Pachinko

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.

Apple TV+'s stunning adaptation of Min Jin Lee's novel is a complete triumph that will leave you aching for more.

Lee Minho's Hansu, a charismatic bureaucrat Sunja first meets in her village, wakes her up to the world's possibilities and its potential cruelties. Hugh's script makes the most of Youn's talent for finding Sunja's malleability in hard moments, giving her the way of a matriarch who refuses to apologize past circumstances, choose instead to be heard, understood and respected. In the times Chon and Kogonada lock the camera on her as those around her are talking, her silence or a stoic tear tumbling down her cheek are the details that slay the scene. These minute visuals collaborate with the dialogue to evoke grandeur in the lives of a family that traces its lineage to a fishing village in Busan, Korea and through the life of a woman named Sunja, tenderly played by Minha Kim as a young woman and Academy Award winner Yuh-Jung Youn (" Minari") as an elder. Sunja as a young, uneducated woman in 1920s and 1930s Korea could not fathom the champagne problems her career-driven grandson Solomon deals with. Part of this was a matter of correct categorization, but in main, I simply could not accept that these episodes as a one and done affair.

The eight-part adaptation of Min Jin Lee's novel captures the book's heavy, wide-ranging subject matter.

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. You may cancel your subscription at anytime by calling Customer Service. 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.

Minha Kim in 'Pachinko,' premiering on Apple TV+. (CNN) With the sweep of a historical epic and a format that focuses on ...

That she did, and for those unaware of this history, parts of the series -- adapted from Korean-American author Min Jin Lee's book -- will surely provide an education. With a gleam in her eye and the weight of all the hardship she has borne in her expressions, Youn should be in the conversation to collect additional trophies, although the ensemble nature of the story makes it difficult for any one of the principals to stand apart. As a little girl, Sunja's father tells her, "I would do anything to keep the ugliness of the world from touching you."

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.

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.

When Japan annexed Korea in 1910, the occupation was more than just a political reality. As Korean resistance met with ever harsher responses from the ...

Yes, this adaptation is less than perfect; the disservice it does to the structural integrity of a novel that gains momentum and poignancy as the decades progress shouldn’t be understated. The overall impression is of an epochal masterpiece cut into snippets and reassembled out of order. And this eight-episode first season (of four that Hugh hopes to make) patiently fills in the intervening decades, though not with the simplistic tale of immigrant bootstrapping that newcomers to Lee’s story might expect. In one of the two parallel narratives, set in the ’30s, a teenage Sunja (played with grace, vulnerability, and grit by Minha Kim) becomes entangled with a Korean businessman, Koh Hansu (South Korean megastar Lee Min-Ho), whose flexible morals have helped him prosper in Japan. Their romance catalyzes her departure for Osaka—although, again, not for the reason you might assume. Then the action jumps three-quarters of a century and halfway around the world, to New York in 1989. Spanning most of the 20th century, Pachinko opens in the woods of rural, Japanese-occupied Korea in 1915.

Usually epic stories need to involve a dragon of some kind, or at least a healthy amount of fantastic CGI. But “Pachinko,” the new Apple TV+ series created ...

That decision to treat all storylines as equally immediate and accessible is part of why every aspect of “Pachinko” feels connected, and its story all the more momentous as it weaves from the early 1920s to the late 1980s and back again. “It wasn’t just the Koreans who sat with the Koreans [or] the Japanese who sat with the Japanese. It was this mix. “We [wanted to make sure] that these characters who live in the past don’t feel like they’re at an arm’s throw from us.” The series switches seamlessly between three languages — English, Korean, and Japanese — to tell the story of a family of Korean immigrants to Japan (and America) led by matriarch Sunja, who is played as a child by Yu-na Jeon, as an adult by Minha Kim, and as a grandmother by Youn Yuh-jung. “Even though this is a very specific Korean story, this is not a Korean show. Usually epic stories need to involve a dragon of some kind, or at least a healthy amount of fantastic CGI. But “ Pachinko,” the new Apple TV+ series created by Soo Hugh and directed by Kogonada and Justin Chon, sets out to be an epic about ordinary human stories.

As Koh Hansu and Sunja's romance, Solomon hears from a long-lost love. A recap of “Chapter Two,” episode 2 of AppleTV+'s 'Pachinko.' Starring Youn Yuh-jung ...

