Title: Pachinko Author: Min Jin Lee Creation Date: 2017 Location: New York, United States Collection: Empire and Its Shadows
Brief
Min Jin Lee spent nearly thirty years working on Pachinko, researching and revising across multiple drafts before Grand Central Publishing released it in 2017 to immediate acclaim. It was a National Book Award finalist, sold millions of copies worldwide, and was adapted by Apple TV+ in 2022. The title refers to the pinball-style gambling machines overwhelmingly operated by ethnic Korean businesses in Japan — a fact encoding the entire argument about exclusion, persistence, and the limited economic channels available to a community denied access to legitimate professions.
The Zainichi Koreans — ethnic Koreans born and resident in Japan, often for multiple generations — occupy a position combining several forms of discrimination: colonised people incorporated into the imperial power then expelled from citizenship after decolonisation; foreigners who speak Japanese as a first language but are registered as aliens; people indistinguishable from the majority yet whose Korean surnames mark them for discrimination in housing, employment, and marriage. The novel spans four generations from the 1910s to 1989, showing how each generation's path is shaped by structural discrimination in a different form.
The thematic core is identity under erasure — what a community does when the host nation refuses to recognise it. Lee's response is epic in scale: four generations, dozens of characters, an accumulation of lives arguing through volume and specificity that this community existed, these lives happened, and the discrimination had costs compounding across time.
The Imperial Machine
The Japanese colonial system in Korea, from annexation in 1910 to surrender in 1945, was among the most comprehensive assimilation programmes in modern history. The land survey of 1910–1918 required all landowners to register holdings; those who failed — many held land through customary arrangements without written documentation — lost their land to the colonial state. By the 1930s, approximately eighty per cent of Korean farmers were tenants, the best land controlled by Japanese interests.
The cultural suppression intensified steadily. Korean was excluded from schools; by the late 1930s instruction was entirely in Japanese. The sōshi-kaimei policy of 1939–1940 required adoption of Japanese-style names — an assault on identity so fundamental it appears in the novel as a recurring wound. Koreans were conscripted into war industries and, from 1944, into the military itself.
The machine's most consequential operation for the novel was what happened after 1945. There were roughly two million Koreans in Japan at the moment of Japan's surrender — colonial subjects brought as labourers, conscripts and migrants — and the great majority repatriated in the years that followed. The roughly six hundred thousand who remained were stripped of Japanese nationality when the San Francisco Peace Treaty took effect in 1952, reclassified from Japanese subjects to stateless foreigners without consent. The Alien Registration Law required identification cards, fingerprinting, and periodic registration. They could not vote or hold public employment. Citizenship required naturalisation through formal renunciation of Korean identity — the final assimilation the colonial period had demanded, now made the price of legal existence. This production of permanent foreigners within an ostensibly homogeneous society is the imperial machine's long afterlife, traced across four generations.
The Subjected People
Lee writes the subjected people from inside the community, accumulating individual lives across decades until the community becomes visible as a historical presence. Sunja is the moral centre — not a heroine in the dramatic sense but a woman who endures and works. She makes kimchi, runs a market stall, feeds her children, endures the humiliations of being Korean in Osaka with a stoicism presented as neither admirable nor pathetic but simply as what survival looks like.
The difference between Noa and Mozasu is the novel's most analytically precise treatment of how a subjected population divides. Noa internalises the system's values: education, merit, assimilation will produce recognition. When he discovers his biological father is a yakuza-connected businessman who has been invisibly smoothing his path, the meritocratic narrative collapses. His response — disappearance, a Japanese name, an entirely new identity — is the most extreme assimilation available, and it kills him. Mozasu takes the path the system left open: pachinko is stigmatised but dominated by Zainichi Koreans precisely because other avenues are closed. He builds a successful business without pretending to be something he is not.
Solomon, the fourth generation, discovers that structural discrimination has not ended but become more sophisticated, operating through professional networks and corporate suspicion rather than explicit legal exclusion. The bank that employs him is happy to use his Korean connections — including those of his father's pachinko business partner Goro — to broker a difficult Tokyo real-estate deal, and then discards him as soon as the pachinko association becomes a liability. The forms change; the function persists.
The Reckoning
Lee's reckoning is not with guilt but with visibility. The Zainichi Korean community has been largely invisible in both Japanese and Korean literature, and Pachinko exists primarily as witness: the insistence that four generations of discrimination and persistence constitute a history deserving monumental scale.
The title is the reckoning's summary image. The pachinko ball bounces through fixed pins; the outcome is neither purely random nor purely determined. The Zainichi Koreans launched their lives into a machine they did not design — colonial rule, wartime conscription, post-war denationalisation, permanent alien registration — and the machine produced certain outcomes with statistical regularity. The house always holds its percentage.
