Ha Young Drops Out of Trauma Center Seasons 2 & 3 After Pro-Japanese Ancestor Scandal

Ha Young is out of Trauma Center seasons 2 and 3. Netflix confirmed on the 1st that "out of respect for the actress's wishes, Ha Young will not appear in the sequels to Trauma Center." She reportedly reached out to the production herself to say she couldn't continue, before the official statement landed.

The timeline here is tight: season 2 filming is scheduled to start in October, and until recently Ha Young had been listed alongside returning leads Ju Ji-hoon, Choo Young-woo, and Yoon Kyung-ho. Now the writers are looking at character and script revisions to account for her absence. Her character, trauma team nurse Cheon Jang-mi, was a significant presence in season 1.

How the controversy unfolded

The chain of events started on the 7th of last month, when Ha Young appeared on the KBS 2TV variety show Rooftop Troublemakers and talked openly about coming from a family of doctors stretching back four generations. That detail caught online attention fast, and not in the way she intended.

Researchers identified her great-grandfather as Ahn Sang-ho (1872–1927), a physician who practiced during Japan's colonial occupation of Korea. The records that surfaced were damaging. In a December 1918 interview with the Maeil Sinbo, a newspaper run by the Japanese Government-General, Ahn said he lived "exactly like a Japanese person," had no Korean clothing left, and avoided socializing with Koreans altogether. He also raised his children in Japanese style and served as an official physician to the Japanese royal household administration (the Yi Royal Family Office), a colonial governance body. The picture that emerged was not of a man who simply survived under occupation but one who actively aligned himself with it.

Ha Young's agency initially pushed back on the allegations. It then reversed course. Ha Young followed with a handwritten apology on the 12th, writing that she had "discovered the pro-Japanese record while looking into the materials myself" and that she "reflects on having mentioned the family history casually without properly understanding our country's painful history of Japanese colonial rule." She added that she "accepts the wrongdoing seriously and sincerely apologizes as a descendant."

The fallout kept spreading

The apology didn't stop the blowback. Ha Young and co-star Jung Hae-in canceled press interviews for their Netflix series This Damn Love after the controversy broke. The episode of Rooftop Troublemakers in which Ha Young mentioned her great-grandfather was pulled from the replay service. Her advertising deals are reported to have been terminated across the board.

The one project she hasn't exited is the SBS drama There's a Chance, where filming was already nearly complete with two days left when the scandal peaked. SBS has said it is "carefully in discussion" about scheduling, which is the kind of phrase that means nobody wants to commit to anything yet.

As for Trauma Center, season 1 director Lee Do-yoon is returning to helm the sequels and is also writing the scripts himself, an unusual double role that signals how much creative control the production is consolidating. The show's original source author, Lee Nak-jun, said on the 24th of last month that pre-production had wrapped and the team was scouting locations, with an October shoot looking likely. That timeline holds. Ha Young just won't be part of it.