Fighting for the Enemy: Koreans in Japan's War, 1937-1945

4. Mobilization of Colonial Labor

139 The Korean people’s most significant contribution to Japan’s war effort was their labor in Korea, Japan proper, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific. Korean wartime labor is best understood as an intensification of existing labor trends that began after the colonization of Korea. After 1931, when Japan became deeply embroiled in Manchuria, Japanese industries expanded rapidly throughout northern Korea, resulting in tens of thousands of workers moving into those industrial centers. After the outbreak of war with China in 1937, northern Korea underwent intensive industrialization and urbanization. Japanese industries on the Japanese islands also needed Korean labor to maintain production levels because the Japanese workforce confronted labor shortages as early as 1939; the labor situation worsened after Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 because hundreds of thousands of Japanese men joined the military. Additionally, between 1937 and 1945, the Government-General of Korea (GGK) mobilized an estimated 4.1 to 7.0 million Koreans as laborers in Korea, and more than one million in Japan and the South Pacific. The nationalist historical paradigm emphasizes the victimization of the comfort women and the Korean laborers in the coal mines located on Hokkaidō. Japanese and Korean scholars compare the recruitment and use of Korean labor in Japan to that of the Atlantic slave trade.1 While the plight of these individuals is undeniable, their story is not a complete account of Korea’s wartime mobilization; any balanced account must include an overview of labor in Korea. The Korean wartime experience cannot simply be reduced to exploitation and victimization—rather, as with those who entered the military, Koreans were active agents throughout the mobiliza4 Mobilization of Colonial Labor | CHAPTER 4 140 tion process. As an analytical tool, calling Japan’s use of Korean manpower a form of slavery fails on at least three counts: First, it does not account for the choices that Koreans had, whether it be to sign a contract or to change their employment (before or after the expiration of a contract); second, many Koreans received pay according to their contract; and third, the experiences of Koreans who worked in Korea are not adequately addressed. Scholars who compare Korean wartime experiences to slavery generally limit their analysis to Korean coal miners in Japan, where conditions were worst. There is no question that slavelike conditions existed in some industries ; indeed, many unfortunate Koreans (and Japanese) were subjected to severe exploitation and physical and mental abuse, and had no choice but to work without pay, all while living in squalid conditions—but their story is part, not the whole, of Korea’s wartime experience. Legal Foundations for Labor Mobilization In the months following the outbreak of war with China in July 1937, Prime Minister Konoe Fumimaro’s cabinet strengthened government control over the Japanese economy. In April 1938 the cabinet instituted the National General Mobilization Law (NGML) in Japan and extended it to Korea the following month. This law established government control over all aspects of Japan’s economy, including labor, and formed the legal basis for the mobilization of Korea. However, the GGK implemented the NGML in Korea in a bastardized and piecemeal fashion because of the differences between Japan’s and Korea’s economies.2 The NGML established government power over the workforce. However, the central government enforced the law differently in Korea than in Japan in four ways. First, there was less worker training in Korea, despite the colonial government’s rhetoric otherwise; second, in Japan the law targeted the urban population, but in Korea it targeted rural folk, so that by the end of the war, roughly 80 percent of the industrial workforce in Korea originated from the countryside; third, labor conscription in Korea was utilized much more broadly than in Japan; and fourth, Japanese women were subject to the NGML but Korean women were not. Korean women generally lacked the educational and technical training to be of use to industries affected by the NGML.3 Thus, Korean women filled vacancies in agriculture and Mobilization of Colonial Labor | 141 nonessential factories, such as textiles and food processing, from which men were requisitioned. The most significant difference in how the NGML was enacted in Japan and in Korea was that labor recruitment in Korea took three forms: company-directed recruitment (K: mojip; J: boshū), government-directed recruitment (K: kwan alsŏn; J: kan assen), and labor conscription (K: chingyong; J: chōy...