Pachinko S2E1 Review: A leaflet falls on Osaka and the family begins to ration its hope
Kogonada returns to Sunja's house under the shadow of imminent bombing, while Solomon negotiates a Tokyo that still treats him as half-Japanese at best.
The second-season premiere of Pachinko opens with Lee Min-ho’s Hansu watching cargo unload in 1945 and asking whether the next ruler of his trade will be the Soviets or the Americans. Within ten minutes, a paper leaflet from an American plane has fluttered into a child’s hand in Osaka, warning the people of Japan that the war must end or the situation will worsen. The hour braids three crises that look unconnected and rhyme exactly: Sunja’s family one ration short of starving in wartime Osaka, Solomon scraping for investors in a Tokyo that still calls him compromised, and the long late-empire shadow Hansu can read better than anyone else in the room. By the close, the show has built its second-season thesis into a single image of a woman refusing to leave a husband no one believes is coming back.
A leaflet, a sea song, and the cabbage that ran out
The Osaka section is shot the way the first season shot the Busan market: low, close, attentive to the small humiliations that compound into a life. Minha Kim’s younger Sunja is selling kimchi at a wartime stall that no longer has reliable cabbage. Her regular Mr. Kim arrives, asks how she is managing, watches her wave it off, and slips Noa a coin with the line that he looks like someone who can handle his money. Noa, played by Steve Sang-Hyun Noh, takes the coin and says he wants to be very rich one day. Sunja, scolding him for joking about a customer being a spy, tells him you never know who is listening. Not in times like this.
Then the leaflet falls. Inji Jeong’s Yangjin and the boys watch it drift down. Noa reads it aloud — accept the consequences, build a new and peace-loving Japan. He asks his mother how things could possibly get worse. She does not have an answer because the answer is being shaped above their heads. Kogonada cuts to a long static shot of Sunja and her children standing in a street full of running neighbors, and the hour’s first chord lands without underlining itself. Mr. Song’s sea song from the season-one boarding house has become a leaflet from an American bomber. The cost of saying the obvious has migrated from one country to another.
The hour’s most painful scene at the stall is Sunja’s reunion with her old friend Jiyun, who arrives to talk about black-market rice wine. Sunja explains that her brother-in-law in a Nagasaki munitions factory has been paid in promissory notes lately, that her mother has not written in three months, that she has one batch of kimchi left. Jiyun, who has come to ask for help, lays out the proposal: a few women here brew rice wine for the black market. Sunja’s first instinct is to say no, that the Economic Police plant informants. Then she goes home and hears Mozasu’s stomach growling in his sleep, and the no becomes a yes. The argument with her sister-in-law Kyunghee that follows is the episode’s most quietly devastating exchange. Kyunghee admits she has considered leaving the maggots in the ration rice for the boys to eat. There is no shame in that, Sunja says. They both know there is. They both know they are not there yet.
Solomon’s runaway market and the village of eleven million
The 1989 thread is built around a single question every investor asks Jin Ha’s Solomon Baek: are you compromised. He pitches his fund as 500 million yen of modest risk in a runaway market, says he is neutral as to whether the dollar or the yen wins, says he is keeping overhead low by managing the fund alone. The senior investor across the table has heard about the Shiffley’s collapse. He has heard about Solomon’s sympathy for the landowner who refused to sell. He has heard, more pointedly, about Mamoru Yoshii. Tokyo, he tells Solomon, is a metropolis of eleven million people, and it still feels like a village.
The line is the episode’s load-bearing sentence about how Japan looks at the men it has not finished assimilating. The Pachinko parlor opening in Osaka belongs to Soji Arai’s Mozasu, whose father-and-son flex with Solomon (“shiny new business with shiny owners”) is the proudest moment any character gets in the hour. He hands Solomon an envelope. Inside is 700,000 dollars, raised by Mozasu and Youn Yuh-jung’s older Sunja against a mortgage on the parlor itself. Solomon hesitates. His father snaps. If I can’t believe in you, who will. Just do your best.
Then a long Tokyo lunch with Solomon’s school friend Tetsuya. Tetsuya remembers, with the cleanness of an old friend, that Solomon was the only boy who did not pile on when he was the new kid. The new kid is always an easy target, he says, and you never played that game. He commits 200 million yen on the spot. By dinner, Abe-san has heard. The phone call to Solomon comes during his grandmother’s grocery run. Tetsuya is sorry, but he can’t. Abe is on the warpath. He claims Solomon is conning him. Solomon, on a Japanese sidewalk, says don’t worry, I understand. The line is delivered without inflection. There is nothing to say back.
