On Saturday morning, the line outside Junbi Matcha & Tea at 685 Market St. formed 30 minutes after the store’s noon opening time.
Mother-daughter pairs abounded. By the end of the first hour at Junbi, at least 60 people had cycled in and out, with a makeshift bouncer monitoring crowd flow. Tourists and joggers passing down Market Street snapped pictures of the line; perhaps this is another sign that SF is back, baby! Kind of.
If anything is back, it’s BTS, with a new album called Arirang released on March 20 after a hiatus of military enlistments and solo careers.
Various Army members (as in, the name of the seven-member boy band’s fanbase) were lined up for a Cupsleeve event thrown by a group called BTSF.
To the uninitiated, cupsleeve events are where devotees to a K-pop group make and give away themed drink sleeves and other free swag to anyone who buys a beverage. Often these are the domain of cheap-and-cheerful boba joints. Drink shops get a bump in sales; fans get a gathering spot to geek out and trade memorabilia. Junbi, as luck would have it, has its own partnership with BTS through a line of plushies and other merch.
On any given day, Junbi is not hurting for customers. Already, owner Brian Ng told Gazetteer SF, the shop has seen an uptick in customers during the blistering March heat wave. But, as with many businesses down Market Street, they’re surviving, if not necessarily thriving. The cupsleeve event, he explained, is part of a broader expansion of Junbi’s services. The devotion of fandom is a welcome shot in the arm for the shop, and for the stretch of Market between the Ferry Building and Union Square that still feels like a dead zone on weekends.
“We’re trying to do all kinds of crazy stuff,” said Ng. “That’s the only way you survive in the city.”
As I got in line to enter, I heard two young women’s early assessments of the new album. “Swim,” the group’s newest single, blared from a small speaker nearby.
“It’s very different, not in a bad way,” one said, cautiously. The other responded: “It’s very produced. It’s not bad, just different.”
Arirang, named after an elegiac Korean national folk song, is supposed to be a re-introduction to the group, and a return to its South Korean roots. The inclusion of A-list American producers like Diplo and Mike Will-Made-It, the fans I eavesdropped on said, feels antithetical to the pitch. An accompanying controversy about Howard University further places scrutiny on the group’s — and K-pop’s — complicated borrowing of Black American culture.
Diana Yu was among the devotees at Junbi. The forty-something Yu got into BTS during the pandemic, as did many other attendees. (A little bulletin board asked fans to place a heart next to the year they enlisted; a majority had put down 2020.) She’d been awake since 4 a.m., when a Netflix livestream of a BTS concert in Seoul started airing. She’s also going to three cities to see her boys: Stanford, Los Angeles, and London. Her bias? The doe-eyed Jimin.
Yu’s allegiance is perhaps surprising to outsiders, but not among K-pop heads, whose various commitments to their favorites are like badges of honor. It’s this kind of energy that businesses all over the city are hoping to tap into. Elsewhere in San Francisco, restaurants, bars, and K-pop store Saranghello have run with the BTS release and thrown listening parties and marketing campaigns to capture some share of this audience. BTSF organizer Bre Walker, a recent newcomer to San Francisco from Atlanta, promised that there would be plenty more San Francisco-centric events in the future.
The most notable, aside from their three-night stint at Stanford, is BTS leader RM has an exhibit at SFMOMA starting this October showcasing his personal art collection; the event is sponsored by BTS’ label, Hybe. “[RM] cares a lot about bringing Korean culture to more people,” Yu told me.
Six months is a long time to wait, but fan obsession runs deep. I ask Yu about the upcoming event, and if she thinks that fans will come from way outside San Francisco to see it.
She does. Little did I know that there’s even a term for BTS fans who partake in slow, meditative experiences like museumgoing — it’s called, in a reference to RM’s real name Kim Namjoon, “Namjooning.”
I walk out of Junbi, a mango-matcha concoction and a small bag of BTS-themed goodies in hand, and see Yu posing outside a makeshift step-and-repeat erected for the event. The line outside has stayed steady, but I notice that there aren’t any non-fans waiting for matchas.
SFMOMA, at least, will draw in Army wanting connection with their favorite boy group; only time will tell if anyone else will enlist.
