While Apple+ has not guaranteed a third season of Pachinko, Show Creator Soo Hugh (who I interviewed last year) and the show’s tremendous lead, Minha Kim, are hopeful they will get to continue telling the multi-generational and multicultural story of Korean immigrants in Japan, Sunja, and her family. Pachinko has been a strangely overlooked show. Season one was gretted by massive raves, but only the series’ open-title scene (which is wonderful), received a nomination. I doubt the show is streaming at the level of the network’s biggest hit (Ted Lasso); Apple TV+ clearly believed there was enough audience to bring the show back for a season two.
Whether Pachinko gets renewed or not, I’m hopeful that the Emmys will give greater consideration to a show that is unlike any other on TV now and probably before (at least in Western markets). The trials of Sunja, her family, the struggle to assimilate as native Koreans in Japan, and the sheer artistry of Pachinko make it more than Emmy-worthy.
Without knowing the show’s fate, Minha Kim and I discuss season two, Sunja’s heroism, and her final moment of heartbreak.
The Contending: Pachinko is an ensemble, but your character, Sunja, is very much the center of the show. Did you feel that challenge as a young actor on such a well-written show?
Minha Kim: Yes. When I started with my character, Sunja, I had a lot of responsibilities towards her because it’s not just the story about me. It’s a story about all the generations. She represents the woman at that time and leading to the present. It was always a challenge for me to portray her character because it’s about a girl who fell in love with a guy (Han-soo, played by Lee Min-ho), and she was abandoned, moved to another country, and started her life in a very new way with another family and raising her kids. Then, starting the second season, time has passed from the first season, so what I had to do is to convey this timeline. I didn’t want her to be obvious. Even though sixteen years have passed, she’s still a very young woman. She’s thirty years old. I’m thirty years old right now, and I feel like I’m just a baby.
But she’s been raising two kids, and she’s been working so hard to save the family with Kyunghee (Jung Eun-chae) and the continuing story with Han-soo. In order to forget Han-soo, she just took on everything. So, I had to convey that into her when she first appeared in the second season. It was really hard for me to convey those changes in her all the time: How she moves, how she talks, how she behaves, or her relationship with their kids and Kyunghee. After the first season, when I heard that there was going to be a second season, I had to consider all of those things. I still remember when I first got the script of the second season, I was like she’s still young, but she’s old inside. I had to build a layer of that. Every time I meet Sunja, it’s a challenge, but I learn so many things from her.
The Contending: I think the show works wonderfully as drama, but one of the great things is that it’s a history lesson about the cultural clash between Koreans and the Japanese. The show has three languages, mostly a little bit of English, a lot of Korean, and a lot of Japanese. The show is smart enough to put the language (subtitles) in different colors so that you know who’s speaking Korean and who is speaking Japanese. Did you feel a sense of the show carrying this weight of responsibility of telling a story to an American audience that may not be familiar with this challenge that was experienced by Koreans, in a way that makes it digestible?
Minha Kim: Of course. I think Soo and all the writers did a wonderful job of conveying all those stories. Some of the feedback that I got from a lot of Americans or people from Western culture was that they didn’t know about this relationship between Koreans and Japanese and all the history. Even Asian people told me that they didn’t know anything about it. So I was so proud when I got that feedback because that meant Pachinko did a wonderful job, not only telling the story of a young woman but also about the historical facts. As Koreans, it was very natural for us to study the history and the relationship between the Japanese and Koreans. It’s always been very intense.
Starting from my childhood, I just could feel it when I turned on the TV and watched the news. The headline of the relationship between Koreans and Japanese was always a very big issue. Now that people have gotten to know the stories and why it matters, and the relationships between these Asian countries are becoming more important, it is rooted in that era. As an Asian, it feels good that now they get to know about all those cultures and all the stories. I feel like it’s great timing for people to know each other and know about their history. And especially for the movie industry, they can make more stories. This kind of hopeful cheerleading mindset has appeared from hearing that feedback. So, it was great. It was a great experience. Now I just wish more and more stories could appear stemming from our show.
