Colonial Industrialization and Labor in Korea: The Onoda Cement Factory (review)

The foil of "enclave style" isolated growth in Korea under Japan (1910-1945) serves the author well in shaping a more complex portrait of both colony and development. Factories of Noguchi Jun's Onoda Cement Company provide a focus in a case study of Korean industrial labor stretching across the colonial years into South Korea's First Republic. The result is a finely drawn portrait that blends depth and breadth in a compelling picture of worker as well as labor. Interpretive debates between schools of enclave versus revisionist Korean historiography accompany a rich lode of primary source data. Although the general reader might prefer a tighter argument and clearer statement of the author's own position, students of the colonial period will appreciate the multiple tables and statistics, supplemented by interviews.

The second chapter, on the Sunghori Factory outside P'yŏngyang is the core of the study, comprising close to half of the entire text. Material is drawn from the author's 1985 doctoral dissertation, supplemented with interviews and a broader statistical picture of Korean labor in the colony. Useful contributions to scholarship on the colony include (1) a contrast between employment at large-scale versus medium- and small-scale factories; (2) development of contract labor at factory and farm, as well as subcontracting of labor in the agrarian economy; (3) a contrast between Korean factory labor with experience from the 1920s versus the suddenly expanded factory labor with Japan's militarization from 1937; and (4) a poignant depiction of the "minds" of Korean factory labor, their motives and rationales in employment in a factory of the colonial powers. The author concludes that worker response to colonial modernity as represented in the factory was "quite varied and opportunistic." A typology of responses based on status and length of employment provides something of a map to understand the effect of various historical forces on the diverse identities at the plant.

An opening chapter on workers, labor market, and labor policy offers a useful introduction to labor in the colonial period. A shorter chapter on the years of the Pacific War provides new data to the English-language audience on both labor and labor policy, while a chapter on the First Republic draws us back to an Onoda Cement factory in South Korea under the Tongyang Group. But it is the colonial period that is the core of the author's data and argument and the strength of the volume. We learn much of labor and something of the worker, but scholars will find less here on either state or business, or indeed on economic ties within the empire. An enclave economy suggests links to empire markets without corresponding integration within the colony itself. The author has helped extend our understanding of how factory work shaped labor in the colony and contributed to both development and underdevelopment. What remains is the task of explaining how Korean labor and enterprise were shaped by links beyond the peninsula, whether by supply and demand, emigration to and immigration from Japan, or extension into Manchuria.

The volume is a welcome addition to the study of the colonial experience and the background of labor and contract in postcolonial Korea. Graduate students and professional scholars alike will find here a rich source of data and interpretations that extends our understanding of both the colony and Korean historiography.