Maybe in the elevator with Tom, Solomon believed that self-interest was king, but here, on the phone with his childhood love, Solomon seems like he would drop everything and do anything to find Hana again. It’s not a total cheat so much as it tips the odds in the favor of the business, but when the young worker expresses his misgivings, Mozasu reassures him, saying that everyone does this. • Mozasu also signs the loan documents for his second pachinko parlor, and I have a terrible feeling the bank will deny his loan. I think this is meant to be a commentary on the beauty of the home and homeland. He brings a gift to the Korean landowner blocking a big deal for his bank, and tries to sweet-talk the old lady who refuses to sell her house. When the friend makes a quip about the son of a pachinko parlor doing as well as Solomon has, Solomon reminds the friend of a comment he made in grade school, that Koreans must have been raised by dogs. Later, in an elevator leaving a business meeting, Solomon’s white counterpart Tom asks Solomon who he thinks will win, “Godzilla or Superman.” He’s asking whether Solomon thinks Japan or the United States will triumph in the economic contest that was the late ’80s and early ’90s, but Solomon replies that the question doesn’t interest him. The friend laughs it off, but there’s a razor edge to the scene that lets us know, although he is financially well-off, Solomon’s situation isn’t so far from Sunja being ridiculed by Japanese men 70 years in the past. Koh sees her with the small fish and scolds her — doesn’t Sunja know that there’s a deficit in the fish market if they don’t allow fish to grow to their full size before selling them? She asks him if he will throw away this shirt, referencing the gossip she’d heard about him earlier, and when he seems confused by this, she masks her embarrassment by telling him to come to the cove the next day so she can wash his dirtied shirtsleeves. Koh finds Sunja at the cove the next day and asks if he can come back again sometime while she is doing the laundry. But Sunja is unfazed and responds that the deficit in fish means the Koreans would have to fight for scraps, but they’re already fighting for scraps under Japanese rule.

Born into poverty on occupied land, Sunja (played at different ages by Minha Kim and Yuh-Jung Youn) emigrates from Busan to Osaka just before World War II.

Kogonada: I think we were one of the first big productions to deal with the protocols. I block where the actors are going to be, and then we move through the space, follow it like you would a play, and try to capture everybody in their moments. That scene in particular, the goodbye, we designed it the way I like to work a lot. I’ve heard people say this and I think it’s true, at the end of the day you always feel that you don’t have enough time. Kogonada: The biggest difference for us is that as independent filmmakers, we know when we’re shooting a scene exactly how we’re going to cut it. When someone like Y-J knows she has to go through certain emotions, you discuss if she wants to go through the scene first on a wide shot. We just wanted to get the best possible composition and lighting to get to that moment when the camera pushes in ever so slightly. She was worried that I wouldn’t do it unless she cried, but for me it was about the note. The actors had to be pretty nimble, they had to work with me and then Justin. Kogonada: When you’re working with this level of acting, when you have someone so seasoned, for me it’s like a late-stage jazz player who no longer needs to show off. The two directors spoke to Filmmaker on a joint Zoom call. I think what each of their styles brings to the show is really exciting.”

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.

Emperor Hirohito, who ruled Japan for more than six decades, dies in the first episode of “Pachinko,” Apple TV Plus's adaptation of novelist Min Jin Lee's ...

