Pachinko Season Progression: the Chronological Breakdown of the Hansu-Noa Crisis

A detailed look at Pachinko Season Progression: the Chronological Breakdown of the Hansu-Noa Crisis, including key takeaways.

In Min Jin Lee’s novel, Noa’s time studying English literature at Tokyo's prestigious Waseda University represents his desperate attempt to transcend the stigma attached to Zainichi Koreans. In postwar Japan, Koreans were stripped of Japanese citizenship, barred from civil service jobs, and denied white-collar corporate employment. Noa believed that academic brilliance and cultural fluency could protect him. If he became more cultured, polite, and articulate than the Japanese themselves, prejudice could not touch him.

Hansu’s money shredded that illusion. It proved that a Zainichi youth could not reach the upper echelons of Japanese society through virtue alone. He had only reached Waseda because a gangster paid for his passage. For Noa, whose morality was fragile and severe, that truth proved poisonous.

His escape was neither violent nor loud. He walked away. Moving to Nagano, he cast off the Baek identity entirely and took the name Ogawa Minato. He married a Japanese woman who never learned his real heritage. He fathered four children who believed they were of pure Japanese descent. He spent decades working as an accountant for a pachinko parlor, ironically entering the very Korean-dominated trade he had spent his youth running from. Noa lived in terror of discovery, constantly performing Japanese mannerisms, forever policing his accent, and suffocating his past.