Ken C. Kawashima is Associate Professor of East Asian Studies at the University of Toronto.

THE PROLETARIAN GAMBLE

Korean Workers in Interwar JapanBy Ken C. Kawashima

DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2009 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4399-8

Contents

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………………………..ixIntroduction The Proletarian Gamble……………………………………………………………………………..11. The Birth of the Uncontrollable Colonial Surplus A Prehistory of the Korean Problem………………………………..252. The Colonial Surplus and the Virtual Pauper…………………………………………………………………….453. Intermediary Exploitation Korean Workers in the Day Labor Market…………………………………………………674. Urban Expropriation and the Threat of the Outside Korean Tenant Struggles against Housing Insecurity…………………945. The Obscene, Violent Supplement of State Power Korean Welfare and Class Warfare in Interwar Japan……………………1306. At the Gates of Unemployment The Struggles of Unemployed Korean Workers…………………………………………..169Epilogue………………………………………………………………………………………………………204Appendix 1 Korean Self-help and Social Work Organizations in Japan………………………………………………….217Appendix 2 A Timeline of Anti-Saikai Activity…………………………………………………………………….227Notes…………………………………………………………………………………………………………231Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………………………..269Index…………………………………………………………………………………………………………287

Chapter One

THE BIRTH OF THE UNCONTROLLABLE COLONIAL SURPLUS

A Prehistory of the Korean Problem

One of the abiding insights made by Marx in Capital is that in the colonies of capitalist nation-states the illusions of the capitalist law of the supply and demand of labor are shattered. In the home country, the great beauty of capitalist production consists in being able to reproduce the wage worker by periodically setting him free, i.e., firing him, and by producing a surplus population that stands in relative exteriority to capitalist production as the precondition for the commodification of labor power. Periodically treating labor power as a disposable commodity is thus the way capitalist production can ensure that its most indispensable commodity-labor power-is always already there when capitalist production experiences so-called labor shortages during times of industrial expansion. It is this reproductive mechanism that allows for the smug deceitfulness of the political economist, not to mention the Japanese colonial policy maker, to think, and to formalize into naturalized axioms of economic movement, that owners of labor power-who are in fact compelled to enter into a relation of dependence with the wage form-can enter into a free contract between sellers and buyers, between owners of the commodity labor power, on one side, and owners of capital, on the other. In the colonies, however, “this beautiful illusion is torn aside” because the conditions for the appearance of owners of labor power on the stage of the capitalist market do not originally exist there. The dependence on wages must therefore be “created by artificial means,” and until that happens, the law of the supply and demand of labor is torn aside. In this way, this artificial and historical process in the colonies represents that which originally took place in the home country, but which has long since been repressed and disavowed there. The political and economic unconscious of the home country dwells in the artificial processes in the colonies.

The year 1910, when the Japanese imperial army transformed Korea into Japan’s most prized colony, marks the beginning of precisely this kind of artificial process. The social effect of this process took the form of a colonial surplus population that came, and was brought, to Japan as sellers of the indispensable commodity of labor power. At the same time, however, the flow of colonial surplus populations into Japan repeatedly reminded the colonial metropole and its various guardians of the limits to the imperial process of repression on which the political unconscious of the home country was based. The precondition for producing artificially a colonial reserve army of workers was the transformation of Korean peasants into independent producers based on the system of private property. The cadastral survey, carried out by the Sotokufu from 1910 to 1918 at a cost of 20.4 million yen, contributed to this end by implementing a new land registration system (in Korean, tochi daicho; t’oji taejang) that expedited the privatization of public land, land previously owned by Korean yangban (the landed aristocracy) and other classes of the feudal bureaucracy. The two other basic objectives of the survey were to recalculate and register land prices and to cultivate land. And similar to the cadastral survey that was carried out in Japan by the Meiji state beginning in 1873, the colonial land survey in Korea served as a basic legal channel to integrate and reform the existing feudal tax system (kyolbu), and to replace it with a modern monetary tax system through which an accumulation of cash payments of taxes, based on newly recalculated land prices, could be appropriated by the colonial government. Compared to land taxes imposed by the Meiji state in Japan, however, taxes were kept low to promote colonial investments in the land by Japanese corporations and wealthy Korean landlords. Nonetheless, Korean peasants struggled to make cash payments of increasing taxes exacted by the colonial government, and many went bankrupt. These circumstances represented an ongoing opportunity for Japanese landlords and capitalists to cooperate with preexisting Korean landlords to buy up large landholdings, reaching 40,000 multiple landholdings by the beginning of the 1920s. At the same time, Korean peasants, especially in the provinces of Cholla and Kyongsang, had no choice but to become tenanted or semi-tenanted, a trend that increased exponentially after 1920, when the colonial government instituted its most significant economic policy in Korea, the program to increase rice production. With the cadastral survey completed by 1918 and the program to increase rice production underway by 1920, the Korean countryside soon transformed into a source of cheap rice exports for the domestic rice market in Japan. Social relations in Korean villages began to break down under the pressures of the new cash economy, however, and peasants increasingly became a floating, rural population with nothing but its capacity to work as its only remaining, sellable commodity.

