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Yoo Seung-joon apologizes, asks for return to Korea on Internet TV interview

May 19, 2015
Yoo Seung-joon (screen capture from AfreecaTV)

Yoo Seung-joon (screen capture from AfreecaTV)

Thirteen years after deportation from South Korea, former K-pop star Yoo Seung-joon knelt onto his knees and shed tears in his first Korean broadcast interview since.

“If I could turn back time, I wouldn’t think twice about doing my military service,” he said during a buzzed-about AfreecaTV interview Tuesday.

The talk was hosted by director Shin Hyun-won.

Yoo, 39, said the interview was not intended as a confession or a place for excuses, but an apology for his mistakes.

“After debuting in China, I’ve starred in 14 films and been in a 60-episode drama,” he said. “I’m not here doing this for the money.”

Yoo is currently signed under JC Group International, led by Jackie Chan.

He said he did not have the courage to come on Korean broadcast, and that until last year, his dignity would not let him.

“But I realized too late that everything had been my fault, and that’s why I’m here,” Yoo said.

Yoo said he is still banned from stepping on Korean soil.

He said he sent a request to South Korea last July to enter military service, ready to give up his American citizenship, but was denied because of his age.

The singer/actor was one of Korea’s biggest pop stars from the mid-1990s to the early 2000s. Following public announcements that he would enlist in the mandatory 21-month military service, he became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 2002 and was branded a deserter by the South Korean government, which deported and banned him from the country.

Yoo denied accusations that his plan had been to avoid military service. He said he was urged by his father, who was living in the U.S. with the rest of his family, to attend the citizenship interview knowing that receiving U.S. citizenship again would become more difficult following 9/11.

Yoo said his choice to take U.S. citizenship was affected by his father and from being the sole talent of his agency, which was dependent on him carrying out activities for his sixth and seventh albums after signing a roughly $3.3 million contract.

“I ask you to give me a chance to step on Korean soil again,” he said in a message to Korea’s Military Manpower Administration. “I apologize for the mistakes I made when I was young.”