The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan (review)

This book is at once refreshingly old-fashioned and innovative. It places Marx front and center in framing the analysis of labor history, but supplements the old master with theorists of power such as Slavoj ŽiŽek. Kawashima's theoretical framing is for the most part clear and effective in allowing us to understand the plight of Korean migrant workers in Japan from the 'teens through the 1930s. At the heart of their dark situation, in this telling, is not so much the difficult conditions and low pay of the work they did (although these are clearly recognized), but the difficulty of finding work in the first place, and then of keeping it. Contingency is Kawashima's key word. Revealing and assessing the consequences of the uncertainty of working life for these men who lived on the social and political margins in Japan, but played surprisingly important economic roles, is Kawashima's central task. The extreme insecurity of the working lives of these colonial migrants—the limit case of a contingent labor force—allows us to observe the workings of contingency with particular clarity, but contingency for the author is inherent in capitalism more generally.

A first chapter describes the migration of thousands of Koreans (about two-thirds male) to Japan during and shortly after World War I. Seen at the outset as a supplementary pool of workers in a booming economy, they ended up becoming an indispensable element in the labor economy of contingency. The second chapter begins nicely in foregrounding the importance in Marxian as opposed to mainstream economics of "the asymmetry of exchange" stemming from "the inherent contingency of the position of selling" their labor (46), both on the part of workers in general and these workers in particular. It introduces the push-factor of agricultural crisis and landlessness in Korea, describes the pattern of chain migration from the hardest hit regions, sketches the types of unskilled, insecure work undertaken by these migrants, and briefly notes left-wing labor activism of some workers resisting both economic exploitation and ethnically based discrimination. The third chapter zeroes in on the complex day labor market and the labor brokers, often themselves Korean. Their "intermediary exploitation" rests at the center of Kawashima's story. Stressing the indispensable contribution of these dispensable workers to the building of Japan's modern urban infrastructure, he introduces in detail the ways in which labor bosses skimmed wages and coerced payments for food and lodging. He ends with a nice summary of a partially successful strike of Korean railway construction laborers who made common cause with the lowest level of Korean labor bosses against the higher level of Japanese bosses and the railway company. Kawashima thoughtfully stresses the exceptional character of this successful resistance, which influenced nearby Japanese workers as well. As the union leadership understood, the system of labor boss exploitation and ethnic discrimination made it extremely difficult for Japanese and Korean workers to make common cause (93). These are points well taken, although not surprising.

The book's fourth chapter is to me the most imaginative. It explores the difficulty faced by Koreans in finding adequate and secure housing in the face of discrimination by landlords. Particular fascinating is what Kawashima calls "the micropolitics of the proper name." To overcome the refusal of landlords to rent to Koreans, the latter (often fluent by this time in the Japanese language) used fictitious Japanese proper names on their leases. He nicely analyzes how this constituted as "an inventive political strategy that refused and temporarily reversed the social and colonial order" (121).

The final two chapters analyze the two-sided strategy of the Japanese state—violently repressive in league with its ally, the Sōaikai, while offering some measure of welfare support so Korean workers could survive and remain available to employers. The Sōaikai was a state-supported organization run by Koreans. It offered welfare services and job introductions to members, but functioned also as a "preventive police" (138) cracking...