Pachinko on Apple TV+ is a Korean drama set against the backdrop of the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 20th century. Pachinko‘s characters during the story’s earlier years are commonly seen wearing white hanbok, or “korean clothing.” For generations, Koreans took their tradition of wearing white hanbok with pride. In the face of Japanese colonization, Koreans were made to reevaluate what wearing white clothes meant to them. The history of Korea’s respect for white clothing goes way back, and the motives behind the Japanese ban on white clothing were disgraceful.
White Clothing is Embedded in Korean Culture
White hanbok or minbok, which translates to “clothing of the people,” was a traditional attire regularly worn by Koreans up until the 1950s. Regardless of a person’s social class, age, or gender, and regardless of the occasion, it was typical that most Korean natives and citizens would be wearing white hanbok wherever they went. Known by foreigners for generations as “the white-clad folk”, the color white is deeply linked to Koreans.
For Korea, the color white historically signifies a number of cultural values, including purity, mental clarity, temperance, and meekness. The origin of the tradition is widely disputed in academic discussion. Some scholars have attributed Koreans’ affinity for white clothing to their faithfulness and religiousness. At the same time, some have determined it to indicate a continuous period of national mourning, and others have marked it as a mere symbol of nationalism.
Japan’s War on Korean Culture
Japanese soldiers would frequently harass Korean citizens during their colonization, bullying them into conforming to Japanese values and customs. Under the pretense that Koreans and Japanese were to be a unified nation, Koreans were coerced into altering their religious practices, “accepting” Japanese-style family names, prohibiting the use of the Korean language in educational facilities, destroying historical documents and texts, and emphasizing loyalty to the Japanese Emperor. One particular way that Japanese soldiers started reshaping Korean culture was by prohibiting them from wearing their white hanbok.
When the “Colored Clothes Campaign” was introduced, Koreans were forced to wear dyed clothing instead of their traditional white clothing, as Japanese authorities claimed that white clothes weren’t “economic” and should be subject to modernization. It was argued that Koreans wore white as a sign of grief for the loss of their country during this time. Still, such claims were most often made by Japanese scholars and Korean sympathizers of Japanese colonization to assign greater inferiority to the nation of Korea. Kim Seok-hee wrote in a 2011 article for The Review of Korean Studies, “The ‘Colored Clothes Campaign’ was a typical attempt to reproach and denounce the indigenous culture of a colonized region as ‘inefficient and unsanitary,’ thereby generating ways to oppress and obliterate it.”
The Japanese ban on wearing white was, without question, a direct means of diminishing the Korean spirit. This was a deteriorative method of sweeping the Korean people of their human rights and stripping them of general social security. It was a passive-aggressive act that was enforced based on lies with the intent to tear down Koreans’ sense of connection to each other and their land.
Did Japan’s Ban on Koreans Wearing White Work?
Korean characters in Pachinko consistently show signs of protest, including singing Korean folk songs in the presence of Japanese elites and authorities, and making their voices heard in opposition to Japanese conformity in large crowds and public areas. With their educational systems being destroyed, their language being absorbed, and their lifestyles being forced into a different gear, the Korean people were determined not to forget who they were, so they sought to use something other than their voice that would communicate their dissent.
Koreans knew that the tradition of wearing white hanbok united the people, which translated to a fair amount of resistance among Koreans in the face of Japan’s ban on white clothing. Unfortunately, much of the anti-Japan resistance that stirred among Korean natives was largely suppressed, but the hunger to fight grew louder and louder. The meaning of white clothing took new effect when Koreans began to wear white hanbok as a form of protest against Japanese colonization of Korea. White, which initially represented integrity, purity, and honesty across all social classes of Korean people, now signified resistance.
White Clothing is Prominent in ‘Pachinko’
A startling majority of Korean characters in Pachinko are wearing some version of white throughout the earlier years of the series timeline. In the episode “Chapter One”, we open on a 1915 Yangjin (Inji Jeong) donned in her white hanbok, indicating up front that this clothing would be synonymous with Korea. Also, in this episode, a group of men, all of whom are dressed in white hanbok, listen to a member lament, “They snatched our rice, our potatoes, our fish. They ordered our [women] to stop wearing white. They make us eat like them, talk the way they do, but they’ll only see us as outsiders.” Townspeople gather in a sea of white hanbok when the same man is arrested by Japanese police for expressing his hatred for what Japan has done to his country.
At the end of “Chapter One,” we meet the character Hansu (Lee MinhoLee Minho ) in a luminous white suit and hat. Hansu is a proud Korean man raised in Japan by a Korean father. He reappears in “Chapter Eight” wearing the same luminous white suit to speak with his son. After witnessing and surviving the ethnically-motivated violence being done to his people, it was something of a victory lap for Hansu to proudly walk the streets of Osaka, Japan wearing gleaming white clothing. Though the Japanese had attempted to destroy Korea, here he was to symbolize the life of his nation.
Although Korean resistance through the refusal to wear white hanbok is not explicitly displayed for much of Pachinko, it was an impossible detail to overlook for the series. Season 2 of Pachinko takes place in 1945, just at the end of Japan’s colonization of Korea. The trailer sees characters now in colored clothing as the story continues in the throes of World War II.
Season 2 of Pachinko is available to stream on Apple TV+ in the U.S.
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