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ahorbinskiBibliographic Data: Kawashima, Ken C. The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009.
Main Argument: In this brilliant, flawed, angry book, Kawashima argues that contingent labor (labor bound to work but not guaranteed work) and contingency are an integral component rather than secondary effect of capitalism, and that Korean day laborers in Japan during the interwar period constituted nothing other than a proletariat despite the fact that their worksites and work were not fixed but aleatory as part of the commodification of their labor power. Secondary to this process, Korean workers were subject to intermediary exploitation, which used social mediations to further distance them from a direct relationship with capital, i.e. their ultimate employers.
Historiographical Engagement: Kawashima bases his work primarily on government and municipal archives in Japan relating to Korean workers; there is almost no focus on their lived experience, and in a very real way Kawashima's subject isn't the workers themselves but how they were represented in the imperial archive. Similarly, Kawashima's analysis depends heavily on the work of the preeminent Marxist thinker Uno Kôzo (about whom seeAndrew Barshay's The Social Sciences in Modern Japan), but he makes the mistake of taking Uno as a bible rather than as a guide. Also, unsurprisingly for one of his students, Kawashima's analysis is marinated in the approach of Harry Harootunian.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The proletariat is best understood not as a population bound to a specific worksite (i.e. factories) but as a surplus population that is compelled to attempt to sell its labor with no guarantee that its labor will be bought or for how long--workers today in many countries, particularly temporary workers, live in these precise conditions (i.e. the so-called 'precariat'). In the context of Korean workers in interwar Japan, the gamble in question was double: both the workers gambling that their labor would be bought in Japan, and employers gambling that they could buy Korean labor for cheap without high social costs.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The creation of the surplus colonial labor population of Korean workers in Japan was a deliberate imperial policy designed to supplement and suppress the wartime Japanese labor market and supply in the home islands--Korean workers were last hired, first fired, and since their wages were kept artificially low, their low wages could be used to keep the wages of Japanese workers artificially low as well. The Korean labor supply was in this way essential to Japanese imperial capitalism, but only as a disposable surplus.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Korean workers in Japan were in fact the virtual paupers of which Marx spoke due to the precariousness of their employment and the fact that their wages were usually 30 to 60 percent lower than those of Japanese workers. Institutionalized discrimination and racism was fundamental to dividing the total labor market along ethnic lines as well as for maintaining the precariousness of employment for Koreans.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Korean workers in interwar Japan were almost never exploited directly but instead through what Kawashima terms "intermediary exploitation"--mediating social and employment structures which usually served to displace both workers' exploitation and grievances (as well as whittle away at their wages). The principal such structure was the so-called hanba or work-camp, since many of the public works private infrastructure projects and undertaken in Japan at this time were built by Korean workers. At times, however, as in the Sanshin strike in which Korean laborers and Korean work bosses joined together against employers higher up the chain, this structure of exploitation failed.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the chronic shortage of housing available to Korean workers in Japan, who were largely prevented from leasing housing due to racist housing practices. At the same time, the shantytowns where they lived instead were continually being expropriated for future public works projects; Kawashima terms this process urban expropriation. Finally, many Koreans would attempt to use Japanese proper names to secure leases, thereby challenging the administrative logic of the proper name (i.e. as an instrument of bureaucratic control) as well as the fiction of the imperial subjecthood, which claimed that Korean colonial subjects were equal to Japanese subjects in the eyes of the emperor, and refusing the logic of colonial abjectivity.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The Sôaikai, or Korean-Japanese Friendship Association, was ostensibly an NGO dedicated to helping Korean workers in Japan that was actually funded by the state, and its vice-president, Pak Ch'um-gum, became the first colonial subject elected to the Imperial Diet. The Sôaikai used violence and repressive tactics to monitor and control the Korean worker population on behalf of the state, revealing itself as the obscene (because unspeakable) supplement to state power and even causing the dissolution of Rôsô, the Korean day laborers' union.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples In the winter of 1925 the Japanese government implemented the Unemployment Emergency Relief Programs, to which Korean workers tried to gain admittance. For them, the UERP "only reproduced job insecurity and the basic conditions for the exploitation of Korean labor power as cheap, colonial labor" (203), but additionally functioning to suture them ever more closely to wage labor and the exigencies of the state's own existential logic.
Critical assessment: This is an excellent book with several notable defects; nonetheless, it's well worth reading. First and foremost, as Andrew Gordon noted in his review for The Journal of Social History, Kawashima's analysis is downright Manichaean: in his book there are the collaborators and the resistors, and absolutely no grey zone between those two poles. Furthermore, the reader will search in vain for any evocation of the lived experience of Korean workers in interwar Japan, save for a few isolated quotations; this book is not really about the experience of Korean workers in Japan, but about how the Japanese state dealt with them in the aggregate and the abstract. Finally, Kawashima consistently overestimates the amount of trouble Korean workers' struggle for rights and representation actually caused the imperial authorities; at the end he claims that the workers brought about "a real state of emergency" á la Walter Benjamin, but the claim is simply sad in light of the available evidence. That said, this is an excellent book that brings to light many previously unknown sources (though much of the data it includes is, as my advisor put it, inert), focuses attention on an understudied aspect of the Japanese empire and the zainichi Korean experience, and raises important questions about transwar continuities in Japanese society, particularly the state of civil society, as well as wider questions about the supposedly recent emergence of the precariat and the proper definition of the proletariat, as well as the relationship of chance and capital.
Further reading: Nimura Kazuo, The Ashio Riot of 1907
Meta notes: To beg a question means to avoid it, not to raise it inevitably.
