(Dis)Locating Zainichi in the Post-Pachinko EraGuest Editors’ Introduction to Special Issue“(Dis)Locating Zainichi: Transcending and Transgressing the Borders of ‘Japan’”

Pachinko put Zainichi literature on the map—or took it off the map. Min Jin Lee’s 2017 bestselling novel, written in English and translated into twenty-seven languages, introduced the world at large to the historical saga of ethnic Korean people living in Japan in the shadow of colonialism and the Cold War. The novel is thoroughly researched, as is Soo Hugh’s streaming television adaptation for Apple TV+, which went live in 2022. In both iterations, the settings feel authentic, and the epic, winding plot takes us through many of the key moments that constitute a historical composite sketch of the Zainichi Korean resident community in Japan: the colonization of the peninsula by the Japanese Empire in 1910, mobilization of Koreans for war as imperial subjects, repression of dissidents by thought police, the barriers to return when Korea was ultimately “liberated” in 1945 (if only to be wracked by civil war shortly thereafter), rampant racial discrimination against Koreans in postwar Japan, the ambivalence of mass repatriation to North Korea in the 1950s and 1960s, and the “glass ceiling” imposed on Korean upward mobility during the era of Japan’s high economic growth and bubble economy. Although it explores universal, humanistic themes, Pachinko is, in many ways, a story that could take place nowhere other than twentieth-century Japan.