Koreans constituted the largest colonial labor force in imperial Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. Caught between the Scylla of agricultural destitution in Korea and the Charybdis of industrial depression in Japan, migrant Korean peasants arrived on Japanese soil amid extreme instability in the labor and housing markets. In The Proletarian Gamble, Ken C. Kawashima maintains that contingent labor is a defining characteristic of capitalist commodity economies. He scrutinizes how the labor power of Korean workers in Japan was commodified, and how these workers both fought against the racist and contingent conditions of exchange and combated institutionalized racism.Kawashima draws on previously unseen archival materials from interwar Japan as he describes how Korean migrants struggled against various recruitment practices, unfair and discriminatory wages, sudden firings, racist housing practices, and excessive bureaucratic red tape. Demonstrating that there was no single Korean "minority," he reveals how Koreans exploited fellow Koreans and how the stratification of their communities worked to the advantage of state and capital. However, Kawashima also describes how, when migrant workers did organize-as when they became involved in Roso (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyo (the Japanese communist labor union)-their diverse struggles were united toward a common goal. In The Proletarian Gamble, his analysis of the Korean migrant workers' experiences opens into a much broader rethinking of the fundamental nature of capitalist commodity economies and the analytical categories of the proletariat, surplus populations, commodification, and state power.
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Extrait
the proletarian gamble
asiapacific: culture, politics, and society
Editors: Rey Chow, H. D. Harootunian, and Masao Miyoshi
This book is dedicated to Fujiya and Joungja Kawashima
contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction 1 The Proletarian Gamble
ix
1. The Birth of the Uncontrollable Colonial Surplus A Prehistory of the Korean Problem
2. The Colonial Surplus and the Virtual Pauper
3. Intermediary Exploitation 67 Korean Workers in the Day Labor Market
45
4. Urban Expropriation and the Threat of the Outside Korean Tenant Struggles against Housing Insecurity
5. The Obscene, Violent Supplement of State Power Korean Welfare and Class Warfare in Interwar Japan
6. At the Gates of Unemployment 169 The Struggles of Unemployed Korean Workers
Epilogue
204
Appendix 1 217 Korean Selfhelp and Social Work Organizations in Japan
Appendix 2 227 A Timeline of AntiSaikai Activity
Notes
231
Bibliography
Index
287
269
25
94
130
acknowledgments
I’d like to thank my family for all their inspiration and support over the years: Joungja Kawashima, my loving mother; and Kimi Kawashima, my Supreme Sistah. Most of all, I would like to dedicate this book to the memory of my father, Fujiya Kawashima, who taught me a great deal about Japan, Korea, history, and art. I count myself as one of the lucky ones to have known and worked with historian Harry Harootunian for such a long time. He’s been an intellectual inspiration since my undergraduate days at the University of Chicago, and he has guided my studies, research, and thinking in a thousand and one ways ever since. This book simply could not have been written had it not been for his tireless support and intellectual companionship. Katsuhiko Mariano Endo has saved my life more than once in additionto enlightening me with the finer points of Uno Kz’s methodology; and Rebecca Karl has been a oneinamillion teacher and friend since my days atnyu. I’d like to also thank Hyun Ok Park, Bill Haver, Louise Young, Sabu Kohso, Bruce Cumings, Tets Najita, Tak Fujitanti, Matsumoto Takenori,Nagahara Yutaka, Higuchi Yuichi, Oki Kosuke, Sato Takashi, Adachi Mariko, Jesook Song, Andre Schmid, Ritu Birla, Kanishka Goonewardena, Gavin Smith, Atsuko Sakaki, Eric Cazdyn, Janice Kim, Robert Albritton, Shivrang Setlur, CMurda Vernon, Olga Fedorenko, and Sunyoung Yang. Lastly, Sugar Brown expresses musical thanks to Rockin’ Johnny Burgin, Taildragger, Dave Waldman, Sho’nuff Sho, Suzuki Sue, Watanabe Satoshi, Noma Ichiro, Samm Bennett, Haruna Ito, Paul Dutton, Dr. Feelgood, The Wolf of Nitouk, and Bob Vespaziani. I originally completed the archival research for this project between 1998and 2000 at the Ohara Institute for Social Problems (Hsei University), where Suzuki Akira, Sadamorisan, and Iidasan were especially kind and helpful to me. Generous research grants from the Fulbright Foundation and Hsei University’s International Fellowship made that research possible.