Pachinko on the Border: Diaspora Literature

 

 written by 20111 Shin Da Jung

“ History has failed us, but no matter. ”

The Gamble: Pachinko

Pachinko is a Japanese gambling machine. By law, pachinko is classified as a game since gambling is illegal. However, most Japanese consider pachinko to be gambling.

Because pachinko was not as well-recognized or considered gambling, only a few people wanted to run it. Therefore, the Koreans in Japan, who could not get a job in the mainstream society due to discrimination, mainly operated pachinko.  

The Novel: Pachinko 

Pachinko addresses the Korean residents in Japan who struggle to earn their living amid discrimination and their desperate lives surrounding the pachinko business.

Pachinko is a feature-length novel written by Korean-American author Lee Min Jin. It was published in the United States in 2017. 

Pachinko has been very popular since its publication. It was selected as “Book of the Year 10” by the New York Times and BBC in 2017 and was nominated for the National Book Award for Fiction the same year.  

In 2022, it was adapted into a drama on Apple TV+ and became a hot topic in Korea. Because almost all of the crew and actors in the drama are Korean or Korean-American.

Pachinko features stories of various people from 1910 to 1989. These people are all “people who have left their homes.” 

Pachinko’s main character, Seonja, was born in a poor boarding house in Yeongdo, Busan, during the Japanese colonial era. She lives in Japan after leaving her hometown with businessman Ko Han Soo. A diaspora is a large group of people with a similar heritage or homeland who have since moved out to places all over the world.

Diaspora is the central theme of Pachinko. 

Lee Min Jin, the author of Pachinko, is also a Korean in America and was part of the Korean diaspora. She moved to the United States at the age of seven, following her father, who lost his hometown in the Korean War. 

She said she started planning a novel more than 30 years ago. This was after hearing the story of a middle school student in Japan who killed herself after being bullied for being a Korean.

Diaspora Literature: People Who Left Their Home

Literature dealing with the lives of those outside their home country, like Pachinko, is called diaspora literature. Diaspora literature mainly shows the appearance of immigrants who feel threatened or confused about their identity while leaving their country and settling in a new country.

Noah, the son of  Seonja in Pachinko, is also a character who is confused about his identity. Noah was born in Japan and has a Japanese name. Still, he is discriminated against because he is a second-generation Korean in Japan. He enters Waseda University to become spiritually Japanese but comes into conflict in his identity between Korean and Japanese and eventually chooses to kill himself.

In Pachinko, where various generations of Koreans in Japan appear, different patterns of the diaspora are revealed by generations. Seonja is a part of the first-generation Korean living in Japan. Her identity belongs to Joseon. So she is discriminated against in Japanese society and in conflict because of cultural differences. 

The second and third-generation Koreans in Japan after Seonja have a weaker national connection than the first-generation. However, they are indirectly influenced by their parents and in a conflict of identity between Korea and Japan.

This is also evident in the lines of Phoebe, a second-generation Korean-American in Pachinko.

“In the United States, there was no such thing as Kang-ko-ku-jin* or Jo-sen-jin*. Why do I have to be either a South Korean or a North Korean? This is ridiculous! I was born in Seattle. My parents went to America when Joseon was not divided.” Pachinko,  pg. 314

*Kan-ko-ku-jin : the Japanese word meaning Koreans

*Jo-sen-jin : the Japanese word for a person who lived in Joseon, a country that ruled the Korean Peninsula and its annexes from 1392 to 1910 before the establishment of the Republic of Korea.

People on the Border

Professor Kim Hwan Ki of Dongguk University said, “This identity confusion occurs because the value to be attributed to ethnic tradition and the diaspora’s characteristic of being a stranger living in another country clash.”

Pachinko’s characters miss their country with the confusion of identity and hometown where they can exist as a whole self. This is a common feature in diaspora literature. 

However, Professor Jeong Eun Kyung of Chung-Ang University said, “The hometown that immigrants miss is an imagined utopia in that it is a ‘country without discrimination.’” 

Those people experiencing diaspora can’t belong to a particular nation-state or ethnic group. This means that nationality cannot be an absolute criterion for explaining an individual’s identity.

In Korea, which has historically undergone colonial rule and division, nationalism served as an important concept to protect the community against external attacks. However, diaspora literature such as Pachinko suggests that the exclusivity of nationalism can be violence to those who do not fall within its borders.