The Contending: My thought after season one, which ended so perfectly, was, what are they going to do next? And then all of a sudden, I thought, oh, World War II. I felt so stupid. (Laughs). While season two isn’t a conventional World War II story, the war hangs over the entire season.
Minha Kim: There’s an episode where World War II came to Japan, and Sunja and all her family were shocked and thinking, what are we going to do? The point that I love about our show is that it’s not about the stories where people suffered in World War II. Ironically, Sunja and her family were having a fortunate time. I hate to say that, but they were having a better time than most during the war. It was a bizarre time. It was a horrible time. But ironically, it just brought people together, and the family had more time to spend together. Even though the war was happening, people were dying, and planes were going up in the sky, we were worrying about Yoseb (Han Joon-Woo) and what was going to happen, and I left my husband’s dead body and couldn’t say goodbye to him. So all this was horrible, but we were so busy just surviving. We just had to focus on surviving, but at the same time, all the family gathered around and had a lot of time to talk and get to know each other. I felt like it was another form of love while these people were living in that era and area. We were trying to convey the story of hope, love, and family, even though we were showing the toll of the war as well.
The Contending: Sunja’s relationship with Han-soo is obviously very complicated, but her relationship with her husband, Isak (Steve Sang-Hyun Noh), has this sweetness and simplicity to it. In season one, when he asks you if you could love another, that is an emotionally powerful scene. He then goes missing for an extended period of time. So when he returns, and he’s ill, my mind immediately went back to that conversation. You had a smaller amount of time to build that relationship so that it pays off in season two.
Minha Kim: It is just the most heartbroken scene I have ever played when Isak dies in season 2. When he got arrested, he was gone for six years, and we had very little time to build a romantic relationship. Even though Sunja loved him so much, it’s more about obligation. There’s no vocabulary to describe how she appreciated Isak. Isak saved her. And even though Isak knew that Sunja couldn’t forget Han-soo, all those things that Isak did for Sunja were all based in love. The humanity that he had was so huge that Sunja learned from him. After the marriage and they became parents to Noa and Mozasu, the relationship was so special and powerful, and Sunja felt that she was finally stabilized and had her own family. It’s rational, and it’s based on a very stabilized love and so more about the family.
On the other hand, with Han-soo, it’s very chemical; her body reacts, and it’s never connected to the rational. It’s more about instinct and impulse, and it’s so powerful that she wants to reject it, but she can’t. It was a totally different kind of love. It was originally in the script that when Isak dies, he said you can go to Han-soo right now, but we just deleted the line because it was too powerful and wouldn’t be the last words that Sunja would want to hear from Isak. But whenever we were doing the rehearsal and Isak said that line, I just couldn’t stop crying. I was angry at him, and there’s no way that I’m going to do that, and I was arguing back. Isak is someone who has a very big capacity for love, and he’s an adult, he’s a big man. The kind I want to meet in my real life. (Laughs).
The Contending: The relationship with Han-soo is so much more complicated because he has a separate family. He does care for Sunja. He goes out of his way to keep her safe during World War II. It’s something that Sunja needs from him, but she wishes she didn’t need it from him. I think for her, that relationship is one that she would like not to be tethered to because of the complications in it. But at the same time, they’re like magnets.
Minha Kim: When I was preparing for Sunja for the second season, I tried really hard to discard the relationship between Sunja and Han-soo because it was so complicated. Of course, it is based on love. It’s one other form of love. I felt that the hate that Sunja had towards Han-soo is also about love. When people don’t have any love, or if they don’t care about someone, they can’t hate them. Sunja tried so hard to delete Han-soo from her life. After she believed that Han-soo disappeared from her life, she tried so hard to forget about him for a very long time, but she failed. So for episode one in season two, when they first met after a decade, even though I was very shocked and scared and I was shivering from the fear, I expected that. Sunja had expected that. What if we met? What if we married? What if we were raising the kids?
