Pachinko, a popular Japanese pinball game played in gambling parlors, appears frequently in the novel, but it’s not simply the business in which Sunja’s sons, like many disadvantaged Koreans living in Japan, find employment. The game symbolizes the interplay of chance, ability, frustration, and higher purpose that govern life for Sunja’s family. When Mozasu keeps getting in trouble for picking fights, Goro steps in and offers him a pachinko job to keep him off the streets. Goro is a master at manipulating the gaming machines—making adjustments “frustrating to the regular customers […] yet [with] just enough predictability to produce attractive windfalls, drawing the customers back to try their luck again and again.” This attribute of pachinko—the constant possibility and occasional teasing hint of success, only to have one’s best efforts frustrated—symbolizes the struggles of Korean immigrants to maintain a foothold within the dominant society. After Mozasu becomes a pachinko millionaire, his girlfriend, Etsuko, reflects that the maligned pachinko industry is a way of making money “from chance and fear and loneliness,” yet the game itself points to people’s undying hope that “[they] might be the lucky ones,” an instinct that doesn’t deserve to be mocked. Indeed, Mozasu’s motivation for becoming rich is so that his son, Solomon, can have the best opportunities and won’t be limited to jobs that others don’t respect. Yet at the end of the novel, Solomon loses his finance job because of his family’s possible criminal connections, and he comes to Mozasu for a pachinko job, believing the “game” of societal prejudice is rigged such that he’ll never be seen as acceptable, no matter where he works. Thus pachinko makes a better life possible for the whole family, yet it also seems to limit their horizons.
Pachinko Quotes in Pachinko
Mozasu couldn’t imagine being so quiet all the time; he would miss the bustle of the pachinko parlor. He loved all the moving pieces of his large, noisy business. His Presbyterian minister father had believed in a divine design, and Mozasu believed that life was like this game where the player could adjust the dials yet also expect the uncertainty of factors he couldn’t control. He understood why his customers wanted to play something that looked fixed but which also left room for randomness and hope.
Why did her family think pachinko was so terrible? Her father, a traveling salesman, had sold expensive life insurance policies to isolated housewives who couldn’t afford them, and Mozasu created spaces where grown men and women could play pinball for money. Both men had made money from chance and fear and loneliness. Every morning, Mozasu and his men tinkered with the machines to fix the outcomes—there could only be a few winners and a lot of losers. And yet we played on, because we had hope that we might be the lucky ones. How could you get angry at the ones who wanted to be in the game? Etsuko had failed in this important way—she had not taught her children to hope, to believe in the perhaps absurd possibility that they might win. Pachinko was a foolish game, but life was not.
“Japan will never change. […] The zainichi can’t leave, nee? But it’s not just you. Japan will never take people like my mother back into society again; it will never take back people like me. And we’re Japanese! I’m diseased. I got this from some Japanese guy who owned an old trading company. He’s dead now. But nobody cares. The doctors here, even, they just want me to go away. So listen, Solomon, you should stay here and not go back to the States, and you should take over your papa’s business. Become so rich that you can do whatever you want. But, my beautiful Solomon, they’re never going to think we’re okay. Do you know what I mean?” Hana stared at him. “Do what I tell you to do.”
Pachinko Symbol Timeline in Pachinko
