Park Jin Woo is a Korean-Canadian writer, named one of the top up-and-coming writers by The Asian Canadian Writers’ Workshop (ACWW) in 2020. His fictional work, Oxford Soju Club, won the 2020 Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers’ Award. But some ARMYs know him better for his insightful analysis of BTS‘s works on his TikTok account.
A recent clip of him analyzing RM‘s mixtape mono is going viral on Twitter because of an unexpected detail he caught in one of the songs. Park explains that “Mono” is a highly autobiographical body of work, and the evidence lies in the very first song of the mixtape. The track is named “Tokyo,” and its first line says, “Wake up in Tokyo, feel like a torso, I know it’s time to go.” In the past four years, fans have come up with many interpretations for this line, but most of them focused on the meaning of the phrase “Feel like a torso.”
Park, however, explains that the first few words, “Wake up in Tokyo,” carry more significance here. “Wake Up: Open Your Eyes” was the title of BTS’s first-ever tour in Japan in 2015.
In a way, this is where it all began. Back in 2015, when the Japan tour happened, they weren’t very well-known, they were quite new. They could’ve easily disbanded, failed, like so many others. And that’s the thing about this album, even more than his other works. It’s a very personal one, I feel.
—Park Jin Woo
He further discusses how each song on the mixtape is an honest reflection of emotions and feelings that RM has experienced in his own life and are, therefore, uniquely his own.
He talks about his complex relationship with his own in ‘Seoul’. He talks about his inner struggle in Uhgood, his fatigue and desire to simply rest in ‘Forever Rain’.
—Park Jin Woo
The explanation of “Tokyo” specifically made an impression on many ARMYs who had never considered that the first line could be a direct reference than a poetic instrument.
@BTS_twt the "wake up in tokyo" reference wow mono is really a treasure i love discovering new meanings even after a while what a great artist you are joon pic.twitter.com/F4fVigGZsZ
— lau⁷ (@jvnggkuk) October 31, 2022
Why have I never seen 'wake up in tokyo' deciphered this way !?!??#@
This is what joon meant when he said he wants to make music ppl will listen over and over and say "ahh this is what he meant"pic.twitter.com/p45AHKOrAb
— ♡ (@JooniesPebble) October 31, 2022
Park went on to discuss how RM is often recognized for his genius lyricism, but in his opinion, the honesty and the vulnerability he dares to show in his work make him an incomparable artist. “He puts himself, his pains, his losses, his struggles all into his music, and it’s senseless to try to compare him to someone else,” he concluded.
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