Four years after the cadastral survey was underway in Korea, Japanese industry was about to enter into a brief but intense period of unprecedented industrial and financial growth. Taking advantage of the war overseas, Japanese manufacturers expanded and intensified production at breakneck speed, producing and exporting manufactured goods to Asian and to European countries. With the war, Japanese industry entered an industrial phase of new economic prosperity that transformed Japan from a debtor nation of 1.1 billion yen in 1914 to a creditor nation of 2.77 billion yen in early 1920. With this phase of industrial prosperity that accompanied the war boom, the number of factories in Japan increased from 31,717 in 1914 to 45,806 in 1920, and the number of factory workers rose during the same years from 948,000 to 1,612,000. Reflecting the demand for labor power during the war years, formal wages for factory workers also increased dramatically during these years. For example, from 1914 to 1920, wages in the textile industry rose from 0.35 yen to 1.03 yen; in metals, from 0.75 yen to 2.17 yen; in ceramics, from 0.58 yen to 1.66 yen; in chemicals, from 0.61 yen to 1.46 yen; and in public works, 1.39 yen to 3.50 yen. The problem for workers, however, was that while formal wages increased, this increase did not match the rate of inflation of general prices of commodities. One index of this disparity is that while general commodity prices increased from 100 to 303 from 1914 to 1919, wages only increased from 100 to 252 during the same years. This disparity led to a sharp rise in factory strikes demanding higher wages. In 1914, there were 50 strikes involving 7,904 workers; in 1919, the number of strikes increased ten-fold to 497, involving 63,137 workers. With this political development especially, Japanese industry looked to Korea for fresh blood.

The conjuncture of the cadastral survey in Korea and the manufacturing boom in Japan during the war years forms the historical backdrop of this chapter. The purpose of this chapter is to look at how the dominant form of commodifying Korean labor power during and immediately following the manufacturing boom produced a very specific colonial surplus population in Japan, one that was, from the perspective of the colonial and metropolitan authorities, extremely difficult to control socially, politically, and economically. This is to say that this chapter does not begin with Korean migration to Japan per se, which began at least as far back as 1910, the year of the annexation, the year when Koreans were proclaimed to be imperial subjects of the Japanese empire, and were, as such, free to travel anywhere they pleased within the empire. Indeed, beginning in 1910, Korean migration to Japan increased annually, slowly at first, then quickly and exponentially during and after the years of the First World War. Here, however, I focus on the dominant form of commodifying Korean labor power during the war years as the analytical lens through which to trace the emergence of an uncontrollable colonial surplus population in Japan, one that came from the southernmost provinces of Korea. The birth of the uncontrollable colonial surplus also forms the prehistory of what would become known in Japan in the 1920s as the Korean problem.

The Mass Recruitment of Korean Peasants as Workers during the First World War

The prehistory of the so-called Korean problem can be traced back to a specific form of commodifying Korean labor power that emerged within, and as part of, the changes taking place inside Japanese industry during the First World War. Seeking to fill shortages of labor power and to stem the tide of rising wages for an increasingly politicized and unionized Japanese work force, owners of factories and coal mines in Osaka, Kobe, Fukuoka, and Hokkaido turned their eyes to colonial Korea, where they actively recruited Korean peasants from the southernmost provinces of the Korean peninsula as cheap, temporary, and non-unionized industrial workers. The primary method of recruiting Korean workers was based on direct company recruitment (gyosha chokusetsu boshu), in which factories dispatched their own company recruiters (boshu jujisha) directly to the Korean countryside, where peasants were contracted as unskilled, short-term workers in small- and medium-sized factories in Osaka, Kobe, and Fukuoka, as well as in coal mines in Hokkaido. Initiated by Japanese companies and their employed recruiters, administered bureaucratically by the police bureau of the Korean government through a process of recruitment approval (boshu kyoka), and aided and monitored by port authorities in the southern provinces of Korea as well as in the major sea ports in Japan, these mass recruitments were the dominant form of commodifying Korean labor power during the war years.

