With the members hailing from different countries, rookie K-pop group 1Verse (pronounced ‘universe’) is still navigating through their life in South Korea.
The quintet debuted in July 2025 with Hyuk and Seok, both 25-year-old North Korean defectors, Japanese member Aito, 20, and American members Nathan, 25, and Kenny, 23, who are of Lao-Thai and Chinese descent respectively.
Hyuk is currently on hiatus due to personal and health reasons.
In a recent interview with AsiaOne, the remaining four active members detailed their struggles over cultural differences between their home country and South Korea.
While global citizenship classes helped them learn about different countries and cultures, the South Korean language is still something Seok is struggling with, and he still can’t have a “full, deep conversation” with his teammates.
The North and South Korean language is very different, he said.
“Not only is the pronunciation different, but people in South Korea use different words. There’re a lot of English words said in Korean, and so I didn’t know any of those words,” he explained, adding in South Korea, he communicates better with older people rather than those his age.
The way people do things in both countries is “incredibly different” too. He added: “I went to the bank, I put a credit card into the ATM, and it wouldn’t come out for 30 minutes. I didn’t know what to do. I just stood there.”
He later got a teller to help and realised he had put his card in the wrong way, and it got stuck in the machine.
“This was a very small task. Every task I had to do was new and I couldn’t figure it out… I had to think to myself, like, how do I live in this new world?” he recalled.
He also had the impression that he would “earn a lot of money” and live in a new house when he was going to South Korea. But he realised that everyone had to “climb up from the bottom”.
Maknae (youngest member) Aito recalled having a difficult time leading the group’s choreography when he was new to the group.
“I wasn’t really used to or close to all the members yet. And in Japan, whenever you teach someone who is older, you can’t really speak directly about what they’re doing wrong or what they should do. You have to indirectly hint they might not be doing it right,” he explained.
The members then sat him down and told him he needed to be direct. He recounted: “For me, that was a lot of pressure. I wasn’t used to it, and I felt like I had to be a little too direct and that made me very emotional.”
Nathan, who said Aito’s “so good” at being direct now, also needed time to adjust to the “big city life” in Seoul.
For example, calling an older male “hyung” felt strange at first. “Back in America, I would talk to my cousin, who’s 30 years old, like, ‘Yo, I’m bored. You want to go eat?'”
‘Biggest triumph’
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When AsiaOne asked about their journey as a group for the past six months, Kenny laughed as he told us he had a “quarter-life crisis”, with people his age now going through university graduation.
“There is this idea of the next step and already being there. However, I quickly realised the real world is very, very different, and reaching a goal doesn’t mean that you’ve made it. It just means it’s the start of something, and that start, I never really thought about until now,” he explained.
Now, he’s trying to find his identity: “I have to learn, ‘What do you want besides debuting?’ That’s what I’m trying to dissect. What am I? What is Kenny in the real world?”
Meanwhile, Aito talked about their upcoming world tour being their “biggest triumph” so far.
The world tour started this month with 11 shows across the US and Canada running through February and will be followed by more than 10 concerts in Europe in April.
“I think just us being able to go on a world six months into debut is a feat itself, just to have all the fans support us, to be able to go. I’m very excited and happy,” he said.
For Seok, who has never been on vacation or gone out of Korea, travelling to the US – a country that he has heard about his whole life – is a “very big milestone”.
“Not just going there to do anything else, but to meet our 5tarz (fandom name). That’s very special to me. There’s a lot that I was able to prepare, and it really makes me happy that I’m able to achieve this feat in life. There’s still a long way to go, but it feels like a good start,” he shared.
Kenny agreed: “The fact that we’re able to do a tour and get it mostly sold out… When we did the fan meeting, we were like, ‘Oh, we might need to change venues because we had a lot more anticipation for our music and journey than we thought.’ It’s been a whirlwind of emotions.”
The shows were initially scheduled to begin last year, but Seok and Aito’s visas were delayed. Their agency Singing Beetle arranged free fanmeets for ticket-holders, where Aito was present while Nathan and Kenny performed for fans. The tickets would still be valid for the postponed tour.
Kenny said the world tour consists of stops in the US and Europe and not Asia because they received offers to perform in the first two.
“If it was offered to us, if we were able to communicate and make the plan and make it happen, we’re going to go,” he explained.
Nathan wanted to add on and express his appreciation for their fans: “We’re just so grateful for our 5tarz, for supporting us from wherever they are, supporting us through online platforms… I want to meet them, perform for them and give our thanks for these short weeks.”
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