[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Pachinko - Season 2" Episode 1

While I only wrote a couple of episodic reviews for "Pachinko" back in 2022 on HanCinema, I wrote a couple of more in-depth reviews of the series on Book and Film Globe. You can read them here and here. To be quite honest I'd entirely forgotten that Apple TV+ had greenlit a second season at all. The show wasn't widely watched or commented upon either in Amercian prestige television spaces or more typical K-Drama fan spaces by anyone except, well, me.

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The exact target audience for "Pachinko - Season 2" remains a bit of a mystery. Lee Min-ho, the show's most bankable star, only appears in a handful of scenes as the Zainichi heir apparent to a yakuza empire that's been struggling to deal with a blockade. "Pachinko - Season 2" goes to surprising lengths to avoid clearly stating that the blockade is being enforced by the American navy. An apparent air force raid is anticlimactically revealed to just be a rain of leaflets urging a peaceful surrender.

I wonder if Lee Min-ho understood that when he was offered a role that could utilize his ability to speak Japanese that it would be for a series his Japanese fans would deeply resent. The implication here that Japanese people feel irredeemable racism to Korean people and probably deserved to be victims of war crimes for that same reason is more than a little unsettling. "Pachinko - Season 2" can't even introduce an apparently sympathetic Japanese teacher without almost immediately suggesting his sense of empathy is solely due to him, too, being an ethnic Korean.

Youn Yuh-jung, the other high profile South Korean performer in this project, also does little more in the second season premiere than meekly accept that racism exists. Her character is also one of many family members who tries to get Solomon, played by Jin Ha, a loan in late eighties Japan, so that he can do some sort of...finance thing. It's not a good sign for this series that I can barely keep track of what its apparent lead character wants to do or why.

Back in the forties, at least, the younger version of Youn Yuh-jung's character Sun-ja, played by Kim Min-ha-I, struggles to make ends meet while waiting for her husband to be released from prison. Despite the backdrop of crisis, "Pachinko - Season 2" has surprising little urgency. The charitable interpretation of this is that Sun-ja herself is also in denial about how bad the situation is- although I'm not sure this series deserves that much credit.

Written by William Schwartz