Ken Kawashima's book The Proletarian Gamble is a much needed and long overdue contribution to the fields of labor history and zainichi 在日 (resident-Korean) studies in Japan. Setting out to explore how the state took advantage of the “contingencies” of Korean workers' labor and life conditions in Japan, Kawashima offers a richly informative, often compelling account of Korean working-class struggles during the period between World War I and World War II. As Korean workers were for the most part unattached to the Japanese factory system, which has long remained the focus for historians of labor in Japan, Kawashima concentrates on what he calls a highly complex “network of commodification” in which state power and labor's struggle against it took shape. His book's strength lies in the wealth of empirical research it offers based on an examination of the archives at the Ohara Institute, research that allows Kawashima to offer his readers a highly nuanced, eye-opening account of the experience of Korean day labor, and the role that particular institutions played in shaping that experience.
In his first two chapters, Kawashima offers a helpful, if not novel, explanation of the “ongoing precondition” for the commodification of Korean labor in Japan – the Japanese state's establishment of a system of private property in the Korean colony, whereby tens of thousands of Koreans were severed from their landed property. A cadastral survey carried out in the 1910s (which paved the way for the privatization of public land and provided the basis for a modern monetary tax system) and then a program of increased rice production (meant to lower the cost of rice in Japan) constituted the institutional preconditions for the immiseration of Korean farmers, mostly in the southernmost provinces of Korea. These conditions in the colony, coupled with an intense, but short-lasting boom in Japanese manufacturing during World War I, set the stage for an intensified recruitment of Korean peasants and then the emergence of an “uncontrollable colonial surplus” of Korean labor, at a later point, in a recession-plagued Japan. Kawashima broadly contextualizes Korean working-class poverty within this particular historical conjuncture of agrarian immiseration in the colony and the industrial recession that followed this boom in Japanese manufacturing.
In the remainder of his book, Kawashima focuses on particular institutional sites and practices whereby workers wrestled against the modern commodification of their labor. Locating the specificity of Korean migrant labor largely in its relation to low-wage public works projects and the ethnic discrimination that helped to reproduce it, Kawashima does not content himself with a simple study of the workplace, but rather examines the many different layers of “intermediary exploitation” through which the state worked to make use of surplus Korean labor and through which resident-Koreans struggled to find jobs, collect unpaid wages, secure housing, and to a some extent build political alliances. Kawashima gives particular attention to the experiences of male day laborers as he sets them historically within the social relations of recruitment practices, work camps, racist housing markets, so-called welfare organizations and unemployment relief programs. In one intriguing chapter, for example, Kawashima explores the issue of Korean wages by looking at the specific structure of public works projects. The state funding of these projects passed through several different levels of subcontracting, each level skimming off its share; the works projects themselves were organized according to a hierarchical system of relations that often resulted in the non-payment of wages, the number one cause for Korean strikes. Prone to the corruption of intermediary managers who subtracted from workers' wages such things as tool rental costs and fees for food and lodging, the hanba 飯場 (work camp) system “carried over many of the social methods of regulating day workers that originated during the Tokugawa period, but infused them with capitalist relations of exchange based on the form of the wage.”
One of the major contributions Kawashima makes with his book to the field of Asian studies is a compelling account of how racism against Koreans was institutionalized. Going beyond what he calls simple assertions that racism existed, Kawashima shows how specific, historical practices actively created ethnic divisions of labor and housing. Given the state's tendency to use Korean workers on public works sites, for example, he writes that the “difference between skilled and unskilled labor came to be maintained as the separation between Japanese and Korean construction workers.” That capitalism often creates racial hierarchies when it cannot draw on existing ones is hardly a novel idea, but Kawashima shows how institutional practices that Koreans participated in, and in some cases helped to inaugurate, also worked to separate the categories of Korean and Japanese labor. The Sōaikai 相愛会, a Korean welfare organization that Kawashima historicizes within the conjuncture of the “massification of the police” and the appearance of an uncontrollable surplus of Korean labor in Japan, served as both an extension of police work and as an important brokerage for Korean laborers, who were almost exclusively channeled through the organization into low-wage, temporary jobs. Kawashima also carefully marshals evidence to show how a new type of racialized knowledge about Koreans was also produced and reproduced in Japan as a condition of this commodification of Korean labor. On the one hand he argues that a “certain public figuration – even idealization – of the ethnic colonial minority called Korean … worked to displace the reality of class struggle from public consciousness.” On the other he shows how the Sōaikai resorted to acts of outright violence to separate and repress the more radical Korean activists who argued for solidarity, not division, between Japanese and Korean workers. Under the banner of Japanese–Korean friendship, but in the service of making cheap, temporary sources of labor available, the Sōaikai was thus an institutional means to separate “Korean surplus populations from their Japanese counterparts, thereby contributing to an ethnic segmentation of the labor markets.” Though Kawashima does not seem quite as interested in activist practices and institutions as in the institutionalized network of commodification, he certainly acknowledges that this kind of ethnic separation was precisely what communist labor unions at the time were struggling against.
Kawashima takes us through many such nuanced examples of the give and take between Korean workers and the institutions that commodified their labor, but it is clear that Kawashima wishes to accomplish something more. Indeed, for all of his empirical richness, depth of analysis, and at times passionate narration, Kawashima ambitiously frames his book, and often individual chapters, with conceptual arguments that would at times seem to detract from the otherwise important meanings to which he draws attention. There would indeed seem to be two different authors in The Proletarian Gamble: the radical historian who wants to explore the multi-faceted, often overwhelming, institutionalized exploitation of Korean laborers, and the liberal professor who seems at times too anxious to align himself with the academic angels to let this fascinating new history – already carefully conceptualized – stand on its own.
More generously phrased this distinction comes down to a matter of readership – if much of the careful research and writing in The Proletarian Gamble is addressed to a more general audience, the book itself seems argued with a far more narrow audience of Marxist philosophers in mind. One thus reads Kawashima's book with a profound insight into the discipline of Asian history as academe works to mold it today, with a fresh new understanding of Japanese state power and the struggles of Korean workers, and with a hopefulness that future scholars come away from Kawashima's invaluable contribution with a renewed conviction to investigate the histories of Korean labor in Japan.