I think Sunja could have imagined a life with Han-soo for a very long time. Then, when Han-soo constantly tried to help her, she wanted to deny it and reject it, but without Han-soo’s help, she and her family couldn’t survive. She accepted the fact that she couldn’t live without him. Han-soo and Sunja are getting old together, and the conversation they’re having is all about their children. In episode seven, when Yoseb and all the children went to see the baseball game, and Han-soo came to the house, and we were talking, I felt very weird. The first emotion that I felt towards Han-soo was oh, look at us, we’re getting old, and we’re sharing our own stories. Han-soo was talking about his daughter and father-in-law, and I felt like even though we had our past and even though I’m very cautious about him, now we are the same people who have their own history and stories. Now, we are in a relationship where we can share it. I believe Sunja loves Han-soo but in a very different way. It’s so complicated.
The Contending: Something you said reminded me of something that I was once told by someone else, and that probably wasn’t an original quote of theirs, but they probably got it from somewhere else, but it was “The opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference.” There’s no indifference between you and Han-soo. Lee Min-ho is so good that you can sometimes look at him and see on his face the wish that he didn’t feel this way towards Sunja.
Minha Kim: If you look at the conversations between Han-soo and Sunja, even though they’re fighting, every time they’re fighting, they have the same goal. I remember one day when I was talking with Min-ho that they’re just a perfect couple. Look at them. They can talk. They are having a conversation every time. They have that chemistry, so how can they be indifferent towards each other? They need each other. I think one reason why Han-soo is so obsessed with Sunja is that he cannot have her. That’s why he’s so angry at her. That could also be the reason for Sunja, as it just doesn’t make any sense for her. Even though World War II and the Korean War happened, despite all the circumstances, Han-soo just wanted Sunja to be safe so maybe they could be together someday. They’re always dreaming of that what if…
The Contending: I think part of Han-soo’s frustration is that he’s a man of a certain time in a world where men dominated society even more than they do today. He’s also a man of power, and yet he still can’t have the thing he wants because he’s already involved with another family before he meets you, and your character has too much character to be his mistress. I think the frustration is that both characters would like to have an alternate universe.
Minha Kim: In the first season, when Han-soo told Sunja that we could not marry each other because he has a family, what if Sunja could have accepted it? What if she still wanted to be part of him? Sunja was very smart and independent. She decided to make her own life, make her own timeline, so they were separated. But the connection between the two of them was so powerful that even though they were leaving each other, their stories couldn’t be complete without each other. That’s why our story just moves on with desperate and heartbroken factors and elements. Sunja has really tried hard to live, very hard to save her husband Isak and to raise their children. She realized that she could not move on in her life without Han-soo’s help, and Han-soo also felt alive when he helped Sunja. All those elements, all this chemistry, were very related to each other even though they were both trying to move on.
The Contending: Years ago, I interviewed Youn Yuh-jung for Minari. In a show that operates in two different eras and there is a central character, which is you and Youn Yuh-jung’s older version of Sunja, is it ever in your mind that my character has to blend in with the future version of me that a different actor is playing?
Minha Kim: To be honest, no. It just went naturally. I just consider the character. I just followed the flow of the characters, and I read the book and I understood the connection between the young version of Sunja and the older version of Sunja. I just believed in the script and focused on the now. Soo and all the writers created such a great script. It just goes like a river. What I did was to just focus on the moment and to be present. Thankfully a lot of people told me that my version of Sunja and the version of Sunja that YJ (Yuh-jung) plays matched very well.
The Contending: As I had mentioned before, Sunja is the center of this ensemble, but season two felt like it belonged to Noa. Noa starts as very much one type of young person and then, at the end of the season, ends up a very different type of young person. There’s a secret that’s being kept from Noa, and it is the type of thing that can ruin someone’s life to know. Playing that out with the actor (Kang Tae-Ju) who played the older version of Noa this season, where your character believes in the truth, but can’t be truthful with Noa?
