Why Japan Made an Exception for Jimin's "Who"
Why Japan Made an Exception for Jimin's "Who"
As of February 28, 2026, Jimin's "Who" had surpassed 144.8 million cumulative streams on Spotify Japan's all-time chart, sitting at No. 40 overall. That makes it the highest-ranking, highest-streaming song ever posted by a K-pop soloist on that specific chart. Widen the frame to include group tracks, and only one K-pop song outstreams it in Japan: BTS's own "Dynamite."
The raw number is impressive, but it is not the detail that should catch an industry observer's attention. That would be Spotify Japan's official 2025 year-end "Wrapped" list, where "Who" landed at No. 10 among all songs streamed in the country that year — the only non-Japanese-language track to crack the top ten. Japan's streaming charts are among the most domestically self-contained of any major market: J-pop acts, anime theme songs, and long-running local franchises typically fill out the entire annual top tier, leaving little room for foreign-language releases to gain a foothold, let alone hold one for twelve months.
What makes "Who" an outlier is less a single spike than an unusual streaming shape over time. The song was released in July 2024, yet it was still gaining ground on Spotify Japan's all-time chart a year and a half later, in February 2026. Most catalog tracks — hits included — settle into a fixed position on all-time rankings well inside their first year, because fresh streams get diluted against a cumulative total that already includes the release-week surge. A song still climbing an all-time chart 19 months after release points to listeners actively returning to it, not a promotional cycle that ran its course and faded.
That kind of return behavior doesn't build overnight. BTS has spent more than a decade cultivating one of the deepest overseas fan bases any non-Japanese act has assembled in Japan, filling arenas and stadiums there since the mid-2010s. "Who" reads as that infrastructure being channeled into a solo release rather than a group comeback — which also explains why "MUSE," the album it comes from, finished as Spotify Japan's top-ranked K-pop album for 2025 (No. 13 overall), despite solo BTS output generally lacking the built-in radio and sync placement that a full group comeback receives in Japan.
The practical takeaway for anyone watching K-pop's performance in Japan: "Who" is not proof that the market has broadly opened up to K-pop solo acts. The rest of Spotify Japan's 2025 top ten staying entirely domestic argues against that reading. It is closer to proof that one artist's decade-long, market-specific fan relationship can produce a streaming curve that looks structurally different from a typical hit — a lower initial peak, a much longer tail, and a total that keeps compounding long after most releases, domestic or foreign, have already leveled off.
Sources: STARNEWS Korea, KStarTrend
