How Pachinko Recreated the Great Kanto Earthquake

The TV adaptation of Pachinko, Min Jin Lee’s 2017 bestseller about four generations of a South Korean family living in Japan, took some liberties with its source. Lee’s novel begins in 1910 with Hoonie and Yangjin – the parents of the main character, Sunja – struggling to make ends meet as the owners of a boarding house in the South Korean fishing village of Yeongdo; Their work and sacrifice provides a blueprint for their descendants, whose stories follow chronologically. But in Apple TV+’s decade-long series, the plot seamlessly jumps between timelines, seamlessly reflecting the suffering and joy of one generation to the next and providing a modern anchor for Sunja Solomon’s grandson (Jin Ha), who grapples with echoes of his predecessors’ decisions while pursuing a career in finance in the 1980s. .

But the biggest departure from the book comes in the penultimate episode of season one, “Chapter Seven,” which harks back to Koh Hanso (Lee Min Ho)’s lower-class upbringing in Yokohama, Japan. The account of Lee Hansoo, a wealthy fishmonger and father of Senja’s first child, is left as a mystery, providing only minor details about his personal life – he is married to a Japanese woman and works for her father – and almost nothing about his past. Series and show creator Soo Hugh was intrigued by Lee’s introduction of the stoic and secretive Hansu and knew early in development that she wanted to use one of Season 1’s eight episodes to explore his character and background.

Heo offers Hansoo’s harsh external introduction with tragedy: He is a survivor of the 1923 Great Kanto Earthquake and the subsequent Korean massacre at the hands of Japanese guards. “Chapter Seven” is a stand-alone episode that feels like a departure from the rest of the series, from the visual language all the way to the absence of the blissful title sequence written into the script. “I wanted the audience to know from the start that we’re not watching a regular episode — that the shaking of that episode would be worrisome,” says Hugh.

The 1923 Kanto earthquake had a magnitude of 7.9 on the moment scale and was so devastating that Japan, to this day, is acknowledging the tragedy by practicing emergency drills across the country. Hugh first learned of the disaster while researching Japanese history in the months leading up to the launch of The Book Room. Shocked that she hadn’t heard of that before. “I felt something of this magnitude should be studied and learned,” she says. “When I started putting the Kanto earthquake research together, I felt it fit right in with Hansoo’s backstory.” She describes the earthquake as a “sliding doors moment” for the character, who is about to chase the American dream via an offer to move to the United States with the Holmes family, who hired him as a teacher. “It has two paths in life, and an earthquake completely blocks one path,” Hugh says. “He could have lived a completely different life had he not been in Yokohama in 1923.”

The looming American presence in Korea and Japan during this period appears not only in Hansu’s What if story but also in fashion. Although Hansoo wears a worn kimono as a sign of his forced assimilation into Japanese culture (Hyo and director Kogunada wanted Hansoo to look young and fragile, according to costume designer Kyunghwa Chae), his father is dressed in a Western dress. “His father has a strong ambition for Western society and he wears just that: his desires,” Chai says. Hanso’s father saw America as the answer to his family’s plight and the only way out of their fate in Japan – the same mindset that sends Solomon abroad for education and instills in him a reverence for his job in a Western bank.

Once the writers created the story line for episode seven, Kojunada, who also directed the series’ first three episodes, came up with the idea of ​​adding a scar on Hansoo’s face. The mark above his eye, which appeared from Pachinko’s premiere onwards, stems from a blow from his father during an argument over Hansoo’s future in Japan and serves as a physical reminder of what Hansoo lost that day. He carries with him the loss of his father and the loss of hope. On this day, he sees the cruelty of history and realizes what it means to survive,” says Kugunada.

For the seventh act, war films provided a benchmark for all aspects of production. To help Lee embody this traumatic event and chart Hansoo’s emotional journey, Kogunada commissioned him to watch the 1985 Russian film Come and See, which depicts the impact of the war on the boy’s life. “We knew we wanted to finish on Hansoo’s face and that we were going to stay there and feel that transformation in his eyes,” Kugunada says. The episode was filmed in a different aspect ratio than the rest of the series to display as Hansoo’s avatar. “This was an arc in our story to step back historically and in relation to Hansoo,” says the director. “The wide aspect ratio is not suitable for portraits, so we added a height because it fits more in the face.”

Survival is the core of Pachinko’s framing of the Kanto earthquake, which killed more than 100,000 people on September 1, 1923, including thousands of Koreans who were scapegoated. But there is still a lot of controversy surrounding these murders at the hands of Japanese guards in the aftermath of the earthquake, and the show has made fact-checking a priority. The pre-production team for the series employed historians, consultants, and experts to work on translating Japanese scripts and watching documentaries to understand exactly what happened.

Pachinko’s seventh episode will likely be the first time Western audiences have learned about the Kanto earthquake and massacre, and while accuracy was paramount, Hugh wanted to make sure the show wasn’t a history lesson. I receded from the horrors of violence; In her research, she read accounts of Koreans lining up opposite canals and then being shot or burned. “I didn’t want to bring that kind of visual into the show or into the real world,” she says. Instead, the episode depicts the Koreans’ hiding hut being set ablaze – still conveying the brutality of the moment without immersing itself in downright horrific visuals.

Hugh also took his liberty with the timestamps present throughout the episode. 12:10 is the exact timing of the earthquake – records have shown stopped hours indicating the initial impact – but the rest of these moments within the episode serve as a creative expression of Hansoo’s imaginary journey that day. In fact, Hugh acknowledges that much of the violence in the aftermath of the earthquake didn’t actually happen the night of the earthquake: “It spread out over days, but because of the pressure of time with the narrative, we moved it.”

One of the visuals that the production team kept coming back to was dust, which oral history described as streaked yellow and hanging thickly in the air. Production designer Mara LePere-Schloop focused on recreating texture and color, importing samples from the UK and Malaysia to the South Korean filming location. The production team dealt with COVID restrictions, supply chain restrictions, and film industry standards around what was considered safe to use. “There was a difference between what we could use as a static dressing versus the airborne dust from the cannons,” Lieber-Schlub says. The special effects team would spray different layers of diluted dust onto stationary pieces to get the desired effect, while cinematographer Florian Hofmeister adjusted the lighting to reflect the thick, smog-like quality in the air.

Kogunada and Hugh identified the initial trembling and subsequent collapse of the city’s buildings as the most poignant moments in the episode. For the scene in which Hansoo, his father, and Ryuichi faced the first earthquakes, the LePere-Schloop team built the set on a giant steel box that could rotate and move in all directions so the scene wouldn’t rely on camera movements to transmit the image. traumas; The actors rehearsed the earthquake scene multiple times and shot it in one take. “Most of the group was resettable, but the enemy was real time,” LePere-Schloop recalls. “If it was a movie, we would have had a week to shoot that sequence. Instead, we had one night.”

Time and time again, the people behind Pachinko describe work on “Chapter Seven” as akin to filming an epic during the eight months into the series’ production. “The ambition and scale of the ring was really memorable, even though it was a daunting task,” Kugunada says. It required new locations, costumes, props, and critical attention to detail from everyone involved—even as production knocked the series out of order. But to commemorate such an important moment for the Korean diaspora and Japanese history, Kogunada says, “all the challenges were worth it.”

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