But the people who played the machine — who ran the parlours, who fed their children within its constraints — persisted. The machine did not destroy them. It marked them, shaped them, constrained them, and they are still here. The reckoning is cumulative rather than dramatic: four generations of evidence arguing that the empire's damage is measured not in treaties or battles but in the daily humiliations, practical accommodations, and stubborn continuities that constitute the lives of the people the empire used and then discarded.
The Reading
The Village
A boarding house on Yeongdo Island, off Busan, Korea, around 1910. The keeper is named Hoonie — born with a cleft palate and a twisted foot, given in marriage to a capable woman named Yangjin whose family accepts his disabilities because his family's boarding house is the best match available. The marriage is affectionate and functional, the kind of partnership that does not appear in stories because it is not dramatic enough. They have one surviving daughter, Sunja, after several miscarriages and infant deaths. Everything begins here, in the ordinary — the undramatic domestic arrangements of people whose lives history has not yet arrived to destroy.
Sunja is a strong girl, serious, who helps run the boarding house and works in the fish market. She is about sixteen when she meets Koh Hansu, a wealthy Korean man who visits periodically on unspecified business. He is charismatic, educated, clearly operating at a level she has never accessed. He courts her with patience, and she falls in love completely. When she discovers she is pregnant, she goes to him expecting marriage and finds he has a wife and daughters in Osaka. He offers to provide for her. She refuses. The refusal is the first act of moral definition: she will not be maintained as a kept woman, regardless of the cost, and the cost will be measured across four generations.
Isak Baek rescues her — a young Korean Christian minister who arrives ill at the boarding house, is nursed back to health, and proposes knowing she is pregnant with another man's child. His motivation is religious and personal: he sees in Sunja a goodness that moves him, and his Christianity gives him a framework in which rescuing a woman from shame is coherent. They marry. He takes her to Osaka, where his brother Yoseb and Yoseb's wife Kyunghee live in the Korean quarter.
Osaka
The Korean quarter in the 1930s is a ghetto — a place of condensed poverty and work that Japanese workers refuse. Pig farming, rag collecting, construction at the worst sites. The stench of the neighbourhood is one of the recurring physical details, the smell of poverty that identifies you before you speak. The women who run these domestic spaces — Kyunghee with her sewing, Sunja with her kimchi — are the moral backbone, operating without public recognition, feeding families on margins that leave no room for error.
Sunja has her son Noa — Hansu's biological child — and then with Isak has another son, Mozasu. Noa is bookish, consumed by desire for education and legitimacy. Mozasu is practical, physically confident, uninterested in the project of being recognised by a society that has made clear it will not recognise him. Both are correct assessments of available strategies.
Isak is arrested for refusing to bow before a Shinto shrine — an act of Christian conscience that is also Korean resistance, though Isak understands it only as the former. He is imprisoned, broken by the conditions of his detention, and dies soon after his release, still a young man in his early thirties. The death arrives without melodrama. It is simply what happens to Korean Christian ministers in 1940s Japan, and Sunja receives it as another loss, adds it to the weight she carries, and continues. Suffering is never permitted to be spectacular. It is made ordinary, which is more accurate and more devastating.
The war years and their aftermath are shown through the household's economic struggle and the transformation of the Korean quarter as Japan mobilises and then collapses. The firebombing of Osaka destroys much of the neighbourhood. After the war, ethnic Koreans are stripped of citizenship without consent — Japanese nationals under colonial rule, now reclassified as foreigners required to carry alien registration cards and submit to fingerprinting. This is not background. It is the structural condition, the ground everything else grows in. The Alien Registration Law transformed a community that had been, however reluctantly, part of the Japanese body politic into a population of permanent outsiders — accomplished by bureaucratic reclassification rather than physical expulsion, the administrative equivalent of the door closing.
Noa
Noa's story is tragedy in the classical sense. He earns admission to Waseda University — one of Japan's most prestigious — through genuine brilliance and relentless work. He is about to have the life his ambition pointed toward when he discovers the truth of his biological father. Hansu reveals himself — the invisible hand that has been smoothing Noa's path, the money, the connections, the covert patronage. The revelation destroys him. Not because Hansu is wicked, but because the knowledge means his entire narrative of self-creation through education was built on a foundation he did not know was there. He was not the self-made man he believed himself to be.
He leaves Waseda. He disappears. He takes a Japanese name, marries a Japanese woman, moves to a provincial city, runs a pachinko parlour. He builds an entirely different life, one in which he is no longer Korean, no longer Noa, no longer anyone's son. When Sunja finds him decades later, he kills himself rather than return to being who he was.
