Two Dreams in One Bed: Empire, Social Life, and the Origins of the North Korean Revolution (review)

As recent historical monographs have demonstrated, Japan’s colonial “experiment” in Manchuria, the resource rich territory in Northeast China, offers a key place to analyze the tensions and contradictions between state-making, national discourses, and colonial economic development in the Japanese imperial project of the “Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere.” Hyun-ok Park’s book, however, has carved out a critical space of research that advances much of the scholarship on colonial Manchuria while also offering historical and genealogical insights into problems of diasporic populations in the postcolonial, capitalist world.

First, like recent work on Manchuria, she goes well beyond the analysis of Manchuria as a mere puppet state. At the same time, her analysis refuses to remain simply on the level of the discursive analysis of nationalism (as in much of Prasenjit Duara’s work on Manchuria), for Park also shows that the Japanese colonial project in Manchuria cannot be understood properly without taking into account how colonial economic development often contradicted, and collided with, various nationalist politics, and vice versa. At the core of her method, then, is a refusal to abandon the analysis of capitalist accumulation in the analysis of the national problematic. Indeed, the central “trope” for Park is the way nationalism(s) and colonial development revealed differing and often contradictory “dreams” in the same bed of capitalism.

The real originality of Park’s book, however, is that her account of the tensions between nationalism(s) and colonial development is mediated by a sustained examination of the social life of Korean migrant populations in Manchuria, both before and after the establishment of the Manchukuo state in 1932. By tracing the ways Korean migrant populations were simultaneously victimized by Japanese colonialism in Korea (as an expropriated and displaced surplus population), and compelled to survive as a frontline “agent” of Japanese imperial expansion in Manchuria (as tenant farmers obtaining loans through Japanese development companies and credit unions), Park discloses the precarious social basis of the Korean migrants amidst the triangular politics of anti-Japanese Chinese nationalism, Korean national liberation, and Japanese “assimilation” in the commercial and political centers of Manchuria, Fengtian and Kando. What we witness here is how a stateless, colonial surplus population is compelled to search for a stable social basis on which to live—and yet is pushed and pulled, on the one hand, by Chinese nationalists, who naturalized—as well as abjected— Korean populations depending on their location in Manchuria; and, on the other, by Japanese colonial expansionists striving to “assimilate” and exploit the labor power of Korean surplus populations.

In Manchuria, Japanese colonial developers wanted to kill (at least) two birds with one stone: to resolve the social crisis in the Korean countryside by displacing landless and impoverished Korean peasants to Manchuria, where they could be partially funded by Japanese development companies to till the land. In this way, Korean migrants became instrumentalized as an agent of Japanese territorial expansion in Manchuria. This process was primarily mediated by Japanese finance capital, which operated by giving loans and credit to Korean peasants, as well as by hoarding mortgaged land. Park calls this a “capitalist osmotic” process, referring to the term used by chemists to demonstrate a diffusion of molecules through a semi-permeable membrane from a place of higher concentration to a place of lower concentration. Park’s analysis especially equates the movement of finance capital into Manchuria as the primary (economic) ‘molecules’ leading Japan’s imperialist, osmotic diffusion; it diffuses into the Manchurian land, thereby commodifying it, but not without first inscribing the (Korean) socius with its financial logic via loans and credit. (Perhaps the only problem with the metaphor of osmosis is that, in chemistry at least, osmotic diffusion leads to an equalization of molecular concentration on both sides of the membrane. In the social and historical reality that Park reveals, however, there is emphatically no “equalization”, only a displacement of...