Dominated, displaced, separated… From 1910 to 1945, Koreans suffered Japanese colonization, often forced to join the Japanese archipelago to survive. The series “Pachinko”, back for a second season, tells the edifying story of one of these families over four generations.
Sunja (Kim Minha), the matriarch of the family, a young woman in the 1920s. Apple TV
Published on August 24, 2024 at 8:00 p.m.
They are called the zainichi — literally, “those who stayed behind.” In the Japanese archipelago, there are an estimated six hundred thousand of these Korean immigrants and their descendants who have never found their way back to their country of origin. The former left the peninsula before it was divided into two states in 1953, and only knew it under the harsh colonial yoke of the Empire of the Rising Sun (1910-1945). By dispossessing them of their land and means to live decently, the Empire forced them to go and work in Japan, often with no possibility of returning. It is this story, which resonates with that of hundreds of thousands of families, that fate evokes
