Pachinko was written by Korean-American Min Jin Lee, and published in 2017. In the version I've just finished listening to, it was ably narrated by Allison Hiroto.

The book relates the story of a multi-generational family of Koreans in Japan, painting the individual lives in a way that highlights differentiation while also underlining common traits.


Old Osaka, Japan. When Sunja, the book's heroine, is still in her teens, she moves here from Korea with her husband


Modern Osaka, 2015





A little background is probably in order.

Korea was annexed by Japan in 1910. Labour shortages in Japan in the 1920s led to the immigration of Koreans, who mostly took on jobs in construction and mining. They were often paid less than ethnic Japanese, and poverty and discrimination made the development of ghettoes inevitable. Initially primarily male, immigration in the 1930s expanded to include families. By the middle of that decade, almost a third of the Koreans had been born in Japan.

During the war enforced migration also took place, with Korean men and women being drafted in to work in factories and mines.

After the war, most Koreans left Japan. But by 1948, 600,000 still remained, and numbers sat at roughly that level for many decades.

The term Zainichi (literally, residing in Japan) dates from the immediate post-war period, when ethnic Koreans were defined as foreigners. The descriptor "reflected the overall expectation that Koreans were living in Japan on a temporary basis and would soon return to Korea".

A succession of laws in the 1940s and 1950s reduced their rights. Yet their options were limited. Return to North Korea soon became synonymous with a journey into poverty and oppression. And, even after the 1965 Normalization Treaty with Seoul, large-scale relocation to South Korea did not materialize. This is partly because Park's dictatorship seemed unattractive, partly because Zainichi had put down roots in Japan over the decades, and partly because Koreans on the Peninsula regarded returnees with suspicion.











On the other hand, in the 1950s and 1960s, few Koreans, despite their intention to stay in Japan, chose to naturalize. At that point, this step was considered taboo among the Zainichi population -- tantamount to a betrayal of their heritage. That being the case, naturalized or mixed Zainichi often suffered exclusion on two fronts: condemnation from their own community and continued discrimination from the Japanese population.

As Mozasu, one of the Korean characters in Pachinko, explains in 1976 to a long-standing Japanese friend: "In Seoul, people like me get called Japanese bastard, and in Japan, I'm just another dirty Korean no matter how much money I make, or how nice I am."

According to this NPR profile, Lee was struck by the idea for her book in 1989 when she heard an American missionary talking about his work with the Korean Japanese in Japan. He recounted the story of a 13-year-old boy who had committed suicide. After his death the boy's parents found his school yearbook, in which classmates had written a succession of hateful messages. Lee comments: "[They] had written things like: Go back to your country. They had written the words: die, die, die. The parents were born in Japan, the boy was born in Japan. That story just really could not be more fixed in my brain."

This incident is memorialized in fictional form in the book, along with many others that give a face and a voice to this betwixt-and-between community. Each character epitomizes a different fate.

While still living on a small island off Busan, Sunja is made pregnant by Koh Hansu, a Korean who has made his way in Japan under the patronage of a Japanese businessman (his marriage to this man's daughter, not disclosed to Sunja, is therefore non-negotiable and insoluble). Ironically, perhaps symbolically, he makes Sunja's acquaintance while rescuing her from being sexually harrassed by a group of Japanese teenagers.


Jeju, South Korea, 2015. This is the Korean island from which Koh Hansu originates





Hansu's yakuza ties, along with his wealth, power, and general omniscience, grow exponentially as the book progresses. But from the beginning, Sunja refuses to be supported by him as his mistress, and accepts a fortuitous offer of marriage from a kind Korean pastor, Isak, with whom she travels to Japan when he goes to take up the modest church position that awaits him in Osaka.

Isak is imprisoned on religious grounds, along with his church colleagues, and released only when he is ill, and on the point of dying. Sunja, along with her brother- and sister-in-law, manage to survive grinding poverty and the perils of war by dint of hard work, entrepreneurial initiative, and -- unbeknownst to them at the time -- the behind-the-scenes protective activity of Koh Hansu.


Replica of pre-war housing in Osaka, Japan (Osaka Museum of Housing and Living). In 1945, the city was heavily fire-bombed. In the book, Koh Hansu, anticipating these developments, arranges jobs for Sunja's family in the country, so that his son, Noa, will be safe





But even after the war, it's tough to be Korean in Japan.

Noa, Sunja's older boy (Koh Hansu's son), successfully makes it to university, where he is taken up by an extrovert and outspoken Japanese girl who relishes the "exoticism" of a Korean boyfriend. But when he finds out the truth about his paternity, he cannot suffer the indignity of having his fees and maintenance costs paid by a man he regards as a gangster. He quits his studies, disappears from contact, and manages to get a job at a pachinko parlour -- but only because he passes himself off as Japanese. He is successful, but so secretive about his identity that even his wife does not know he is Korean. When Sunja eventually locates him, therefore, many years later, he feels so threatened that he commits suicide.

Mozasu, meanwhile (Sunja's younger son, and the offspring of the late Isak), was working at a pachinko parlour long before Noa turns to the business. Strong and hot-headed, he had been well on his way to being one of the "bad Koreans", but is rescued by the pachinko job that Goro offers him. He ends up owning his own outlets, and becomes quite prosperous. But he encounters his share of prejudice, as we saw above. He tells his friend that he too experienced the kind of hate messages that drove the unfortunate schoolboy to suicide.

The next generation doesn't manage to escape either. Solomon, Mozasu's son, still has to regularly go to get fingerprinted, in order to keep on the right side of the Japanese authorities. He goes to university in the US, and gets a flash job with an international bank in Tokyo. But he is dragged down by prejudice, when a deal involving Koreans goes wrong.