Main Argument: In this brilliant, flawed, angry book, Kawashima argues that contingent labor (labor bound to work but not guaranteed work) and contingency are an integral component rather than secondary effect of capitalism, and that Korean day laborers in Japan during the interwar period constituted nothing other than a proletariat despite the fact that their worksites and work were not fixed but aleatory as part of the commodification of their labor power. Secondary to this process, Korean workers were subject to intermediary exploitation, which used social mediations to further distance them from a direct relationship with capital, i.e. their ultimate employers.
Historiographical Engagement: Kawashima bases his work primarily on government and municipal archives in Japan relating to Korean workers; there is almost no focus on their lived experience, and in a very real way Kawashima's subject isn't the workers themselves but how they were represented in the imperial archive. Similarly, Kawashima's analysis depends heavily on the work of the preeminent Marxist thinker Uno Kôzo (about whom seeAndrew Barshay's The Social Sciences in Modern Japan), but he makes the mistake of taking Uno as a bible rather than as a guide. Also, unsurprisingly for one of his students, Kawashima's analysis is marinated in the approach of Harry Harootunian.
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples The proletariat is best understood not as a population bound to a specific worksite (i.e. factories) but as a surplus population that is compelled to attempt to sell its labor with no guarantee that its labor will be bought or for how long--workers today in many countries, particularly temporary workers, live in these precise conditions (i.e. the so-called 'precariat'). In the context of Korean workers in interwar Japan, the gamble in question was double: both the workers gambling that their labor would be bought in Japan, and employers gambling that they could buy Korean labor for cheap without high social costs.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples The creation of the surplus colonial labor population of Korean workers in Japan was a deliberate imperial policy designed to supplement and suppress the wartime Japanese labor market and supply in the home islands--Korean workers were last hired, first fired, and since their wages were kept artificially low, their low wages could be used to keep the wages of Japanese workers artificially low as well. The Korean labor supply was in this way essential to Japanese imperial capitalism, but only as a disposable surplus.
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples Korean workers in Japan were in fact the virtual paupers of which Marx spoke due to the precariousness of their employment and the fact that their wages were usually 30 to 60 percent lower than those of Japanese workers. Institutionalized discrimination and racism was fundamental to dividing the total labor market along ethnic lines as well as for maintaining the precariousness of employment for Koreans.
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples Korean workers in interwar Japan were almost never exploited directly but instead through what Kawashima terms "intermediary exploitation"--mediating social and employment structures which usually served to displace both workers' exploitation and grievances (as well as whittle away at their wages). The principal such structure was the so-called hanba or work-camp, since many of the public works private infrastructure projects and undertaken in Japan at this time were built by Korean workers. At times, however, as in the Sanshin strike in which Korean laborers and Korean work bosses joined together against employers higher up the chain, this structure of exploitation failed.
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter explores the chronic shortage of housing available to Korean workers in Japan, who were largely prevented from leasing housing due to racist housing practices. At the same time, the shantytowns where they lived instead were continually being expropriated for future public works projects; Kawashima terms this process urban expropriation. Finally, many Koreans would attempt to use Japanese proper names to secure leases, thereby challenging the administrative logic of the proper name (i.e. as an instrument of bureaucratic control) as well as the fiction of the imperial subjecthood, which claimed that Korean colonial subjects were equal to Japanese subjects in the eyes of the emperor, and refusing the logic of colonial abjectivity.
Chapter 5: Argument, Sources, Examples The Sôaikai, or Korean-Japanese Friendship Association, was ostensibly an NGO dedicated to helping Korean workers in Japan that was actually funded by the state, and its vice-president, Pak Ch'um-gum, became the first colonial subject elected to the Imperial Diet. The Sôaikai used violence and repressive tactics to monitor and control the Korean worker population on behalf of the state, revealing itself as the obscene (because unspeakable) supplement to state power and even causing the dissolution of Rôsô, the Korean day laborers' union.
Chapter 6: Argument, Sources, Examples In the winter of 1925 the Japanese government implemented the Unemployment Emergency Relief Programs, to which Korean workers tried to gain admittance. For them, the UERP "only reproduced job insecurity and the basic conditions for the exploitation of Korean labor power as cheap, colonial labor" (203), but additionally functioning to suture them ever more closely to wage labor and the exigencies of the state's own existential logic.
Critical assessment: This is an excellent book with several notable defects; nonetheless, it's well worth reading. First and foremost, as Andrew Gordon noted in his review for The Journal of Social History, Kawashima's analysis is downright Manichaean: in his book there are the collaborators and the resistors, and absolutely no grey zone between those two poles. Furthermore, the reader will search in vain for any evocation of the lived experience of Korean workers in interwar Japan, save for a few isolated quotations; this book is not really about the experience of Korean workers in Japan, but about how the Japanese state dealt with them in the aggregate and the abstract. Finally, Kawashima consistently overestimates the amount of trouble Korean workers' struggle for rights and representation actually caused the imperial authorities; at the end he claims that the workers brought about "a real state of emergency" á la Walter Benjamin, but the claim is simply sad in light of the available evidence. That said, this is an excellent book that brings to light many previously unknown sources (though much of the data it includes is, as my advisor put it, inert), focuses attention on an understudied aspect of the Japanese empire and the zainichi Korean experience, and raises important questions about transwar continuities in Japanese society, particularly the state of civil society, as well as wider questions about the supposedly recent emergence of the precariat and the proper definition of the proletariat, as well as the relationship of chance and capital.
Further reading: Nimura Kazuo, The Ashio Riot of 1907
Meta notes: To beg a question means to avoid it, not to raise it inevitably.
(no subject)
Date: 2011-03-22 23:40 (UTC)THIS.
---L.