Adapted from the novel by Min Jin Lee, creator Soo Hugh's Apple TV+ series “Pachinko” is an emotional, expressive retracing though history that honors how ...
“Pachinko” may not have the grandiose, accumulative power it seeks, but it does have many facets to recommend it, including the power of its storytellers, in front of and behind the camera. It’s far better at depicting this resilience than it is in building with it, creating episodes that have inherent sadness to them and a sense of danger and life, but don’t amount to a lot of momentum. The production design becomes its own emotional storytelling, with its focus on clothes as class, or any time it pauses to witness the creation of Korean food, while making us appreciate how rice from Busan is different from that in Japan. Part of the excitement in watching “Pachinko” unfold is in watching two exciting directors at work, Kogonada and Justin Chon, whose approach to filmmaking is almost like their best shots. Portrayed by Jin Ha, Solomon vividly depicts the dreams and hunger from previous generations placed onto younger ones; the desire to be in control of the money, instead of being stored away in crammed spaces like Sunja was for much of her life. Her father wanted her to know “there is such thing as kindness in the world” before he died, but she sees so little of that.
Meet Sunja, our heroine, as she survives growing up in Japanese-occupied Korea and a family curse. A recap of “Chapter One,” episode 1 of AppleTV+'s ...
The choice to tell this story in flashback is unique to Pachinko as a series. In Solomon, we see the very same forces that Sunja once looked in the eye as a young woman, keeping her back defiantly straight. He is beaten in public, and something hardens in child-Sunja — a will to live, a sense of endurance, a realization of the reality she inhabits. Also, as a Japanese speaker, I’m thrilled that they nailed the Osaka dialect and didn’t have everyone simply speaking standard Japanese. • We get a little glimpse of Anna Sawai in Solomon’s Tokyo office and the distinct sense she’ll be an important character later. Here, I wondered if shame is a reincarnation of the same curse, running through the family even as it endures through Japanese oppression. When we meet Sunja in Osaka as Solomon’s grandmother, we naturally wonder how she got there, how the bright-eyed hard-bargainer of a tween we met earlier could be this loving but sharp-tongued grandma, making pajeon in a kitchen. I wondered if Solomon was supposed to signify the end of the curse, a sort of American dream type answer in the form of a worldly, clean-cut young man aiming for a successful career. This nascent feeling of wrongness is solidified when a fisherman staying at the boarding house Sunja’s parents run gets drunk and speaks critically of the Japanese. Curses get invoked again when the fisherman says that hate is a curse. Sunja’s mom can’t just be scared for her family, instead she has to perform and be a good hostess, telling the soldiers they’re invited to eat at the boarding house anytime, despite their menacing presence. Beyond Sunja’s interactions at the fish market, it’s the first time we see up close and personal just how denigrating the occupying Japanese forces are toward the Koreans. I shivered a little at the end of the exchange when the soldiers, who had been threatening Sunja’s sweet father seconds ago, turned to Sunja’s mother and smiled, saying they had heard she was a good cook and that they’d like to try her food sometime. “Chapter One” begins in 1915 in Japanese-occupied Korea, opening on a distraught Korean woman who begs a mudang (Korean shaman woman) to save her unborn child from the early death that met her previous three children.
In an early episode of “Pachinko,” Korean American banker Soloman Baek concludes that Japanese businessman Katsu Abe is testing his loyalty, ...
Her parents left Korea, and due to her own upbringing in the U.S., much of her own survival was marked by attempts to feel a sense of belonging. We have these stories of superheroes who have powers and save the world. “A positive element of that is, you’re seeing a woman have incredible agency and control of how her future unfolds,” Chon said. The earlier episodes show his return to Japan in hopes of closing a business deal that he believes will earn him the promotion he deserves. Having largely grown up in the United States with a financial privilege that Sunja and his family have afforded him but did not have themselves, Solomon often tries to wash himself of his identity to advance his career. It carries on, making a heavy imprint on the behaviors, sacrifices and decisions of families for years to come.
We sat down with 'Pachinko' directors Justin Chon and Kogonada to hear about how they recreated multiple eras for the show and the locations that have ...
