Brokers of Empire: Japanese Settler Colonialism in Korea, 1876-1945 by Jun Uchida (review)

This book aims to "disaggregate colonial power" (12) by recovering the agency of overlooked historical actors, specifically early twentieth-century Japanese emigrants to Korea, whom Professor Uchida dubs "brokers of empire." In addition to being thickly descriptive, Brokers of Empire engages a number of larger questions about the functioning and meaning of colonial domination in the modern world. Through an analysis of memoirs, meeting minutes, reports, and punditry generated by Japanese emigrants to Korea, this ambitious study chronicles seven decades of turbulent colonial social history. Also utilized are Korean-language newspapers, official records, and Uchida's own interviews with repatriated Japanese settlers from Korea, conducted over fifty years after liberation. In terms of scope, depth and erudition, Brokers of Empire can be ranked alongside Louise Young's Japan's Total Empire: Manchuria and the Culture of Wartime Imperialism and Caroline Hui-yu Ts'ai's Taiwan in Japan's Empire Building: An Institutional Approach to Colonial Engineering as a comprehensive account of a major Japanese colonial undertaking.

Uchida frames her study by proposing that Korea be reconceptualized as a "settler colony," due to its proximity to Japan, and its comparatively large population of resident Japanese. Uchida thus writes against an English-language historiography which treats Korea as a classic "exploitation colony," wherein a minority population of Japanese ruled a large subject population at the behest of the mother country. This orthodox view, Uchida argues, places undue emphasis on directives and schemes developed in metropolitan Tokyo or Seoul, obscuring the impact, agency, and subjectivities of the Japanese settlers in Korea. This internally diverse group of "entrepreneurs, essayists, political fixers, educators, social reformers, religious leaders, and other non-governmental actors" (5) exerted an "independent vector of influence in all phases of colonial rule" (3), according to Uchida.

To complicate what has hitherto been an oversimplified view of the operations of colonial power, Uchida documents the ways in which the "state-society" divide in colonized Korea did not map onto a "colonizer-colonized" binary by pointing out how the state often took the side of Koreans when settler-native frictions arose, or by revealing that some groups of Koreans could be classified, subjectively and materially, as "social betters" in relationship to poorer Japanese immigrants to Korea. Subsets of the Japanese settler community and elite Koreans found common cause at times, especially around policies that favored capitalist development under state protection. Korea's first Governor-General, Terauchi Masatake (1910-1916), was infamous for his draconian policies vis-á-vis Koreans, but in Uchida's account, Terauchi's "martial rule" also oppresses Japanese settlers, who were stripped of their local councils and organs of self-government. While they appealed to public opinion and the central government in Tokyo for the restoration of their rights, and could prove contentious, Uchida argues that Japanese residents of Korea were relatively powerless vis-á-vis the colonial state. Whereas scholars like Gallagher and Robinson have foregrounded the ability of settlers on the periphery of European empires in Africa to hijack the state for their own parochial ends, Uchida suggests that their Japanese counterparts in Korea had much less leverage, due to the unusually large proportion of resident Japanese who worked in the colonial bureaucracy and police apparatus. Moreover, faced with a population of twenty million Koreans whose living memory of dynastic independence inspired organized resistance into the 1910s, the Korea Government General was in no position to uncritically back settler demands if such acquiescence portended greater instability in the colony. As Uchida reminds us, it was Korean resistance in the form of the March 1st Movement, and not disgruntled "brokers of empire," that finally brought an end to the stifling era of "martial rule."

Uchida's analysis of the colonial state's reaction to the mass anti-government demonstrations known as the March 1st Movement (1919) forms the pivot of her exposition. Reeling from the unexpected depth and extent of anti-Japanese sentiment expressed in the uprising...