DALLAS — Haewon Park has always enjoyed watching anime like “Ergo Proxy.” When she was growing up in North Texas, she watched Japanese culture explode in popularity.
However, it was years later when reading Min Jin Lee’s “Pachinko” that she reflected more deeply on her complicated relationship to Japan as a Korean American child of immigrants.
“I am second gen, but my parents did go through the feeling of being oppressed by Japanese people, their grandparents and parents felt the effects of that,” Park said.
Some of that 20th century history is explored in “Pachinko,” which is one of the first novels in English depicting the lives of zainichi or Korean residents in Japan during the 1900s.
An avid fan of the book, Park is now watching the second season of the Apple TV+ series, which came out in August. Like other North Texans, she says the show resonates because of the way it explores themes such as survival, belonging, generational trauma and the history of comfort women.
While Park’s family were not zainichi, she said Japan’s annexation of Korea is woven into the history of her family. She learned about how her great-grandmother was forced to take a Japanese name, which was part of a policy designed to assimilate Korean people.
She said her parents continued to grapple with that history of oppression when they emigrated from Korea to Hawaii, where they served Japanese customers.
“It was very hard for them. Like their pride was on the line, their cultural sense of identity, because they felt like they were giving in when not too long ago their parents were oppressed and they were going through things as young people for being Korean,” she said.
Park isn’t the only North Texan finding the show relatable. The show’s notoriety brought a crowd of students and community members to SMU last month to watch a panel of the TV series’ showrunner and writers talk about how they created the show.
Soo Hugh, the showrunner of the TV series, said she wanted to represent the expansiveness of the story as a multigenerational epic that covers decades.
“It really is a tragedy of families coming undone, so it’s interesting taking that on. How do you do those generational familial epics? And yet, how do you not end with a punchline of: third generation loses it all? How do you end with a more hopeful tone?” she said.
As someone who’s enjoyed parts of Japanese culture like anime, Park said it’s strange to know that the story of “Pachinko” happened in recent history.
“I think ‘Pachinko’ is a representation of a lot of generational trauma that has yet to be addressed,” she said.
Renowned Korean American author Chang-Rae Lee was one of the writers who worked on “Pachinko’s” second season. He said the writer’s room consulted with a number of historical experts as they worked on scripts.
“We had people Zooming in from everywhere, giving their expertise on Yakuza activities, comfort women, on zainichi life and education,” he said.
Sinmin Pak is particularly grateful for the way the show highlights the story of “comfort women” that has long faced historical erasure. Between 1932 and 1945, tens of thousands of women — many of them Korean, but also from countries like Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand — were forced into sexual slavery by Japanese soldiers during WWII.
Pak founded the nonprofit Unforgotten Butterflies, which educates and raises awareness about the history of comfort women. She thanked the panel.
“Ever since your drama came out, I met so many young people and middle-aged women who said, I know, I heard from ‘Pachinko,’” she said.
Language has helped make the show more accessible to a wide audience, but also added another layer of complexity. The TV series is available in English, Japanese and Korean with much of the show’s dialogue weaving between Korean and Japanese.
Hugh said while juggling all the languages can be complicated, she made sure viewers could universally understand the emotions on screen by just watching.
“The editor and I always watch one version with no sound, no dialogue and if we have no idea what’s going on based on what we’re seeing performance wise, we know something is wrong,” she said. “The idea is you should know the emotions of a scene with no words.”
