tvN ‘You Quiz on the Block’

Actor Lee Jun-young looked back on the brutal training he went through in Japan and the fiercely competitive rookie days during his time promoting with U-KISS.

On the July 8 broadcast of tvN ‘You Quiz on the Block’, Lee Jun-young appeared and revealed behind-the-scenes stories from his time as a U-KISS member.

Recalling the time he joined U-KISS, which was very active in Japan, Lee confessed that he even had to undergo special training to overcome the language barrier. He said, “The older U-KISS members spoke Japanese fluently, but I could only manage greetings and was not good at it. So I had to do a mission called ‘Find the dorm from the middle of Shibuya’.”

tvN ‘You Quiz on the Block’

He continued, “It was brutal. They dropped me in the middle of Shibuya and said, ‘Find your way, to the dorm.’ Because I could not speak the language, they also took my phone. They let me off in front of Tower Records, and I went up from there; with clumsy English and Japanese, it took me four hours to cover a 15-minute distance. I thought, ‘I must learn Japanese no matter what’,” he recalled.

As a new member joining the team, his efforts to catch up with the existing members were extraordinary. Lee Jun-young said, “I joined a group that was already active, so even when promotions ended, I still had a lot to do. I had to re-record and have the choreography prepared. Within three weeks, I mastered more than twenty songs. Altogether, it came to about that many. I had to get it done. I wanted to do what they had been doing even better. I did it every day. When a music show ended, the older members went home, and I went to the practice room. I stayed at the company longer than the trainee friends.”

He then added, recalling those intense rookie days, “If someone asked, ‘Would you go back and do it again?’ I do not think I could. That is how hard I worked.”