You couldn't plan any better in terms of going to set everyday, just the feeling you got of how special the place was. K: And the fog that was rolling in! There was not much to be done in terms of the setting because it was just so beautiful. The boarding house had a view of the mountains, and there are rice fields and a river that runs alongside. Kogonada: Yangdong. It's a folk village north of Daegu. It was incredible and we were able to build the boarding house right in the middle of someone’s backyard. Spanning multiple generations and told in three languages—Korean, English, and Japanese—Pachinko is a sweeping period piece that follows a Korean immigrant family through the eyes of its matriarch, Sunja, beginning in 1910 Yeongdo, a rural village near Busan, and ending amid the shimmering skyscrapers of New York some 70 years later.
Pachinko is a multi-generational epic that debuts on Apple TV Plus on March 25th, spanning nearly a century across Japan and Korea.
Grandmother Han painfully shares with Solomon that her children, born and raised in Japan, “don’t even know the language in which their mother dreams.” The Japanese occupation of Korea ripped away the ground of her homeland from beneath her feet, forced her to move to Tokyo, and then cleaved her native Korean tongue from her children and descendants. The area has turned into a dreary brown, ready for the development of Tokyo’s high-rises and towers, inviolable proof that the machines of cosmopolitanism and capitalist progress are alive and churning. To impress the upper management, he takes on the challenge of scooping up a final, tiny plot of land on a site in Tokyo marked for future hotel development. In these better juxtapositions, Pachinko’s achronological movements imbue the present with the gravity of the past and the sacredness of the grand stories of old. Yet, these bumps do not take away the shine from Pachinko — the sheer force and momentum of its story emphatically drive it from beginning to end. Even details like the subtitles — colored in yellow for dialogue in Korean and blue for Japanese — inscribe cultural nuance and complexity, demanding a less familiar viewer to engage actively with the text.
There's no dumbing down the history of colonialism and tension between Korea and Japan thanks to characters like Koh Hansu (Lee Min-Ho), a Korean-born ...
She is her family story, she is that living history, and the show’s commitment to her perspective makes it all the more touching and relatable. The experience of an immigrant who moves to a land where she doesn’t speak the language and is treated like a second-class citizen is not the experience of a second-generation man who struggles to balance his identities as Japanese and Korean. And they don’t need to be. At its core, Pachinko is about the intergenerational trauma of colonialism and immigration; it would have been easy to focus primarily on Solomon, learning and using Sunja’s story as a way to force him to confront his family’s past. Her painful past does not make him enlightened, similar to the seminal 1993 film Joy Luck Club. By prioritizing Sunja, Pachinko allows not only for her to have more agency and ownership of her own story, but for Sunja and Solomon’s experiences to stand on their own. Throughout the series, there are references to Noa, her eldest, but he never appears as an adult, and his nephew doesn’t seem to know he existed at all. Then there’s the question of how much Sunja’s son and grandson even know about her experience as an immigrant. As a teenager in the 1930s (the main timeline of the show) she is the victim of a racist attack, and later, after she moves to Japan, she and her family live as second class citizens. Pachinko consistently avoids veering into trauma porn; it’s clear that showrunner Soo Hugh respects the historical importance of how Sunja’s story fits into the horrors of the Japanese occupation, but they also understand that to focus on her suffering would erase the humanity of her story. And later, when Isak appears like a lifeline, proposing to her and offering to give her child his name, she is in even less of a position to turn him down. As an unwed pregnant teenager with no prospects, no money, and no reputation, Sunja is hardly in a position to turn down Hansu’s offer, but she does. There’s no dumbing down the history of colonialism and tension between Korea and Japan thanks to characters like Koh Hansu (Lee Min-Ho), a Korean-born businessman who embarks on an affair with Sunja. He works on behalf of the Japanese running the local fish market, and has learned how to find success in Japan as a Korean. Koh Hansu’s apparent allegiance to Japan makes him neither good, nor bad; instead it’s the way he treats Sunja that is the true test of his character. But Solomon is really an entry point into Sunja’s story, which takes up a bulk of the mini-series.
The eight-part adaptation of Min Jin Lee's novel captures the book's heavy, wide-ranging subject matter.
You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. Given the somber nature of most of Min Jin Lee’s popular and in many quarters beloved novel on which the series is based, it feels as if the show is using the recurring sequence as an antidote for itself. There are many distractions in and around the eight-episode epic “Pachinko,” including a multigenerational storyline, a multinational production and a multitude of characters, but what lingers on the palate is the credit sequence—which is not a good thing, even if the strategy behind it is logical.