Pachinko, the stellar Apple TV+ series about the fortunes of a Korean family across decades and generations, takes time away from its main storyline to tell the story of the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, which killed tens of thousands of people in Japan.
The episode isn’t a full stylistic break, but it’s a very different animal from the rest of the season. It offers a harrowing look at one person’s struggle to survive before and after a disaster that forever changed the face of Japan and the Koreans who lived there.
Pachinko recap: ‘Chapter Seven’
The year is 1923. Young tutor Hansu (played by Lee Min-ho) is approached by a figure in the local mob (Takashi Yamaguchi) who wants to give him a job. He’s got a head for calculus and it could be put to good use, they say. However, his father (Woong in-Jung) insists he can’t work for them.
Hansu is split. He wants better things for himself, same as his father, but he doesn’t know what they might be. His father sees him as the great hope of the family, someone who’s got to make something more of himself. He is, however, setting a bad example for Hansu. He borrowed money from the mob to impress his favorite good-time girl.
Hansu wants to help but there is no way to do that and retain his dignity. Hansu suggests going to Mr. Holmes — the rich father of his American student, who has big plans for U.S. interests in Japan. But this sets Hansu’s father off. He’d sooner die than ask for help. And though he tries to tell him to leave Japan for America right then and there, Hansu won’t have it.
Disaster strikes
He tries to offer his labor in exchange for his father’s debt. But in the middle of the discussion, the Great Kanto Earthquake hits, killing Hansu’s dad (and some 140,000 more, when you factor in the people who were murdered in the wake of the disaster). Hansu is only saved when the mob boss drags him from the wreckage. The man makes him promise not to wallow in his grief.
After the earthquake, Hansu goes to the only place left for him: the Holmes house. He arrives in time to dissuade Andrew and his mother (Kerry Knuppe) from taking a fully loaded luggage cart to the boat landing where Mr. Holmes is waiting for them. They get lost walking through ruined Yokohama, and the Holmes leave without Hansu — only to be killed in an aftershock down the road.
The mob boss takes in Hansu, protects him from people killing Koreans under suspicion of looting, and introduces him to his family. Hansu’s new life starts today.
The standout episode of Pachinko
I like the trend in Apple TV+ shows to unleash one episode that’s markedly different from the rest of the season. Swagger gave us the police brutality episode. (And, as in that, there are no opening credits for this episode of Pachinko. The jocular mood would have jibed awkwardly with the tale of a disaster that killed so many people.) Mythic Quest takes an episode a season to go back in time and tell the story of something or someone tangentially related to the show. And now Pachinko has stepped outside its narrative and focused on the experiences of a peripheral but very important character.
Hansu’s arc has been a consistently upsetting feature of the show. To go from the one man who sees beauty in Sunja to her tormentor and unseen stalker was quite a heel turn. This episode thankfully spares us overt psychoanalysis (“See, this is why he’s such a bad guy, feel bad for him”) and just lets us see him lose everything meaningful to Hansu in an instant.
Suddenly, Hansu has no family, no future outside of Japan, and nowhere to turn but to a less-than-savory industry.
What you don’t know …
You could say broadly that Pachinko’s chief aim is to illustrate the point made to Solomon by his elders around the dinner table a few episodes back: You just don’t know what someone’s been through. The show makes this case nimbly, for the most part, by having its timelines intersect at crucial moments to show that a crisis in the present has nothing on a crisis in the past, or that the terrible conditions of the past haven’t changed at all.
This week’s episode chooses one central idea and plays it out to its logical conclusion. No one who was not there can possibly understand what it was like to walk through a ruined city, on tops of piles of corpses, and then to be nearly killed for simply being Korean.
Behind the camera
Kogonada returns to the director’s chair and handles the interpersonal drama a little better than the disaster. A gray color grading and lots of dust do more work showing the destruction than his camera. (Cinematographer Florian Hoffmeister also returns this week, shooting this episode in a smaller aspect ratio, to both hint at the antiquity of the timeline as compared to the show’s usual 1930s and 1980s settings and to further trap Hansu in his surroundings.)
Kogonada’s obviously trying to toe the line between showing too much horror and letting implication do all the work. And while I’m not certain it works as well as it ought to, there’s nothing wrong with the approach.
The stuff with Hansu and his dad is pretty unimpeachable, however. The two of them talking about the future over a radio broadcast of a baseball game is probably the strongest moment in the episode.
All in all, it’s a sensitively handled episode — and a necessary addition to Pachinko’s historical underpinning.
Watch Pachinko on Apple TV+
New episodes of Pachinko arrive Fridays on Apple TV+.
Rated: TV-MA
Watch on: Apple TV+
Scout Tafoya is a film and TV critic, director and creator of the long-running video essay series The Unloved for RogerEbert.com. He has written for The Village Voice, Film Comment, The Los Angeles Review of Books and Nylon Magazine. He is the author of Cinemaphagy: On the Psychedelic Classical Form of Tobe Hooper, the director of 25 feature films, and the director and editor of more than 300 video essays, which can be found at Patreon.com/honorszombie.