The grocery clerk who refuses to admit she misread Sunja’s cake order is where the episode finally cracks Solomon open. The clerk lectures the older Sunja about half-assed Japanese, says there are stores for people like you. Solomon shouts her down in Japanese — I was born here, just like you, I went to Yale University, I made your monthly salary in a single day. The outburst is calibrated to lose him the argument by winning it. His grandmother walks ahead, embarrassed. Later, on a bench, he tells her plainly that he can’t live always feeling sorry for her. The shame Yangjin folded into her altar prayer in season one has bent forty years later into a grandson telling his grandmother he is tired of being the man her life requires him to be. He apologizes. He still says it.
Hansu, tungsten, and the woman who will not leave
The premiere’s last movement is the one returning viewers have been waiting on since 2022. Sunja, sentenced for nothing at the black-market judge’s bench because the judge is on Hansu’s payroll, is released and put into Mr. Kim’s car. The drive ends at a warehouse stacked with mineral ore. Hansu, lit like a man who has chosen the lighting himself, picks up a stone and tells her it is tungsten. Resistant to corrosion once processed. Useful for airplanes, missiles, grenades. This is what makes the war possible. Then he tells her the bombs are coming. Not the smaller targeted runs. The Americans will carpet-bomb the city. He has arranged for her, Kyunghee, and the boys to shelter in the countryside.
How did you find me, Sunja asks. He never lost her. Mr. Kim has worked for him for years, watching the family. Specifically watching Noa. He’s a clever boy, Hansu says, but he’s not applying himself. The line lands with the weight of every season-one viewer’s knowledge of who Noa’s father is.
Sunja refuses. She will not leave her husband Isak to rot in prison. Hansu, who can read most rooms before anyone has finished speaking, reads this one slowly. You actually care about him. The episode cuts to black on the question rather than her answer. It is the right call. The answer has been the show’s spine since the first Busan altar.
What this episode argues
The premiere makes the case that Pachinko’s second season will be a study of how a family rations hope when there is not enough of anything else. Cabbage runs out. Promissory notes replace yen. American leaflets replace sea songs. The smallest unit of dignity — Mr. Kim’s coin to Noa, Yuki’s clean shirt for Solomon — is the only currency the people in this story have any control over.
The trilingual structure that organized season one is back, sharper. Korean carries the kitchen and the kimchi stall. Japanese carries the schoolroom bully, the grocery clerk, the corporate investors, and the prison judge. English carries Solomon’s panicked phone call to Brock, his outburst at the bakery counter, the diasporic vocabulary he uses to flinch away from the family he came from. The leaflet is in Japanese. The bombs do not need a language.
The hour’s most quietly important rhyme is the one between Noa’s teacher and Hansu. The teacher hands Noa a Waseda University practice book and tells him his mind can open many doors. He is, the teacher hints, also Korean, also passing. Hansu, hours later, tells Sunja Noa is clever but not applying himself. Two men with money and false names are already deciding the shape of Noa’s future. Sunja is the only person in either scene who still believes Noa’s future is hers to negotiate.
Verdict
This is a careful, deliberate return to a show that earned the right to be careful. Kogonada paces the hour like a person walking carefully through a house they are not yet sure is on fire. Minha Kim gives Sunja a tighter, harder spine than season one allowed — the kimchi-stall haggling has hardened into a black-market calculation — and Youn Yuh-jung’s Sunja delivers a single grocery-store walk that does more grief work than most prestige dramas manage in a season. Jin Ha plays Solomon’s collapse with the right brittleness: a man whose Yale diploma cannot cash the social check he keeps trying to write.
The premiere’s minor friction is the same one season one had: the cross-cutting structure asks for patience before it earns it, and the Hansu reveal at the warehouse lands a beat earlier than it might have if the episode had held its breath one more scene. The closing image — Sunja choosing Isak over the safety Hansu can buy — is the right hill for the season to die on. A returning viewer leaves the hour reasonably sure Pachinko still knows what it is about and how to film it.
Rating: 8.7/10