And it’s worth noting that a life-altering development in a primary character’s life is changed from the book with the effect of softening the pro-emperor fanaticism of the era. It’s a strange choice, one made doubly so by the continual soft-pedaling in portraying Japan’s colonization of Korea. Another title card observes that the majority of the (presumably still alive) Koreans sent to Japan during the colonial era returned after World War II without noting the reason for it: Their homeland was finally free from Japanese rule. The series never fails to wring tears when it wants to, which is often, but it maintains a none-too-glum tonal balance (despite an ever-droning cello in the otherwise nondescript soundtrack) by demonstrating that people are people everywhere, seeking levity and showing grace. My father’s mother, who helped raise my brother and me in the first decade of my childhood, grew up in a household with multiple wives, the beloved daughter of a man somewhat unusual in educating his female children. Decades later, Sunja’s finance-minded grandson Solomon (a fantastic Jin Ha) returns to Japan. A 30-ish Zainichi pushed by his father (Soji Arai) to move to America in search of a life beyond pachinko wealth — and prejudice — Solomon finds himself disinterested in the raging nationalistic race between the United States and Japan to become the world’s largest economy. The burden that Solomon carries of having to ensure that all the self-sacrifices of prior generations bear fruit through him is a heavy and, for probably many viewers, resonant one. I can fathom even less the life of my mother’s father, a North Korean who fled in the 1930s to Manchuria, another region Japan aspired to claim as its own. For better and for worse, showrunner Soo Hugh takes hefty liberties with her televisual translation, crisscrossing between timelines not unlike Greta Gerwig’s recent adaptation of “ Little Women.” The eight-part debut season — the first of a planned four — centers on Sunja, a Korean-born Zainichi woman we first meet as the spirited young daughter (played by Yu-na Jeon) of struggling boardinghouse owners. Here’s where I’ll happily confess that “Pachinko” is one of my favorite novels of the past decade. Emperor Hirohito, who ruled Japan for more than six decades, dies in the first episode of “Pachinko,” Apple TV Plus’s adaptation of novelist Min Jin Lee’s multigenerational saga about a Korean family that survives colonialism, war and more loss than they can allow themselves to feel. It also deals with intra-Asian bias, a subject little understood in the West and one that mostly seems to get trotted out in discussions of race and racism as a cudgel against members of Asian diasporas. Of the 2 million Koreans who moved to Japan during colonial rule (not always by choice), 600,000 chose to stay after the war’s end.

Apple TV+'s 'Pachinko' prompts multi-generational conversations about survival, love and loss on-screen and behind the scenes.

With opportunities to tap into ancestral experiences, the cast of Pachinko confronts a history of resilience to celebrate the growth and love it provided to future generations. In Pachinko, all four generations of characters and the actors who portray them share the screen for only one sequence – the opening title. “It hurt me to play this role, I felt like I’m my mother…that’s why I kind of have a mission to expose this part of our history” she said. “I feel like that third generation point of view really needs to be put up to mirror that first generation in order to reveal the big themes. While skipping between time periods allows the series to feature more characters and plot at once, Hugh said she wanted the show “to be this conversation between generations.” The series begins with a secret romance that develops into a trilingual saga that explores love, loss, home and identity over nearly a century.

While Sunja in Japanese-occupied Korea struggles with the imposition of new life, 1989 Sunja is presented with the sudden imposition of death.

Solomon sees an opportunity to get Sunja to come and convince the woman to sell her land to him. As she folds blankets and bustles around, she talks with Solomon about the Korean woman in Tokyo who refuses to sell her plot of land. She heads to her son’s pachinko parlor and tells him that she knows where Kyunghee’s ashes need to be placed. Instead, she bites back tears, and we get the sense that this is one of many hard decisions she will have to make on behalf of the love she bears for her someday children. Isak reveals to Sunja that he knows that she’s pregnant; he overheard her conversation with her mother the previous night. Sunja returns home to tell her mother her predicament but is intercepted by the arrival of a very ill stranger who collapses in front of the boarding house. Isak is moved by her conviction and asks if she could ever forget the man who fathered this child and if she might, with time, love someone new. While Isak is recuperating, Sunja finally tells her mother she’s pregnant but refuses to disclose the father’s identity. I couldn’t help but remember the last episode that it was Koh Hansu drawing Sunja a map and telling her about electric lights and heaters in houses in Osaka. He, of all people, should know that Sunja isn’t stupid, but she also has never left Busan. She doesn’t know what the outside world is like, much in the same way she had no idea Koh was married. Just like we were reminded that Sunja is our heroine but was just a little girl in the first episode, I feel like the show wants us to remember that Sunja is street-smart with a firm conscience, but she also is basically a teenager. Koh Hansu insists that Sunja knew the extramarital nature of their relationship, but it’s clear from Sunja’s devastated expression that she didn’t. When she refuses his offer of being essentially a well-paid-for mistress, he again insists that Sunja knows what the world is like. That’s the case for Sunja, who struggles not to vomit as she makes rice and cuts kimchee for her mother’s boarders.