https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gnd_rJDAW78

(Min Jin Lee interview AWP 2018)

She took 30 years to write Pachingko.

Thanks for introducing Min Jin Lee.

I read about Min Jin Lee as follows;

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Min_Jin_Lee

And review of her novel - Pachinko by The Guardian;

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/15/pachinko-min-jin-lee-review

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Z88vr9xfKiI

(A beautiful narrator voice; Im Roman)

시력이 나빠서 책읽기가 불편 하신 분들을 위해서 책이 출판 될 때 오디오가 대개

따라 나옵니다.

A great story!

She articulates so clearly where we are as Korean-Americans or other Minorities.

I am so proud of what she did, i.e. writing the book, Pachinko.

I joined some 100 Cardiologists of America in a charter airplane in 1978 to attend

World Congress of Cardiology in Tokyo and 7 days Japan tour.

I happened to have a family member who married a Japanese girl while attending a university 

and settled in Japan decades before World War II, and they had three sons. 

He was an MD but could not make a living because once people found out he was a Korean,

they would not come so he decided to become a taxicab driver and started taxicab business with one car.

His wife was disowned by her family because she married a Korean.

He became very successful thru his pure hard work. 

When I met him in 1978, his taxicab company was the largest taxicab company in Tokyo, and

he owned 1300 taxicabs. He was said to be the first or second richest Japanese-Korean and built a hospital

for Japanese-Koreans. He took me and my traveling companion, an American MD, to restaurants where

Japanese-Koreans eat. They were just like the Korean restaurants in America.

The surprising thing was that so many Japanese were there too and were eating kimchi, etc.

I found out many Japanese love Korean food.

At any rate all the Koreans, some one million of them, have been brutally discriminated generation after generation.

Korean governments have done nothing to improve the situation all these years.

Ms. Lee said she felt a great anger when she first found that out at age 19 and so did I in 1978.

It is long overdue for something like Pachinko to come out.

I, as one of Koreans, am so proud of Ms. Lee and her courage, persistence and intelligence

in bringing out this book to let the world know the cruelty of the Japanese nobody outside Japan

heard about or cared about.

Thank you, Dr. Lee for your timely great story out of your experience. 

Our tragic history gave us horrible conditions, but it did not matter.

Many of them overcame adversaries and were successful. Your story is like

one in the novel. The more I know the history, the less likely understand

the Japanese character.  Aren’t they terrible people? Really?

"The more I know the history, the less likely understand the Japanese character. 

Aren't they terrible people? Really?"

In 1978 the anti-Japanese feeling among Americans was very high.

One glass of orange juice at a Tokyo hotel was reported 

to be $15 because the value of yen was very high something like 80 to 1.

All these 100 American Cardiologists, believe it or not,

treated the coupons for breakfasts very carefully to save their pocket money.

During all the bus and train rides over 7 days

all of us were exchanging our views on Japan(by the way I was the only one Asian and

always was spoken to in Japanese at every hotel I entered because they thought I was Japanese-American).

We had a Japanese tour guide fluent in English in our bus who obviously 

mastered the history, etc, who gave us a marathon lecture in a humorous way and

I believe succeeded in convincing us that the Japanese 

are the hardest working good people in the world.

I thought he was a great apologist for his people.

He said, for example, only 20% of the land of Japan is arable,

and 80% of the land is inhabitable mountains covered with bamboo.

They basically have to import everything including timbers to build houses.

They have to build factories and golf courses beside homes

in that 20% of the land. A traditional attitude of an average Japanese man and woman is

right away from the start is a battle for survival.

Japan as a nation is no different, he said.

Obviously they way overcompensated themselves every now and then

by once or twice occupying Korea, etc.

At any rate on our way back to USA all these 100 USA doctors openly acknowledged that

they no longer had the anti-Japanese feeling as strongly because the guide helped them develop

some respect and sympathy for the Japanese and their fate.

The first impression I got after the tour was that the average Japanese made me think of

an ant whose life is genetically programmed

to work, work and work at whatever job life gives you in a most efficient,

effective way as a member of the society.

A simplistic view, I must say, ignoring individuality,

sort of the opposite to what Albert Einstein believed all his life.