The suicide is the formal centre — the point at which the weight of denial becomes lethal. He could not be Korean in Japan on his own terms, so he chose to not be Korean at all, and the choice required suppression so total that being found — being restored to his actual identity — was experienced as annihilation. The reader has watched his childhood, his studies, his hunger for recognition, and understands that the hunger was always for something the system could not provide: not achievement, which he had, but belonging, which required the system to change. The system did not change.
Mozasu
Mozasu's life takes the other path. He becomes a pachinko parlour operator — the business that defines the Zainichi community's economic position. Pachinko is tolerated because gambling is permitted but deemed unclean, and the unclean business is allocated to a community already deemed unclean by mainstream Japanese society. The circularity is the system's genius: the Koreans are stigmatised, therefore given stigmatised work, therefore further stigmatised by the work they do.
Mozasu is good at the business, honest in his way, builds something substantial from the narrow space the system provided. He marries a Korean seamstress named Yumi, and they have a son, Solomon. When Yumi is killed by a drunk driver while Solomon is still a child, the household reorganises itself around the loss. Eventually Mozasu takes up with a Japanese woman named Etsuko, a divorced restaurant owner from Hokkaidō who refuses his marriage proposals but becomes Solomon's second mother and Mozasu's long companion — a partnership that crosses the ethnic boundary not by ignoring it but by living patiently inside it. Etsuko's own troubled daughter, Hana, runs through the late chapters as the novel's most lacerating modern wound: pregnancy, abortion, drinking, sex work, and finally AIDS, dying in a Tokyo hospital with Solomon at her bedside. Hana's death is not a Korean tragedy but a Japanese one, set beside the Korean tragedies for comparison; it is what the empire's afterlife produces in the other community too.
Solomon, the fourth generation, is educated in America, works for a British bank in Tokyo, speaks three languages. He is supposed to be the generation that has arrived. He has not. He persuades his bank that his father's pachinko business partner, Goro, can broker a tricky Tokyo property purchase that the bank's other channels cannot move; Goro delivers, the deal closes, and within days the bank fires Solomon, ostensibly horrified by the taint of pachinko money and yakuza-adjacent connections it was perfectly happy to use until the moment it was no longer convenient to do so. The Japanese employer uses him as Korean when convenient — the language skills, the connections — and discards him as Korean when convenient — the taint of association, the risk. The structural discrimination has not ended; it has become more sophisticated, its bars invisible to anyone not inside the cage.
The Machines
The novel ends in 1989, not with resolution but with Solomon watching his father work the pachinko parlour floor — Mozasu moving among the machines with the competent pride of a man who has built something real within impossible constraints. The parlour is noisy, bright, full of the cascading sound of steel balls bouncing through pins. Mozasu walks among the machines with the proprietorial attention of a man who knows each one by its particular rattle and hum. He is not ashamed. He has never been ashamed. The shame was Noa's burden — the internalised judgment of a society that measured worth by proximity to its own centre — and the shame killed him. Mozasu refused the shame and built a life the shame could not reach.
Hansu appears throughout as the shadow father, the figure whose money and connections operate invisibly beneath the family's fortunes. He provides for Sunja and her sons without consent, smooths paths she does not know have been smoothed. He represents a form of power examined without endorsement — the power of the man who has understood that the system will never be fair and who has decided to operate outside its rules. His love for Sunja is real and cannot be separated from his possessiveness. His care for Noa is genuine and destroys Noa's self-understanding when revealed.
Sunja survives all four generations. She is present at the end, aged and quiet, the woman around whom the family has arranged itself without always knowing it was doing so. She does not deliver speeches about justice. She makes food. She feeds people. She endures the specific humiliations — the landlords who will not rent, the employers who will not hire her sons, the bureaucrats who require her to press her fingers into ink — and she absorbs them into the daily rhythm of work and care that constitutes her life. The most important things are not the crises but the mornings after the crises, when the rice must be cooked and the children must be fed and the question of how to continue must be answered not with philosophy but with labour.
The pachinko machine is the governing metaphor: a ball launched at a particular angle, bouncing through fixed pins, landing in a slot that is neither purely determined nor purely random. Over sufficient volume and time, the house holds its percentage. The house always holds its percentage. But the people who played the machine — who ran the parlours, who fed their children within its constraints, who buried their dead and raised their living and carried the alien registration card in their pockets and submitted to the fingerprinting and came home and made dinner and did not break — persisted. Persistence, in the face of everything the empire did and then refused to undo, is the definition of heroism. The steel balls fall through the pins, and the sound they make is the sound of lives being lived under conditions designed to discourage living, and the lives continued anyway.
This post is part of Empire and Its Shadows, a series on colonialism, power, and the books that answer empire back. See the full collection →
The Grand Central Publishing paperback is the standard and widely available edition.
Grand Central Publishing (2017). The standard paperback — widely available and the edition that became a phenomenon.
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