Pachinko: A History That Transcends Yesterday

History has failed us, but no matter. This chilling opening line from the best-selling novel Pachinko is a masterful portrait of the Korean diaspora who persevered to carve a place in this complex, unforgiving world. In this season of change, dive into the television adaptation of Pachinko and learn to appreciate the legacies of those who came before, whose resilience many Koreans owe their sacred existence to.

Hope Amidst Tragedy

-A Korean Japanese Story, Told by a Korean American

Pachinko is a historical fiction novel that features poignant stories intertwined across four generations of a family whose roots began in Korea but eventually spread to Japan. The book was written by Lee Min-jin, a New York-raised Korean American author, no stranger to the often-untold Korean diasporic experience. Since its publication in 2017, Lee’s novel has gained much acclaim, even ranking on the New York Times Best Seller list. Eventually, Pachinko was adapted into a drama series on the streaming service Apple TV+, where its first season aired in March 2022. The show uses a nonlinear narrative, constantly shifting between the timeline of a young girl living in a Japanese-occupied Korea in the early 1900s and another one of her in late 1980s Japan as an elderly woman with an American-educated grandson. It crosses over the past and present by fading shots and creating paralleling scenes, entrapping the audience with the unsettling trauma of yesterday that ripples through the lives of today. Without further ado, here is a rundown of all one needs to know before immersing oneself into the freshly wrapped, second season of Pachinko’s all-engrossing yet emotionally intimate family saga.

-Synopsis (*Spoiler Alert)

In a small fishing village in Korea under Japanese rule, a bright-eyed young merchant named Sunja locks eyes with Hansu, a wealthy fish broker with ties to a crime syndicate. They enter a romantic relationship until she becomes pregnant with his child. It is only then that Hansu reveals that he is married, offering to support her as a mistress regardless. Refusing to live a life of shame, Sunja declines. Later, she meets a minister named Isak, whom she marries and embarks on a journey with to an unfamiliar land called Japan. Fast forward to a skyscraper-studded New York City, where Sunja’s grandson, an investment banker named Solomon, fails to receive a promotion. As such, he proposes that he be given a higher position if he can successfully close a stalled business deal by persuading Han Geumja, an elderly Korean woman in Japan, to sell her land. Desperate, he even uses his grandmother to join a meal with them, hoping that their generational bond will cajole Geumja. Separated by decades but connected through a single lineage — will Sunja and Solomon emerge triumphant amid the respective chaos in their lives?

Shaped by the Shadows of Yesterday

To fully appreciate Pachinko, it is essential to contextualize it within the tragic history of Korea and its influence on everyday people. Imperial Japan colonized the Korean Peninsula from 1910 to 1945, wherein they committed numerous atrocities to take control. Many Koreans were pushed into a life of forced labor under inhumane conditions abroad and taken as sexual slaves or “comfort women” for the military. Like Sunja, some also had no choice but to leave their home country amid dire poverty. However, Japan was not the perfect land of opportunity they had hoped for, but rather a continuation of the injustices they received back home. The work’s title, Pachinko, a Japanese term that refers to a vertical pinball game often used for gambling, reflects the unfair treatment that cornered these Korean immigrants into slums and demeaning jobs. Many Japanese individuals avoided the pachinko business due to its morally gray legality, making it one of the few livelihoods marginalized Koreans could practice, including Solomon’s father, Mozasu. In contrast, it also represents everything that their Japan-born, but ethnically Korean descendants had difficulty coming to terms with. For instance, Solomon pursues a conventional form of corporate success to establish himself outside of the connotations that long followed their minority, including those that his father’s pachinko parlor displayed. Yet, it is ironic that the very opportunities he gained were only made possible by the money earned from the same business he distances himself from, highlighting the constant clash of his identities. Caught between the two nations that supposedly shape him, Solomon grapples with making it as a perpetual foreigner in a society away from either country he struggles to call home.

Parallels Across Generations

-A Luxury Called the Taste of Gohyang

A plain bowl of rice, as unassuming as it looks, can evoke feelings buried inside the hearts of many, including the past they left in their homeland or gohyang. Before Sunja leaves for Osaka with Isak, her mother, Yangjin, decides to gift her what she does best: a homemade meal. Yangjin carefully tends to the handful of rice she barely manages to procure — a priceless rarity then strictly reserved for Japanese individuals — and steams it to fluffy white perfection. After taking a spoonful, Sunja’s eyes immediately well up as she holds back her tears and savors every bite, trying to engrave the taste of home into her memory. This scene is paralleled in another episode where Sunja is taken back to this very moment decades down the line. During a meal with Solomon at Geumja’s home, she immediately notices the distinct sweetness and nuttiness of gohyang’s rice. On the contrary, Solomon does not understand what makes the rice special as he had countless bowls as a staple of every meal, underlining the intense dichotomy of their lives.

-An Emotion That Reverberated through the Decades

On the boat to Japan, Sunja and Isak go down a staircase to a packed third-class compartment, which is juxtapositioned with the first-class deck, where a Korean opera singer is performing an Italian aria. In a room of watchful Japanese eyes, she suddenly switches to belting a Korean folk song that travels down to the bottom deck, where Korean workers sing along in unison. However, everything comes to a halt when the singer takes a knife to her neck, refusing to live as a songbird forever trapped in a cage. Moving forward to 1989, all greed-filled Japanese and American eyes are on Geumja. As they wait for her to sign her land away, she asks Solomon if he would let his grandmother push through the sale even if every drop of blood in her system was stopping her. Although Solomon was previously convinced that he was doing good by letting Geumja move on from the past through financial compensation, a switch goes off within him: he tells her not to sign. Suddenly, he runs down the stairs and throws away his necktie — a symbol of legitimate success that distanced him from his pachinko-reminiscent identity. Under the pouring rain, he walks out to see a band performing and surrenders himself to the music, dancing away the pent-up, unexplainable feeling in his gut. Solomon finally unleashes the han that ran through the blood of his ancestors — an internalized sense of deep sorrow and resentment accumulated throughout the nation’s long history of suffering, an emotion that many Koreans live through despite all.