Minha Kim: Every time I had a scene with Noa, it was so hard because I had never raised kids before. There’s a scene when Noa told me that he’s not going to go to college and I persuaded him. I remember we were shooting that scene for more than six hours because I couldn’t figure out how I could persuade him. Should I be angry at him, or should I comfort him, or should I make him sit down and talk about it for two hours? Or what should I do? So I asked Sang-il, the director, how did you raise kids? It’s so fucking hard. (Laughs). “They don’t listen to me. They are so stubborn”. The relationship between me and Noa and Mozasu, I love them so much, so I want them to go in the right direction. ‘
And especially for Noa, I don’t want him to become what Han-soo has, and I don’t want them to be too close. I’m always very aware of that. One of the biggest fears that I have is that Noa would figure out the truth. That was the one thing that I wanted to keep a secret. I’m always very cautious, and I love him so much. I want him to go to college, and I want him to fly as a butterfly, and I want him to make his dream come true, and Mozasu as well. But in the last episode, when I figure out that Noa came to my house to say goodbye, there was the point when Sunja finally collapsed, when she finally loses her dream. She realizes that she has to give up. She finally lied down and that was the first time that she closed her eyes because at that time she was exhausted. She loses her hope and the reason for her to live on. It was that big for her to have the secret. When Isak was gone, raising her kids was the only goal and the only thing that she could breathe. It was very challenging.
The Contending: Kang Tae-Ju, as the older Noa, has such a great sweetness about him. The arc of his character is written so well that the change in him is almost invisible. As you were shooting the show were you thinking this young man’s becoming a compelling actor right before my eyes?
Minha Kim: For the first four episodes, Kang-hoon was my son. And he was so good. Whenever I look into his eyes, he’s so deep, and emotional. Every time I was on set with Kang-hoon, there was only one goal: I had to protect him. I just want him to eat, sleep, and be warm, even when we were not acting. He was so good, and he was so powerful. When we were in the rural area in World War II, I looked at him, and he was reading the newspaper; he was trying so hard to be a good student and a good son. It just made me feel very overwhelmed. He’s the only child that I gave a lot of responsibilities, and I gave him a lot of guilt as well, so I had to protect him.
Then, time passed, and Tae-Ju represented Noa’s role as well. And you know what? Tae-Ju and I are friends in real life. We’re the same age, but he has to play my son. (Laughs). Tae-Ju always tried to be a good man and a good student. But, after he realized that he had the same genes as Han-soo, he became very violent; it just broke my heart that I couldn’t help. Usually, Sunja is the one who is trying to find the solutions, and she knows how to survive. But after Noa disappeared, she just stopped, and it froze her. Tae-Ju and Kang-hoon were so powerful. It just helped me so much to be in that moment and try to be a mom.
The Contending: When you mentioned when Sunja crumbles after that final scene with Noa, when she realizes that he’s saying goodbye without, it was like it was the first time your character gave herself any moment of weakness. And I mean weak in the most human of ways: I have tried to protect my son all of this time, and I couldn’t do it.
Minha Kim: It was the first time she showed weakness. All of her life, especially when she moved to Osaka, she had a great responsibility to protect her family even when she wanted to collapse or when she wanted to be a little fragile. She’s human. She worked very hard every day, and she had a lot of obstacles in her life. She wanted to collapse before, but she couldn’t. Isak is gone, and Yoseb is far away. She’s the one who couldn’t be weak, so she just buried it. She’s so strong, but after Noa has gone, she couldn’t help it. What’s the hope? Where’s the light? What’s the reason for me to survive? What’s the point? All my goals are gone, and the one thing that I really wanted to keep a secret has just been revealed. That’s when she finally realized that’s it, I’m just done, there’s nothing that I can do. Just reminding me of all those emotions and the scene, even though it was like two years ago, it makes me broken as well.