While these practices can be traced back to 1913 with the recruitment of female Korean workers for the Setsuritsu cotton factory in Kobe, the historical essence of the mass recruitments was that it was a war-economy phenomenon that was not clearly discernible as a general practice until the peak war years. The year 1917 marked the height of recruiting Korean workers, with 80 recruitment outings bringing in 28,737 Korean workers to Japan. As table 1 shows, the majority of recruited Korean workers during this time were hired as workers in coal mines in Fukuoka and Hokkaido, and in cotton factories in Osaka, Okayama, and Hyogo prefectures. According to a survey that covered January to August of 1917, 16,590 workers were recruited, 11,875 of whom were men. Of the remaining 4,715 female workers, all except 200 were recruited into cotton factories. Korean men in factories and coal mines worked primarily as unskilled assistants (but not apprentices) on temporary contracts that usually lasted 2 to 3 years. Korean female workers, mostly in cotton factories (and some in glass factories), were also hired on temporary contracts of the same duration. An important characteristic of the recruitment of Korean workers during the war period, therefore, is that the majority of Korean workers were employed as temporary or short-term contract workers in factories, coal mines, and cotton factories, and only secondarily as construction workers in public works construction sites. This trend would change dramatically after the end of the war boom in 1918 and especially after the 1920 economic crisis.

Broadly speaking, the recruitment of Korean workers was an extension of existing recruitment practices that had accompanied the rapid development of capitalism in Japan since the Meiji period. As is well known, the most extensive use and abuse of recruiting practices were in textile factories, which significantly expanded in the 1880s and 1890s. Incapable of meeting the increasing demand for labor power of textile factories in the cities, and eager to keep down costs of labor as much as possible, Japanese textile factories competed against each other to recruit and contract young, female workers by dispatching large groups of recruiters to distant Japanese villages in the countryside. The recruitment of female workers during the Meiji period generally did not take place through direct company recruitments, but rather through advertising agencies, family intermediaries, and independent labor brokers who connected employer and employee. Especially during the interwar period, direct recruitments increased (despite various legal movements against them), largely as a direct response to the intense competition between textile factories during the war boom. As a result, recruiters, many of whom received cash per worker recruited, competed with each other, double-crossed employers by recruiting the same individual for multiple factories at once, and concealed or exaggerated working conditions as they canvassed for workers in the countryside.

During the Meiji period, work agreements were often not formalized in contracts, but instead secured through verbal promises. Later, however, formal contracts were drawn between the recruiter and the worker (or, in cases when the worker was a legal minor, the legal guardian of the worker). Escorted by recruiters to the city, the workers soon found themselves far away from home, living in poorly ventilated and crowded factory dormitories, and working long hours in labor-intensive production lines. They fell into poverty from reduced wages stemming from mandatory dormitory fees, and they could not quit their jobs because of either physical coercion or dire economic consequences, many of which stemmed from mandatory savings plans that workers could not cash in on until their work contract concluded, typically after three years. The recruited factory women also quickly realized that the brutal working conditions in which they toiled in the cities all too frequently contradicted the working conditions promoted and promised by the recruiters in the villages back home. Recruitment practices also took place within the heavy industries dating back to the 1910s, but unlike textile factories’ recruitment practices, they generally had a double purpose. On the one hand, factories in the heavy industries deployed factory recruiters to increase the number of regular workers (joyo-ko rodosha) as a means to deepen factory paternalism and to reduce high labor turn-over of skilled workers. On the other hand, however, recruiters were also used to increase the use of temporary (rinjiko rodosha) and day labor workers (hiyatoi rodosha) as a way to provide factory management with greater labor flexibility in the face of fluctuating business cycles and an increasingly vociferous trade union movement. The practice of recruiting Korean workers stemmed out of preexisting practices of labor recruitment in Japan. At the same time, there were specific characteristics to the recruitment of Korean workers that suggest differences from past forms of labor recruitment in Japan. First, common to recruitment practices of the twentieth century in Japan, the recruitment of Korean workers took place on the basis of contracts. Though female factory workers were generally recruited on an individual basis, the predominant method of recruiting Korean workers took place on a group basis, typically with groups of Korean peasants from the same village or hometown. Shudan boshu, or mass recruitment, thus seems to have been the standard practice for factory and other company recruitments in Korea, and while it is unclear who the recruited party’s signatory was in cases of mass recruitment, it is probable that the signatory was an individual selected by the group as its representative. This is corroborated by police notifications (tsucho), distributed to recruiters and published in Sotokufu publications such as the Chosen Iho, which emphasized the importance of having the recruited group (kumi) select one of its own members to take care of the group’s collective concerns while in Japan, and to maintain communications with the hometown or village in Korea. (Continues…)

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