“Pachinko,” Min Jin Lee’ sprawling epic about Korean immigrants in Japan and America, was always going to be a difficult story to adapt. But it’s not until you dive into the very language of the Apple TV+ original that you fully understand how herculean this task was.
Starting in 1915, “Pachinko” largely follows Kim Sunja (Minha Kim), a Korean woman who later becomes her family’s matriarch. Season 1 followed her as a young woman pregnant with another man’s child, who fled from Japan-occupied Korea to the Koreatown part of Osaka, Japan. A second timeline set in 1989 follows her grandson Solomon (Jin Ha), a Yale graduate who seamlessly drifts between Eastern and Western cultures as he becomes increasingly frustrated by his family.
The series revolves around Sunja and her descendants as they navigate the trials and racial discrimination of Japan and America in their respective eras, as well as their complicated family history. As it parses through intergenerational trauma, “Pachinko” constantly asks: What do we owe to our pasts as we look to our futures?
That examination can even be felt in this season’s language. “Pachinko” has always utilized a color-coded subtitles to tell English-speaking audiences when characters are speaking which language. Yellow subtitles are for Korean and blue are for Japanese. But as Season 2 starts — an installment set 7 years after the events of Season 1 — there is far more blue than yellow. That shift was intentional.
“With the second generation or third generation, you’re seeing just how much more of their Japanese side has to come out,” showrunner and executive producer Soo Hugh told TheWrap. When it comes to Sunja’s children — Noa (Tae Jung Kang) and Mozasu (Soji Arai) — Japan is “all they know,” despite their Korean heritage. “So when they talk about homeland, it’s a very complicated question.”
No character reflects these linguistic and cultural complexities better than Jin Ha’s Solomon. “I always say Jin really does have the hardest job as an actor on this show,” Hugh said.
To prepare for the role, Ha researched the history of 1980s Japan to help him with context and worked closely with dialect coach Yumi King on “the language portion of my lines.”
“I’ve got two dialects: I’ve got Osaka dialect and Tokyo dialect for Japanese, and I’ve got a Japanese-accented Korean. Then my English is fluent, but I’m doing a bit of an affectation to try to not have him sound like me,” Ha explained.
The whole process from the first draft to performing the lines takes “months and months,” Ha said. “It’s translation, then it’s back translation to double check the translation, and it’s like that times 1,000.” Ha said he’s had “countless” conversations with the show’s translators and writers.
“[Soo Hugh, the writers and the translators] did such an incredible job of understanding that there is no one-to-one, and therefore it needs to be translated in context,” Ha said. “It requires so much knowledge, and cultural knowledge as well.”
In many ways Ha’s storyline, which zooms in on business wheeling and dealing, feels separate from Sunja’s quietly bold saga of perseverance as a racially persecuted woman in Japan during World War II. It’s exactly because Solomon’s story feels so “distinct” that Ha is able to better understand his character’s part in this larger story.
“It’s coming from this super-specific, and then super universal, context of how does this person end up here?” Ha said of the fast-talking and multi-cultural Solomon. “Even though the two worlds do feel so distinct, esthetically … they’re inseparable.”
Unlike Season 1, which largely only focused on Sunja and Solomon, Season 2 has a much more ambitious focus.
“Season 1 was a very intimate story of Sunja and how that seed started to sprout. In Season 2, we really wanted to be given the chance to see a lot more of the sprouting of the family,” Hugh explained. “One thing that was a big challenge about the show is, how do you balance all the new characters? We wanted to make sure the next generation had their voice — Noa and Mozasu — and give their stories the spotlight.”
Minha Kim, the actor behind the young adult version of Sunja, knew that the focus of “Pachinko” would expand in Season 2, especially since so much of this season is about motherhood. Because she doesn’t have any personal experience with being a mother, she used her own mother and grandmother as a resource.
“I tried really hard to figure out how can [Sunja] sacrifice herself? She’s so brave to do everything for her kids,” Kim said. “I asked a lot to my mom and my grandmother, as well. I just explained the situation that Sunja is facing, and I asked them, ‘How is it to have a kid? How do you think of me?’”
At one point Kim asked her mother why she loved her so much. “She says, ‘Because it’s you.’ And it was everything,” Kim said. “I was like, yeah, there’s no reason. It’s an unconditional love.”
Asking these questions and embodying Sunja has ultimately changed Kim’s relationship with her mother and grandmother. That’s partially because, before this project, she didn’t “have any occasion” to ask them about their experiences with motherhood.
“It’s so powerful, and it’s brilliant. I think without them, our stories cannot be continued,” Kim said. “After that, I tried to have more conversations with them, and I try to spend my time with my grandmother more.”
New episodes of “Pachinko” are released Fridays on Apple TV+.
