Must-watch TV: Apple TV+'s Pachinko reviewed

Pachinko is like an extended version of the Monty Python ‘Four Yorkshiremen’ sketch (‘I used to have to get out of shoebox at midnight, lick road clean, eat a couple of bits of coal gravel’) relocated to mostly 20th-century Japan and Korea. There’s so much misery it makes Angela’s Ashes look like Pollyanna. And there’s so little by way of laughter or a redemptive pay off you might be tempted to end it all like one of the numerous doomed characters do – off camera, fortunately – in the almost relentlessly catastrophe-laden season one.

Pachinko comes pretty close, I’d say, to being must-watch television

Now we’re back for season two and with the second world war (from the Japanese/Korean perspective) and the Korean war yet to be covered, I’m sure this one ain’t going to be a barrel of fun either. But don’t let anything I’ve just said put you off. Pachinko comes pretty close, I’d say, to being must-watch television: for the acting, for the unfamiliar setting, for the sweeping melodrama of the masochistically compulsive plot and, most instructively, for the handy history lesson.

The Koreans, it turns out, had it worse under the Japanese occupation (from 1910 to 1945) than even the Irish did under the British. They could barely earn a living (except in jobs that were near-slave labour), they were spied on and arrested if they expressed the slightest anti-imperial sentiment; they were even forbidden from eating their deliciously nutty-tasting staple white rice. Two million of them were forced to abandon their homeland to seek a miserable, squalid living as second-class – indeed stateless – citizens in Japan, where they were spat at and looked down on for eating kimchi, which the locals considered unpalatably stinky.