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

Few would dispute that capitalist exploitation and colonial rule structured the fate of ethnic Koreans in imperial, interwar Japan. Ken Kawashima seeks at once to provide deep empirical support and high theoretical justification for the received view (influentially articulated by the zainichi scholar Pak Kyŏngsik¹). It is a Marxist narrative—replete with aperçus and blind spots—that the author seeks to amplify and amend.

Following Marx, Kawashima characterizes the colonial-era Korean proletariat as the "virtual pauper." Unless the dispossessed migrant sells "his" (the gender dimension is worth noting) labor, he risks being a pauper. Yet the exchange is far from being assured: accident or contingency marks the labor market. As Kawashima puts it, "a particular experience of contingency on the road to commodification" is crucial for an adequate understanding of the migrant workers (p. 22). What distinguished the Korean workers from the prototypical Marxist proletariat was not their poverty, misery, or dispensability but the fundamental role of ethnic discrimination and the consequent insecurity.

The significant influx of ethnic Koreans in the Japanese archipelago coincided with the labor shortage occasioned by World War I. Kawashima argues that the mode of labor recruitment "stemmed out of preexisting practices of labor recruitment in Japan" (p. 31) but with the added and activist presence of the Japanese Government-General in Korea (Sōtokufu). The colonial government played an important role not only in recruitment but also in setting the wages of Korean workers. Japanese government bureaucrats and factory managers sought a plentiful source of low-paid and compliant labor in the Korean peninsula in place of the Japanese workforce that increasingly demanded higher wages and improved conditions. Just as Japanese workers organized themselves into unions of all political stripes, their fellow Koreans were no different.

Kawashima traces the growth of the Korean population in the Japanese archipelago to Japanese agrarian policy. "The historical essence of the colonial surplus populations coming to Japan from Korea after 1920 is a population caught between agricultural immiseration in Korea, on the one hand, and an industrial recession in Japan, on the other" (p. 63). Initiated in 1920, the state effort to enhance rice production encouraged Japanese landholding (enriching some Korean landlords in the process as well) and the degradation and dispossession of Korean peasants. Colonial agrarian policy generated relatively inexpensive rice for the colonizers and agrarian poverty for the colonized.

The persistent economic downturn in the 1920s presented unenviable options for ethnic Koreans in Japan. "The urgent problem for Korean peasants was that, while many got out of the frying pan of agricultural immiseration in Korea by migrating to Japan, their fate was to fall into the fire of an industrial recession in Japan" (p. 53). Rather than stable and well-paying jobs in factories, most Koreans found marginal employment as day laborers. Distinct categories of "free" workers prove the axiom that the only thing worse than being exploited is not being exploited. Most commonly, Koreans found jobs in the public works industry, then as now in Japan a steady source of economic dynamism. The ubiquitous presence and contribution of ethnic Korean workers in this sector lead the author to quip that, without these workers, "the modern infrastructure that underlay interwar Japan simply would not have materialized in the accelerated time that it did" (p. 67).

The predominance of the public works industry for the colonial Korean workers elevates the phenomenon of "intermediary exploitation" (chūkan sakushu). Belying the general recession, construction projects—ranging from transportation and communication lines to river embankment and urban sewage projects—proliferated in the 1920s and 1930s. And the labor demand took the specific form of unskilled construction work, relying on ethnic Koreans. Ethnic distinction matched skill division: "the difference between skilled and unskilled labor" was "the separation between Japanese and Korean construction workers" (p. 73). The modal form of labor recruitment and management relied on labor brokers and subcontractors, who in turn operated the work camp...