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Pachinko

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Key facts

  1. Pachinko was filmed across three countries — South Korea, Japan, and Canada — with the production team meticulously recreating historical settings from early twentieth-century coastal Korea to post-war Osaka.
  2. The show employs three languages — Korean, Japanese, and English — with each generation speaking the language that reflects their historical circumstances, requiring the cast to be multilingual or to learn new languages for their roles.
  3. Author Min Jin Lee spent more than twenty years researching and writing the novel on which the series is based, interviewing hundreds of Zainichi Koreans (ethnic Koreans living in Japan) to ensure historical and cultural accuracy.
  4. Youn Yuh-jung, who plays the elder Sunja, was cast directly from her Oscar-winning performance in Minari — with showrunner Soo Hugh describing her as the only actress she could imagine in the role.
  5. The title refers to the pachinko parlor business that becomes central to the family's story — a type of amusement machine unique to Japan that became strongly associated with the Zainichi Korean community.
  6. Apple TV+ granted the production one of its largest-ever budgets for a non-English-language series, allowing the show to achieve the scope and authenticity that the novel's century-spanning narrative demands.
  7. The series premiere on Apple TV+ was timed to coincide with the 2022 ceremony marking the 110th anniversary of Korean migration to Japan, giving the show added historical resonance at its launch.
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Pachinko Apple TV+ show poster

Pachinko

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Pachinko is one of the most ambitious television dramas ever produced — a multigenerational epic based on Min Jin Lee's bestselling 2017 novel that spans nearly a century of Korean-Japanese history through the story of one family's survival, sacrifice, and resilience. The series opens in early twentieth-century Korea, where a young woman named Sunja makes a fateful decision that will reverberate through four generations of her family, eventually reaching a young Solomon (Jin Ha) navigating identity and belonging in 1980s Osaka and New York.

What makes Pachinko extraordinary is its ambition matched by its execution. Showrunner Soo Hugh and her team weave between three distinct time periods and three languages — Korean, Japanese, and English — with total command, finding the thread that connects the grandmother of 1915 to the grandson of 1989 not through plot mechanics but through a shared DNA of stubbornness and love. The performances throughout are exceptional, with Youn Yuh-jung (Oscar winner for Minari) delivering heartbreaking grace as the elder Sunja.

Pachinko is also a rare television drama that places the Korean-Japanese experience — one of the twentieth century's most overlooked stories of displacement and discrimination — at the absolute center of a major prestige production. It is sweeping in scale and intimate in feeling, and it stands as one of the defining works of international television storytelling.

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