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

Ken Kawashima's book The Proletarian Gamble is by no means the first to explore Korean labor migration to the Japanese metropole during the 1920s and 1930s. While the landscape he surveys may be familiar to labor and social historians of Japan, he employs a novel approach in presenting an argument about the Korean experience of the Japanese labor market during these decades that is as insightful and thought-provoking for those well-versed in the topic as it is for readers encountering it for the first time. Kawashima's project is to highlight the role of the state in facilitating the exploitation of Korean workers and undermining the potential for interethnic working-class solidarity between Japanese and Korean labor. In doing so, he offers an important critique of much of the previous scholarship that has appeared in both Japanese and English, which either treats anti-Korean discrimination as a "natural" outcome of Japanese imperialism—thereby doing little to describe the effects of discrimination in terms of "precise historical situations, practices, and social relations" (p. 18)—or else focuses on the experience of Koreans within the misleading category of factory labor. Kawashima takes his reader back to the primary sources to reveal the most prevalent and persistent concerns of the bulk of Korean laborers in Japan, as well as the ways in which the state shaped and utilized these concerns in its efforts to control colonial labor power within metropolitan society.

The chief concept Kawashima employs is Marx's idea of contingency. The defining characteristic of the day-to-day experience of most Korean laborers, even before problems of discriminatory wages and treatment, was the constant uncertainty of simply finding enough work to support themselves. In the midst of a chronic recession that followed World War I, Korean migrants found themselves largely shut out of the more stable labor market in heavy industry, which became dominated by Japanese labor in spite of the state's earlier efforts to facilitate the hiring of Koreans (and at lower wages than those for Japanese) to alleviate wartime labor shortages. What was left for Korean workers was the uncertain world of day labor, where the vagaries of the weather, fluctuating demand in the construction and public works sectors, and a multitiered system of subcontractors all combined to keep opportunities insufficient, wages low, and the pool of surplus laborers large. This was the "proletarian gamble" that Korean workers faced. The state did nothing to mitigate this situation; in fact, through various policies it maintained the contingency for the benefit of Japanese capital and its own ideological and security prerogatives.

In the first three chapters, Kawashima traces the path that transformed thousands of Koreans from impoverished farmers in the colony to impoverished colonial laborers in the metropole. While there is some redundancy here—the colonial agricultural policies that created what Kawashima aptly terms the "uncontrollable colonial surplus," after an in-depth explanation in chapter 1, are recapped again in the following chapter, for example—on the whole the analysis is clear and concise. Particularly outstanding is the author s examination of the structure of the subcontracting system that employed Koreans as manual laborers, organizing them into work gangs and housing them in socially isolated dormitories (hanba); Kawashima has done an expert job of presenting the particulars of a complex system in a way that makes its social and economic impacts on Korean laborers easy to grasp. The discussion of intermediary exploitation (chūkan sakushu) in the subcontracting system—in which Korean subcontractors and foremen (hanbagashira) exploited the Korean workers they hired, while at the same time bearing the brunt of Japanese construction firms' efforts to improve their bottom line by cutting labor costs ever lower—also introduces another important concept in Kawashima's analysis: the "divided margin." The Japanese state and private enterprise actively undermined ethnic solidarity among Koreans by, in this case, privileging hanba bosses and other Koreans at an intermediary position in the subcontracting structure...