美国国家公共电台 NPR 'Pachinko' Is A Family Saga Of Exile, Discrimination ... And Japanese Pinball

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RACHEL MARTIN, HOST:

If you've ever been to Japan, you've probably seen these crazy-looking video game centers all over. They've got lots of fluorescent¹ flashing lights, and it's where businessmen often unwind after work. The game is called pachinko, and it's a multibillion-dollar business in Japan, a business dominated by Koreans.

Min Jin Lee has written a new novel called "Pachinko." And in it, she explores the history of that community and one family's struggle to fit into a society that treats them with contempt. Here's NPR's Lynn Neary.

LYNN NEARY, BYLINE²: Min Jin Lee got the idea for her second novel when she was still a college student. The year was 1989. She went to a lecture by an American missionary³ who had been working with the Korean-Japanese in Japan. He told a story about a 13-year-old boy who committed suicide. After his death, the boy's parents found his school yearbook.

MIN JIN LEE: And in this yearbook, several of his classmates had written things like, go back to your country. And they had written the words, die, die, die. And the parents were born in Japan. The boy was born in Japan. And I think that story just really could not be more fixed⁴ into my brain.

NEARY: Lee, a Korean-American, was determined⁵ to tell the history of Koreans in Japan. She lived there for a while and interviewed many Korean-Japanese to get a sense of what life was like for them. She decided⁶ to tell their history through a multigenerational family story.

LEE: I was very interested in history, but I also thought, you know, history's not that interesting sometimes. And it can feel a bit medicinal. And I wanted it to be really fun, and I wanted it to be really exciting. And I also wanted to give these people kind of flesh and blood in the same way the people that I know have contradictions and betrayals and deaths and marriages and the kind of texture⁷ of life.

NEARY: The story begins in the early 20th century, when Korea is already under Japanese rule. A young girl named Sunja is growing up in a small fishing village on a tiny Korean island. She falls in love with a good-looking older man from the mainland. When she becomes pregnant, he tells her he is already married. Sunja is saved from disgrace by a Christian⁸ minister staying at her family's boarding house who offers to marry her and takes her to Japan.

LEE: She's a child. She's 16. And when she goes to Japan, she has simply no idea what's going to wait for her. And to be frank, most Koreans really didn't know that the history would turn out this way.

NEARY: The impoverished⁹ Koreans who left their occupied homeland didn't find life much easier in Japan. Sunja has two sons, and her husband takes care of both of them. But when he's arrested for preaching Christianity, her life becomes even more difficult. She and her children survive World War II, but then the Korean War breaks out.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER: A highly trained and well-equipped North Korean army swarmed¹⁰ across the 38th parallel to attack unprepared South Korean defenders¹¹. Caught off guard, they were all but overwhelmed.

NEARY: With the war and the partition of Korea, it becomes almost impossible for Sunja to return to her homeland. Twenty years later, she still yearns¹² for what she has lost.

LEE: (Reading) Even the memory of the moon and stars in Korea seemed different than the cold moon here. No matter how much people complained about how bad things were back home, it was difficult for Sunja to imagine anything but the bright, sturdy house that her father had taken care of so well by the green, glassy sea, the bountiful garden that had given them watermelons, lettuces¹³ and squash and the open-air market that never ran out of anything delicious. When she was there, she had not loved it enough.

NEARY: After the war, pachinko parlors¹⁴ start popping up all over in Japan. Both of Sunja's sons find work in the noisy pinball dens¹⁵, which are often run by Korean-Japanese.

LEE: And the reason why the Korean-Japanese are involved in this business is because they could not find legal employment for - I don't know - seven or eight decades. And even now, they have great difficulty finding jobs in certain sectors¹⁶. So in pachinko, they were able to find a kind of employment haven¹⁷.

NEARY: Employment and in many cases, financial success, but not necessarily respect. Despite its popularity, the Japanese looked down on pachinko parlors as gambling¹⁸ dens with connections to the criminals known as the Yakuza. Even so, one of Sunja's sons thrives in the business. But her firstborn never comes to terms with the circumstances of his life.

LEE: I think that my character Noa really is symbolic¹⁹, and he is an emblem²⁰ of so many people that I met who wanted very desperately²¹ to just belong. And they would do everything they possibly could within legal channels to be considered a respectable human being.

NEARY: As a naturalized American who feels she belongs in this country, Lee says it's hard for her to understand that generations of Koreans have never been fully²² accepted in Japan. But many of the Japanese-Koreans she interviewed dismissed her concerns. They have adapted to living in Japan, even if their presence there is still not fully embraced.

Lynn Neary, NPR News, Washington.

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