This is yet everything behind us, "the notary said in Tokyo nervous, hesitant than the old Korean to sign the purchase agreement - and begins with the old stories: the stories of their family, as seven hundred thousand other Koreans during the Japanese occupation after Japan withdrew to escape the misery, but there witnessed an endless series of harassment.

The woman looks at the notary: "If you believe, you're an even bigger idiot than I thought."

Mark Siemons

Feature correspondent in Berlin.

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Like many others, has remained her family even after 1945, in Japan, because she had no home in Korea, and now the woman settles, refuses all those they expectantly intuiting Japanese bankers, their small plot of land and house for sale, the she has acquired in the foreign country and the necessarily want to have for a luxury hotel building, the bank now.

"Each plug blood," she says in Korean the seated between them broker Solomon, who also Korean roots, is an argument against signing these papers.

This scene in the fourth episode of the now on Apple TV + running series "Pachinko - A Simple Life" is a summary of the morality of the entire epic: The past is not gone;

Not to be confused with the South Korean K-Dramas that became so popular on Netflix and elsewhere in the western mainstream well before Squid Game, this series is about four generations of a Korean family.

"Pachinko" is an American series with a decidedly American perspective.

In contrast to the chronologically narrative novel by the New York author Min Jin Lee, which was published in German in 2018 under the title "EinEasy Life", the television version by Soo Hugh constantly oscillates between the time levels.

The humiliating experiences under the Japanese occupation are continually reflected in the grandson's struggle for self-assertion in New York and in the globalized high-finance world of 1989.

In the self-confident, initially almost haughty look,

The past is not past

From the first shot, "Pachinko" is about recognition and identity - not primarily in the categories of "race", but in those of the historical experience of a nation.

Koreans and Japanese, who are more or less the same in the western superficial view (“Asians”), are sharply differentiated here in their very different, conflict-ridden memories.

In order not to mix things up, the subtitles of the Korean and Japanese dialogues also have different colors.

"Pachinko" is not a chamber play.

No expense is spared on equipment;

with the alternation of wide-ranging panoramas and close-up scenes composed down to the last detail, but above all with the great crew of actors, the series creates a pull for which a screen is actually too small.

It starts with a look at a Korean fishing village near Busan in 1915. Five years earlier, Korea had been annexed by Japan, and the fear of the occupying power's police officers and spies is omnipresent.

After three sons died young, Hoonie and his wife have a daughter, Sunja, and she survives.

In the character of Hoonies with his cleft palate and his crippled foot, the literary scholar Kim Seong-kon from Seoul identified a symbol of Korea himself after the publication of the book:

disadvantaged, if only because of its geopolitical situation, and has little ability to articulate internationally.

But, one might add, at the same time resilient and generous.