Last spring I saw Korean-Japanese filmmaker Yang Yonghi’s latest documentary, Soup and Ideology, at the Foreign Correspondents Club of Japan. During the post-screening Q&A, Yang expressed frustration over her belief that Japan has not really produced any great films about the Korean experience in Japan. Of course, there have been movies made in Japan by Japanese and Korean directors that depict this experience at a certain level, and all her movies, which include one narrative fiction work, are about the Korean experience in Japan, specifically her family’s, but she was talking about something larger, more sweeping, and mentioned Pachinko, the international bestseller by Korean-American novelist Min Jin Lee, which, at the time of the press conference, had just begun streaming as an 8-part TV series adaptation on Apple TV+. The bulk of the plot takes place in Japan among the resident Korean community, commonly known as zainichi, but since it is a South Korean-Canadian co-production, apparently much of it was not filmed in Japan, though the credits do include many Japanese names. Yang’s point, however, is not that Japan should have been more involved in the making of Pachinko, but that Japan, by now, should have produced something as monumental as Pachinko on its own. After all, the novel and the series are worldwide hits, meaning not only that the subject matter has a broad appeal, but that the readers and viewers who enjoyed the story now have a particular image of Japan as it was conveyed by Lee. Though the image is not a flattering one, I don’t think that was Yang’s concern. Her implication was that the Korean experience in Japan is central to Japan’s history and even its identity, and that leaving that story for others to tell is a lost opportunity. Of course, it’s also easy to infer from Yang’s tone that she herself would have loved to tackle something as wide-ranging as Pachinko since she herself is a Korean-Japanese filmmaker, but she has addressed that theme in all her work and likely knows she could never raise the kind of money or interest in Japan necessary for such a production, because that’s the way the industry—and, by implication, the culture—works.
I recently finished watching the first season and came away thinking that it did, in fact, miss something essential about Japan. I did not read the novel, and from what I gather the scenarists changed some things and added some others, though the basic multi-generational plot about an extended family of Koreans who originally came to Japan in the 1920s and 1930s is the same. Initially, I had little interest in the series simply because multi-generational family epics are not my thing, especially as TV series, but my partner, who did read the novel in Japanese translation, wanted me to watch it so that we could discuss it.
Her reasons are practical. Masako’s father was Korean, though she didn’t know he was until after he died when she was just 8. At that age she had no real concept of Korea. Her mother was not married to her father. She had been employed by him as a housekeeper. He was a widower with two teenage sons who was often on the road for work. By the time Masako was born her mother was living in his house full-time. Her father was much older than her mother, who rarely talked about him after he died of cancer shortly before the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. Over the next turbulent year or so, Masako’s two half-brothers would move out and she and her mother would be forced to leave the house. From then until Masako was 15 and moved away from her mother to live on her own, the two existed in a state of abject precariousness, always one step ahead of the landlord and beholden to whichever man her mother, who had never even finished elementary school, was taking up with at the time for the sake of financial security, which was almost always a mirage.
Masako’s life before her father died was comparatively stable, or as stable as it could be for a small child who was legally illegitimate and living with a father in late middle age and two much older brothers, not to mention a mother who didn’t always seem to know what was going on. Consequently, she has always romanticized that time of her life and in recent decades tried to find out who her father was and how and when he came to Japan. This effort has become a project, since she hopes to write it all down in English, which is where I come in. Unfortunately, she hasn’t had much luck since she can’t prove to the authorities that her father was actually her father and, thus, can’t get access to relevant records the government may have on file. When her mother registered Masako’s birth by herself, she couldn’t name him as Masako’s father because he wasn’t a Japanese national. Had she or her father registered Masako as his daughter, she would have effectively been Korean in accordance with the laws at the time, which determined nationality through paternity, though Masako’s mother didn’t seem to know this. It was the city hall officials who decided the matter. So while Masako was later able to find out where her father came from in Korea and even secured a copy of his Korean family register, she has been unable to go any further. Masako’s mother, who now lives with reduced cognitive capacity in a facility, has never had much information to give. She may not even have known he was Korean until she actually went to city hall. After all, his late wife was a Japanese national—but, per the law cited above, not his sons, though they were born in Japan—and he lived as a Japanese man. He did not manifest any noticeable Korean traits, such as a penchant for Korean food or a tendency to slip into Korean speech. But the fact remained: He was, legally, Korean, not Japanese.
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