did the Pepsi Commercial along with Cristina Aguilera that is usually starred by only top stars such as Super Junior and 2AM.
Jung Ji Hoon worked so hard to achieve what he get right now. He sticks to his motto, “Endless modest, endless endurance, endless effort”. When he’s asked why did he worked so hard, that he’s still in his twenties, he said that a person must do the best that he can in his live.
The once helpless boy named Ji Hoon who hated how the world turned its back to him, is now Rain, the person that got the whole world under his spreaded wings.
Rain Bi inspired me a lot. I wish if only I could get a little drop of his endurance, effort and spirit. Even with all the achievements, Rain is the Jung Ji Hoon that still unafraid to cry in front of the cameras, keep making silly jokes, brag at the right place and be humble where he should and most importantly, he still keeps his promise to his mother.
t/n : this was written in 2010.
p/s : Rain has now came back to his 'father'. the JYPe and his company, JTune Entertainment is now emerged with JYPe and JYP himself was elected as the CEO. Rain was not allowed to be involved in MblaQ's activities or promotions and planning anymore. Poor Rain. xD
p/p/s : btw, just wanna show that this baby boy never changed his face. xD
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