‘Pachinko’ Corrects Itself

My expectations for the second season of Pachinko were not high. I was one of very few English language critics who was willing to be negative about the first season of Pachinko, chiefly due to its historical distortions. Based on the book of the same title, Pachinko obviously bears the point of view of Korean-Americans assuming that the Zainichi Korean experience in Japan over the twentieth century was basically the same as theirs, but worse, because everyone knows that Japanese people are racist against Koreans.

The first episode of the second season does little to address this kind of tribalist thinking–the show introduces a kindly Japanese teacher  in the 40s wing of the story but it turns out he’s ethnically Korean too, which is the only reason he’s nice to Noa–the teenage bridge character who’s the son of Sunja in the 40s, who’s just trying to survive, and the uncle of Solomon in the 80s, who’s trying to close an ambitious real estate deal.

Despite this unimpressive opening, however, the second episode features a dramatic improvement in quality with the reintroduction of Isak, Sunja’s husband, imprisoned by the Japanese Empire for refusing to engage in Shinto ritual. I noticed, with a raised eyebrow, that Pachinko simply ignored all the new content from last season about ivory tower Japanese Communists hoodwinking Isak. This is just as well, because this end to his character arc, hewing closer to the book, is much, much stronger thematically than whatever Pachinko was trying to do last season.

Isak is a devout Christian. Despite knowing that Sunja is pregnant with another man’s child, he chooses to marry her and try to give her a better life in gratitude for her helping to nurse him back to health ahead of his voyage to Japan. Battered and beaten by the Japanese Empire, Isak must face the man who betrayed him- and he chooses forgiveness. In his final moments, Isak refuses to give into thoughts of resentment or revenge, and chooses a death much like the life he tried to lead- not as a Christian or a Korean, but as a kind, decent man who only wants the people he loves, and even the ones he doesn’t, to find their way to a better world.

The first season of Pachinko was also somewhat infamous for its convoluted editing- the second season streamlines that considerably. There are only really two stories in parallel- Noa growing up in the 40s and 50s, and Solomon over the course of maybe a few months doing the high profile real estate deal in 1989. This structural choice greatly simplifies the narrative and makes the comparison between Noa and Solomon’s respective arcs much more coherent.

While Noa observes suffering and makes moral choices before and after the war obviously influenced by what little time he had with his father in their final days together, Solomon appears to be backsliding. A business deal that, last season, the show was setting up as if it were a triumph for Zainichi Koreans trying to win in a rigged system here just feels more petty and mean-spirited as it goes on. Anna Sawai, who you’ll likely recognize better now as the lead actress of Shogun, has a significant role here as Solomon’s love interest Naomi who he rejects to make the deal go through.

While I thought this was the point Pachinko was making from episodes two to five, episodes six to seven significantly complicate that narrative. We find out, for example, that Naomi was hiding something from Solomon, although it’s not much of a secret and certainly doesn’t justify Solomon’s actions afterwards. But the other bigger problem is that Pachinko’s dubious history once again rears its ugly head, creating some fairly alarming implications and undermining many of the show’s stronger themes.

The second season of Pachinko covers 50s-era Japan. For students of Japanese history, you can’t understate the importance of this era to Japan as it exists today. With the Korean War as an opening shot, the Japanese people had to grapple with the permanent American occupation of their homeland and battle with American authorities about the extent the new Japan would have to fight in the Cold War. Despite the obvious relevance of the Korean War to, say, Zainichi Koreans, Pachinko doesn’t deal with the issue at all.

 Pachinko’s only briefly discusses the Korean War in the context of one character, Changho, foolishly listening to Communist propaganda because of his recent heartbreak. The recruitment scene is alarming for another reason too–the North Korean recruiter makes reference to the Jeju Massacre as an argument for the righteousness of their cause. The way the show presents this information, you could forgive the average viewer for thinking the Jeju Massacre never happened and the recruiter just made it up. Except it did happen. No one on the side of the United States in the Cold War acknowledged that it happened until my lifetime, but it did happen.

And the distorted history only gets weirder when in the 80s era of the story, we learn that an until then sympathetic Japanese character participated in the Palawan Massacre, an act of unforgivable moral depravity. Unlike the Jeju Massacre, the Palawan Massacre was recognized and punished pretty much as soon as the United States Army became aware of it, for the rather unsurprising reason that the victims were American POWs.

I don’t mean to imply that the Palawan Massacre wasn’t a crime against humanity (it was), but it’s not even among the top ten worst things a person in the Japanese Army could have done that a Zainichi Korean would consider a moral red line. This is because, as I often emphasized last season, Zainichi Koreans tend to think of themselves as Japanese, and are no more likely to assume teenage soldiers in World War II were irredeemably evil than we as Americans would make a similar assumption about our own soldiers accused of similar deeds in the War on Terror.

A lot of this just goes to Pachinko’s obvious pro-American bias. The problem with a serious discussion of post-war Japanese politics is that the American influence is so obvious there’s no way to discuss it that doesn’t make us look complicit. Even before the war is over, Pachinko decides to make it look like the Americans were mostly just doing leaflet campaigns instead of real bombing raids. The problem with this approach is that it’s quite counter-intuitive to the themes. The first episode dehumanizes the Japanese by portraying them as preparing to fanatically fight to the last man. These Japanese people don’t warrant Isak’s forgiveness. The huge terrified mob begging Hansu, the Zainichi yakuza leader who is Noa’s biological father, for a way out of the city far more effectively demonstrates the shared humanity between Zainichi and Japanese alike.

Hansu is an odd character in general this season, at times seeming like a sympathetic man in a situation beyond his control, and at other times seeming like a cynical asshole deliberately making everyone’s life worse for his own selfish interests, only incidentally helping a few individuals along the way. The ambiguity is what makes Hansu compelling– in the final episode of this season, Noa must choose between Isak’s Christian love and Hansu’s materialist ambition. The ending to this is a powerful climax and recontextualization of an otherwise not very important scene in the book. Noa rejects his Korean identity, not because he is ashamed to be Korean, but because in order to achieve what he wants in life, Noa has to leave one of his fathers behind, and both of them are unavoidably Korean.

By contrast, someone at one point explicitly describes Solomon in the 80s as acting like an American–which is quite true. Solomon may speak Korean, yet has almost nothing in common spiritually with the rest of his family. These are all fantastic nuances of race and identity, and we can even see a compelling demonstration of America’s toxic influence with a surprisingly affecting backstory from Tom Andrews, Solomon’s former boss, who admits that the cutthroat world of Wall Street finance destroyed his relationship with his family. Pachinko features compelling characters because of the choices they make, rather than the rationalizations they use to pretend like they didn’t have choices at all. But there’s no denying in any case that the second season of Pachinko is a huge improvement on the first.