He ends up with his father in the pachinko business...

So, what's with the pachinko, that we keep coming back to it? Well, with limited employment opportunities, Koreans often turned to pachinko parlours to gain a living. But pachinko also offers a metaphor: "In a game of pinball, the initial strike of the ball against the flipper determines how the game will play out. For Sunja and her descendants, it is what happens at birth that determines their fate. Over the years they may bounce off the sides of the machine, ricocheting against the bumpers, kickers and slingshots, but there is a sense that fate has decided how their lives will develop from the moment the plunger hits the ball."

And part of that fate always has ethnic colours... Although the novel covers a period of almost 80 years, by its close, in 1989, the problems of Koreans in Japan have not been resolved. They still have a divided identity. They are still outsiders. Solomon's girlfriend, Phoebe, a Korean-American, can't hack these distinctions, and this is partly what pushes her to leave him, and return to the US.







The novel largely avoids crude stereotypes. In many ways the various members of the family feel at home in Japan, and while they encounter prejudice, they also acknowledge that many Japanese have been kind to them. Some are aware, too, that ethnic Japanese also struggle to find a comfortable place in their own society (for example, Mozasu's girlfriend, Etsuko; Etsuko's daughter, Hana; and Mozasu's friend, Haruki).

The novel's key sub-theme is the role of women. The book is full of strong females -- who often triumph despite the conservatism and downright stubbornness of their menfolk. "A woman's lot is to suffer," Sunja is told from her early years. And yes, women do get the short end of many sticks. Sex workers have a particularly hard time in a society that sees them as disposable. Mothers never seem able to do right. And there's little latitude for women who want to carve out a different path for themselves. But at the end of the day, they do have agency. They are not solely cogs in the machine. They make decisions. They find and implement solutions. And for sure, in this book, women do not have a monopoly on suffering...

So what of Koreans in Japan now?

The 1980s and 1990s started to see signs of change: "By 1991, permanent residency status was granted to almost the entire Zainichi population. By 1993, the demeaning practice of forced fingerprinting during alien registration for permanent residents was abolished... By the early twenty-first century, over 10,000 Zainichi chose to naturalize every year."


Jeju





But clearly, problems remain.

In 2005, an ethnic Korean student born and raised in Japan told Yamada and Yusa: "I want to live as a Korean with confidence, but I am afraid of discrimination." Nine years later, these researchers were still documenting media bias against Zainichi Koreans (in the form of non-recognition or of negativity); acts of hostility against students wearing Korean dress; the constant juggling of two names (the Japanese "popular" name and the Korean real name); and the (sometimes unconscious) use of discriminatory terms by Japanese.

Several stories within the last year underline the persistence of these issues.

To solve the problem of verbal aggression directed against the city’s ethnic Korean residents, Kawasaki City, introduced an anti-hate speech law in December 2019. Tokyo, Osaka, and Kobe already had these instruments, but Kawasaki's was the first to include penalties: "But at least eight hate rallies have been held in Kawasaki, including outside the main station, since July [2020], when the ordinance came into full effect. Morooka Yasuko, an attorney specializing in hate speech, believes that the ordinance itself is exemplary, and is starting to carry weight, but does not go far enough..."

This article reports results from a survey of more than a thousand ethnic Koreans (80% of them Japan-born, and many with families in the country for several generations). The findings are dispiriting:

"Of the respondents, 30.9% said they had been verbally harassed for reasons including being Zainichi Korean... Meanwhile, 73.9% of respondents said that they had seen ethnic discrimination online... A high percentage of respondents -- 75.7% -- also said that they had seen or heard hate demonstrations or speeches. And at least 23.9% had had offensive encounters in public... 'To tell a certain ethnic group to get out or to call for them to be killed used to be something screamed in the streets by a tiny number of extremists,' says journalist Koichi Yasuda. 'But now, such discriminatory words have become increasingly a part of everyday vernacular. Discrimination and prejudice have been imprinted into our subconscious not just in the streets and online, but in various parts of our day-to-day lives, and are now being widely wielded.'"









A Zainichi Korean reporter -- a third-generation resident of Japan, schooled entirely in the Japanese system -- describes the kinds of "microaggressions" that he regularly encounters: "When I exchange business cards and greetings with other people, some tell me, 'Your Japanese is so good,' or, 'How long have you been in Japan?' As I explain that I was born in Japan, they respond with the comment, 'Then you are the same as Japanese people.' Some people have even asked me to explain South Korean government positions upon learning that I am a citizen of that country. This usually happens when Japan-Korean relations are going through a tense patch [which they often are, of course]... None of these things is obvious discrimination. Am I being too sensitive? But I'm bothered every time I hear such comments."

According to a survey carried out by the Zainichi Korean Counseling and Community Center, "microaggressions that Zainichi Koreans often face include, 'Are you a North Korean agent?' 'Many South Koreans are rude. I don't think you are, though,' and, 'If you want to complain, go back to your country.'"

A Nike ad made waves in November last year when it featured the stories of three young women (including one who is ethnically Korean, and is featured wearing a traditional Korean outfit) who have had to contend with racisim in Japan. The ad, the company said, was inspired by real stories. "'Thumbs-down' accounted for 40% of the ratings on YouTube, where it has 11 million views. On Twitter (16.8 million views), some users said the spot was moving and empowering; others blasted the company for being anti-Japan or exaggerating the extent of racism in the country."

Given all this, the themes explored in Pachinko seem unlikely to soon lose their relevance.