‘Pachinko’ Season 2’s rice fields are all real — but they were tough to pull off

Pachinko Season 2, episode 3 shifts gears in a major way, as Sunja (Minha Kim) and her family flee to the Japanese countryside in order to escape the bombing of Osaka. There, they live and work on a rice farm (as opposed to the sweet potato farm in Min Jin Lee’s original novel). But as shooting for this stretch of the season got underway, production encountered an unlikely challenge: the rice itself.

“The amount of meetings we had on rice is pretty funny,” Soo Hugh, creator and showrunner of Pachinko, told Mashable.

Originally, Hugh thought production could use fake rice plants for the farming sequence, which she describes as one of her favorite moments in the book. However, procuring enough fake rice plants to fill an entire farm would have been far too costly. The Pachinko crew would have to work with the real rice plants at the Korean rice farm where shooting took place.

These real plants presented their own logistical issues. Sunja and her family are on the rice farm for months, meaning the show’s version of the rice farm would have to play out different seasons.

Minha Kim and Lee Minho in “Pachinko.”
Credit: AppleTV+

“When Sunja, Hansu [Lee Minho], and her family first arrive, you’ll notice they arrive in winter, so there can be no rice there,” Hugh explained. “But then when we cut back to them, it is now the first part of spring, so the rice is supposed to just start growing. Later on, we go through the whole cycle of the rice farm. At the end of that sequence, it’s the harvest.”

Since Pachinko wasn’t shooting over the course of an entire year, production had to grow out rice fields of varying heights. So as the series shot in Toronto in March of 2023, a crew flew out to Korea to begin cultivating seeds. That way, by the time the shoot in Korea started at the end of May, the rice fields would be camera-ready.

However, that cultivation process wasn’t without its challenges, either. “We had a lot of weather issues where the rice ended up actually growing too fast. We were so worried that we weren’t going to get enough rice, and then, because of the rains, we had an overabundance,” Hugh said.

Luckily, the abundance of rice you see onscreen in Pachinko Season 2 didn’t go to waste. On top of starring in one of the best shows of 2024, the rice ended up being harvested for real by the owners of the farm where shooting took place.

“Someone out there is eating Pachinko rice,” Hugh said.

Pachinko Season 2 is now streaming, with a new episode every Friday.