The proletarian gamble : Korean workers in interwar Japan
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
The proletarian gamble : Korean workers in interwar Japan
（Asia-Pacific : culture, politics, and society）
Duke University Press, 2009
- : cloth
- : pbk
Available at / 20 libraries
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Doshisha University Library (Imadegawa)
: cloth366.8||K9375107100604,
: pbk366.8||K9375209800361 -
Library, Institute of Developing Economies, Japan External Trade Organization図
: pbkAEKR||331.6||P117311473
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Note
Bibliography: p. [269]-286
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
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.
Table of Contents
Introduction: The Proletarian Gamble 1
1. The Birth of the Uncontrollable Colonial Surplus: A Prehistory of the Korean Problem 25
2. The Colonial Surplus and the Virtual Pauper 45
3. Intermediary Exploitation: Korean Workers in the Day Labor Market 67
4. Urban Expropriation and the Threat of the Outside: Korean Tenant Struggles against Housing Insecurity 94
5. The Obscene, Violent Supplement of State Power: Korean Welfare and Class Warfare in Interwar Japan 130
6. At the Gates of Unemployment: The Struggles of Unemployed Korean Workers 169
Epilogue 204
Appendix 1. Korean Self-help and Social Work Organizations in Japan 217
Appendix 2. A Timeline of Anti-Soaikai Activity 227
Notes 231
Bibliography 269
Index 287
by "Nielsen BookData"
