| The Proletarian Gamble: Korean Workers in Interwar Japan Contributor(s): Kawashima, Ken C. (Author) |
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ISBN: 0822343991 ISBN-13: 9780822343998 Publisher: Duke University Press OUR PRICE: $102.55 Product Type: Hardcover - Other Formats Published: April 2009 Annotation: ""The Proletarian Gamble" is the most penetrating analysis of Japanese discrimination against the Koreans that I know of; its scope goes well beyond the confines of Japanese social history or Marxist historiography. Ken C. Kawashima shows how state agencies sought to fulfill the humanistic claims of Japanese colonialism by individualizing the Korean workers and integrating them into the multiethnic nation: they took advantage of the workers' contingent life conditions. By viewing racism as an aspect of the micropolitics of individualization and totalization, he criticizes the foundational premises of liberalism and the institutionalized framework in which much of area studies is still conducted."-- [RR;PP] Naoki Sakai, author of "Translation and Subjectivity: On "Japan" and Cultural Nationalism" |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | Asia - Japan - History | Asia - Korea - Business & Economics | Economic History |
| Dewey: 331.625 |
| LCCN: 2008051092 |
| Series: Asia-Pacific: Culture, Politics, and Society (Hardcover) |
| Physical Information: 0.9" H x 6.1" W x 9.3" (1.25 lbs) 312 pages |
| Themes: - Cultural Region - Japanese - Cultural Region - East Asian - Chronological Period - 1920's - Chronological Period - 1930's |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher 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 Rōsō (the largest Korean communist labor union in Japan) and in Zenkyō (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. |
