The connections between colonialism and corporate culture run deep in Apple TV+’s Pachinko, the epic of a multigenerational zainichi family, Japanese citizens of Korean descent regardless of generation. The core of Apple TV+’s Pachinko lies both in the grueling life of Sunja (played as a teenager by Minha Kim and as an adult by Youn Yuh-Jung) in Japanese-occupied Korea, and in the story of her grandson, a driven young New York-based businessman named Solomon Baek (played as an adult by Jin Ha). While Min Jin Lee’s 2017 novel is primarily told in a chronological fashion, the series adaptation moves between the stories beginning in 1915 and 1989, flashing backwards and forwards to create complementary timelines. While Solomon’s struggle is not directly compared to Sunja’s, nor are they comparable in scope or scale, what is apparent are the impacts of colonialism and neocolonialism — regardless of generation — on the two. The stories, which run in parallel despite being spaced decades apart, utilize dual narratives that explore corporate exploitation as an expansion of colonialism.
Sunja is defeated time and time again at the hands of Japanese officials and authorities, a direct result of the imperial and colonial relationship between Japan and annexed Korea. She first suffers as an impoverished Korean woman under Japanese rule, where frequent interrogations and unfounded punishments are carried out against Koreans. Next, she is brought (or rather, forced) to seek a new start in Japan, where the promise of a good life is teasingly offered but never fulfilled; instead, the Koreans are bound to a ramshackle part of Osaka, where they still live, in effect, under Japanese subjugation. She is torn away, once and for all, from her ancestral homeland, never to return until her elder years.
Likewise, Solomon is caught in a pseudo-colonial relationship with his employer, Shiffley’s, which replicates the types of subjugation Sunja experienced in her youth, albeit in a new and perhaps what might be considered “contemporary” form. His boss at Shiffley’s, and even his white coworkers, exploit his talent while refusing to offer him the promotion he deserved. At the Tokyo branch, Solomon finds himself convincing an elderly Korean woman to give up her land for the approval of his employer, a wealthy company not even based in Japan.
If we consider colonialism as subjugation of people in order to exploit them and extract for the wealth of a foreign land, Shiffley’s itself stands in as the colonizer. In this way, the representatives at Shiffley’s bring Solomon into its neocolonial web by convincing the “promising” young investment banker that it is in his best interest to strive for the upper rungs of the bank, even though they know he will never be considered an insider. Although it appears from an outside perspective that it is Solomon’s own free will and ambition that is driving him, it quickly becomes clear that the values instilled in him by Shiffley’s, and perhaps a Western narrative of development and modernization, has taken hold of him. He himself strives to become the oppressor, only to back out and reclaim his true position when he tells the elderly woman to refuse the contract to buy her land, even though he knows it will ruin his career and for all that he has worked.
Solomon struggles to figure out where his loyalties lie precisely because of colonially perpetuated relationships. Does he bend to the hand of his capitalist oppressor, the bank that “granted” him the opportunity to rise as an Asian American in the 1980s while using and abusing his talents? His struggles not only parallel those of Sunja, but are ultimately the result of a complex cause-and-effect chain between intergenerational trauma inflicted by colonialism upon his grandmother, which transforms into corporate exploitation of Solomon’s day.
The viewer is provided Solomon’s struggle on a micro-scale and Sunja’s on a macro-scale, with Sunja’s life spanning from her birth to her elderly years. However, the neocolonial relationship becomes very apparent in these day-to-day interactions and the conditions of Solomon’s workplace, where the toils of corporate life weigh him down with every step. Sunja is forced to face the globalized world at a much more rapid pace than she has ever experienced, and she, too, desires to keep up in some way — even if this desire is exemplified in the simple yet beautiful concept of white rice, a foodstuff reserved for the Japanese.
Solomon’s story runs at a snail’s pace in comparison to Sunja’s. His struggle is centered around his occupation, his livelihood, and his reputation on the scale of weeks and months rather than years and decades. Solomon is already caught up in this globalized world, and he is deeply embedded in this system, knowing nothing other than a pursuit of money and power as the pinnacle of success. Yet he is given a taste of a new life, one that may appear more readily in the second season, through the possibility of running a pachinko business. In this way, he is both culturally and economically forced to confront all that he has run from and all that this neocolonial oppression has suppressed within him.
The ways in which Sunja’s and Solomon’s stories are intertwined, along with how they meet and interact, further demonstrate this causal chain. The ways in which Solomon is laughed at by white coworkers mirrors that of the Japanese men who corner and target her. The immense amount of shame held within Sunja for being poor carries through to Solomon, who sees his only way out as conforming to the Shiffley’s standard and that of a Western banker. The question remains whether Sunja still carries with her the colonial binds, which seems to be the case when she agrees to attempt to convince the elderly Korean woman to give up her home to Shiffley’s. Yet the pride she holds in being Korean, and the indescribable joy she feels when returning to Korea, shows that there is more at play than simply coloniality. Coloniality may be omnipresent, but solidarity, love, and a refusal to give up one’s roots will trump even the most entrenched beliefs.
